MULTIMEDIA PRODUCT CRITIQUES: NO RED INK 1

Multimedia Product Critiques: No Red Ink

Stacy Ownbey

Coastal Carolina University

MULTIMEDIA PRODUCT CRITIQUES: NO RED INK 2

Multimedia Product Critiques: No Red Ink

Introduction

No Red Ink is a program that was purchased by Horry County Schools as a way
to deliver and practice grammar skills. While the program is free, the county purchased
the premium version and mandated its use in all middle school ELA classrooms. As the
No Red Ink website states, students work with engaging and often humorous
sentences that incorporate their favorite characters, musicians, athletes, books, movies,
sports teams, and celebrities to learn practical grammar and writing skills. NoRedInk
provides adaptive, differentiated instruction...When learners get stuck, NoRedInk shows
them tutorials that help them correct mistakes and keep going. (No Red Ink Parent
Letter). While this sounds great in theory, many students struggle with this site. Despite
spending time working through the program, students are not learning the skills that are
addressed, and as a result, are feeling unsuccessful. Because of this, I wanted to
analyze this mandated tool to see where the disconnect is and if/how this program could
be improved to adhere to multimedia principles and theories of learning.

Multimedia Principle Adherence

As a grammarian, the concept of No Red Ink seems ideal: adaptive,

differentiated grammar instruction that provides real time data for the teacher. The
students are immediately drawn to the fact that they are able to choose the topics of
their grammar lessons. This adheres to Mayers Personalization Principle. Since the
learning is personalized and the sentences that are used within the activity are more
conversational, it stands to reason that the students will learn better from multimedia
lessons because the words are in conversational style rather than formal style. Mayer
states conversational style can prime a sense of social presence in the learner, which
causes the learner to try harder to make sense of what the instructor is saying by
engaging in appropriate cognitive processing during learning, leading to learning
outcomes that are better able to support problem-solving transfer (Mayer, 2014). While
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this is true of the activity in No Red Ink, it is not true of the actual lesson, which is written
in a much more formal style.

Another principle closely adhered to is the coherence principle. People learn

better when extraneous words, pictures and sounds are excluded (Mayer, 2014). There
are no additional sounds or pictures within either the lesson or activity, which reduces
the extraneous cognitive load.

Since the program is student paced and presented in segments, it adheres to the
segmenting principle which states that people learn better from a multimedia lesson is
presented inuser-paced segments rather than as a continuous unit (Mayer, 2014).
Students can work at their own pace and revisit the lesson. Students can also take
charge of their own learning using the color coded Practice Page. This page shows
students how close they are to mastering each topic on the site (No Red Ink Parent
Letter).
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When working through the activity, the program uses signaling to help guide the
learner. When the learner is asked to move an item into place, that item has a
highlighted circle around it as a signal to the learner; the place its being moved to also
has a highlight so that the learner can more easily see where they are placing it.

When a student gets one wrong, the program signals that it wasnt quite right and lets
them know how many questions they need to get right in order to move on, and if the
learner continues to get two wrong, the program stops the activity to show the wrong
answer, the correct answer, and a lesson addressing the skill involved. While these are
all beneficial, the signaling created through grouping and color used within the lesson
detracts from the important information and instead draws focus on only the examples
and not the key information. Its easy to overlook the actual grammar rule and focus
only on whats inside the yellow box.
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As excited as I am at the prospect of having a tool that helps track and monitor
learner progress in grammar and writing skills, the program has some major design
flaws that greatly hinder the learning process. One of the major design flaws is the lack
of adherence to the temporal contiguity principle. Students do not have access to the
lesson as they are working through the activity. They must click back to the lesson, try
and remember it, and then go back to the activity, greatly increasing the extraneous
cognitive load since they are unable to practice while having access to the information.

Another major detriment to the program is its lack of adherence to the

multimedia principle. According to Mayer, people learn better from words and pictures
than from words alone (2014). The lessons and activities are text only. There isnt any
narration, videos, or animations to help students understand the concepts and
materials. If a student continues to answer incorrectly, the same PDF style lesson will
come up, further frustrating the novice learner. They often come to me for further
explanation because they simply cannot make sense of the text only lesson. These two
major oversights of multimedia principles within the design seem to far outweigh the
benefits from the principles that were applied.

Learning Theory Adherence

As a result of the design flaws mentioned above, many of the learning theories
have been overlooked. The instructional design principles of fading and scaffolding
state that techniques need to change as the learner progresses and that novice learners
should have considerable support that can be reduced as expertise increases (Plass,
Kalyuga, & Leutner, 2010, p 71). This is the most egregious design flaw of No Red Ink.
The lessons themselves are static and do not change regardless of the expertise of the
learner. There is no scaffolding within the presentation of material, so many novice
learners struggle since the presentation of the material offers little support. The program
seems to be a response strengthening design. According to Mayer, this drill and kill
approach is very limiting and may not be adequate (Mayer, 2014, 18-19).
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Because these drill and kill lessons are offered in one area of the program
while the completion of the activity is separate, a split attention effect is created.
Instructional split attention occurs when learners are required to split their attention
among several sources that are each essential to the understanding of the material. The
cognitive load is thereby increased in order to integrate the information from these
sources. When there are disparate sources of information that must be mentally
integrated in order for the information to be understood, those sources of information
should be presented in an integrated format(Ayres & Sweller, 2014, p 206). The lack of
integration within No Red Ink depletes working memory resources and increases the
extraneous cognitive load for the learner.

Dual coding theory states that there are two separate channels (auditory and
visual) for processing information. Since the working memory has a limited capacity,
both channels should be utilized. Not only will more information be able to process, the
use of both channels can lead to deeper understanding since more pathways are
formed (Clark & Paivio, 1991, p 165). No Red Ink utilizes only one channel, thereby
limiting the amount of information that can be attained and stored by the learner.

Despite its flaws, there are some noticeable learning theories at play in the
program design. No Red Ink uses familiar topics to practice the skills taught within the
program, which helps the students make connections to information that is already
stored within their long term memory. In this sense, No Red Ink makes use of encoding,
which is the process in which working memory uses prior knowledge already stored in
long-term memory to form connections and make the information more relevant and
meaningful (Driscoll, 2005, p 89).
While much of the site does not adhere to cognitive load theory, it does provide
embedded diagnostics which can be key to adapting instruction for optimal cognitive
load (Plass, Kalyuga, & Leutner, 2010, p 79). These diagnostic tools determine which
students need more practice and in what areas before moving them onto a new skill.
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Improvements

There are some major overhauls that I would like to see in the multimedia design
of this program. First and foremost, the program needs to become more adaptive in
both lessons and activities. There needs to be more supports and scaffolding for the
novice learners. SInce there are embedded diagnostics, students who need more
guidance can be offered narrated or animated lessons and guidance. The use of a tutor
(on screen talking head) could help students connect and better understand the
material. These interventions could be integrated into the activity, eliminating some of
the split attention issues currently at play. By utilizing the instructional design principles
of fading and scaffolding as well as multimedia and dual coding theories, the success
rate of student learning will increase as learner frustration decreases.

Summary

No Red Ink is an amazing concept. The idea that there could be useful, real time
data in grammar instruction is exciting. This program is a great start, but the major
design flaws leave the novice learner extremely frustrated. The extraneous cognitive
load that poor design has created is too great to overcome for the novice making the
program less than effective. I would love to see this program adhere to the multimedia
principles and learning theories so that the true value of this program can be achieved.
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References

Ayres, P & Sweller, J. (2014) The split-attention principle in multimedia Learning. In R.

E. Mayer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning. (pp. 206-226).
New York: Cambridge.

Clark, J.M., & Paivio, A. (1991). Dual Coding Theory and Education. Educational

Psychology Review, 3, 149-210.

Kalyuga, S. (2010). Schema acquisition and sources of cognitive load. In J.L. Plass,

R. Moreno, & R. Brnken, Cognitive Load Theory (pp. 48-64). New York:

Cambridge.

Mayer, Richard E. (2014). Research-Based Principles for Designing Multimedia

Instruction. Retrieved February 6, 2017, from

https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/375591/mod_page/content/10/back
ground_reading.pdf
Mayer, R.E. & Pilegard C. (2014) Principles for managing essential processing in
multimedia learning: segmenting, pre-training, and modality principles. In R. E.
Mayer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning. (pp. 316-344).
New York: Cambridge.

No Red Ink Parent Letter. Retrieved March 09, 2017, from No Red Ink. (n.d.). Retrieved

March 09, 2017, from https://www.noredink.com/

NoRedInk (Product Reviews on EdSurge). Retrieved March 09, 2017, from

https://www.edsurge.com/product-reviews/noredink

Plass, J.L. & Kalyuga, S., & Leutner, D. (2010). Individual differences and cognitive load
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theory. In J. L. Plass, R. Moreno, & R. Brnken (Eds.), Cognitive Load Theory

(pp. 65-87). New York: Cambridge.