An Evaluation of Multimedia Content in a Critical Care Pharmacotherapeutic Course

Our objective was to investigate the alignment between didactic multimedia materials utilized by pharmacy faculty with Mayer's Principles for Multimedia Learning and faculty characteristics associated with greater alignment. We used a systematic process including a modified version of the Learning Object Review Instrument (LORI) to evaluate faculty video-recorded lectures for alignment with Mayer’s Principles of Multimedia Learning capturing the number and type of misalignments. We used correlations to evaluate the association between faculty characteristics and ratings and proportions of misalignments. Five-hundred-fifty-five PowerPoint slides were reviewed from 13 lectures from 13 faculty members. The average (SD) LORI score per slide was 4.44 (0.84) out of 5 with an average score per lecture from 3.83 (0.96) to 4.95 (0.53). Across all lecture slides, misalignments with multimedia principles were captured in 20.2% of slides. For each lecture, the average percentage of misalignments was 27.6% ranging from 0% to 49%. The principal misalignments included Coherence, 66.1%; Signaling, 15.2%; and Segmenting, 8% violations. No faculty characteristics were significantly associated with LORI ratings or proportion of misalignments within lectures. Faculty had high LORI ratings for their multimedia material. Nonetheless, misalignments with multimedia principles were identified and related primarily to extraneous processing. These misalignments, when addressed, have the potential to improve learning, suggesting an opportunity for faculty development to optimize multimedia educational delivery. Future investigation is needed to clarify how clinical pharmacy faculty develop multimedia material and the impact of faculty development on the application of multimedia principles and on learning outcomes.