Contiguity, Modality and Redundancy principles - Instructional Media Critique 2

The Earthguide: Investigating Groundwater 
media example stands out immediately as 
missing an audio component. It uses Flash 
animation and written words at the bottom of the graphic to convey its content.

As I was going through the screens, it was somewhat of a burden to read the 4-5 lines of text below each graphic, comprehend it and then look at the graphic above to try and correlate it. It should have adhered to the  Contiguity principle by placing the text closer to the process or object on the screen, the text is describing. It would have reduced the cognitive resources used to correlate text at the bottom to the graphic on top. Towards the end of the course on Groundwater, some text is placed on screen to point to certain elements in the graphic, however a majority of the text is still at the bottom of the screen.

By separating the text from the graphics, the learner will experience heavier load on their working memory, leaving lesser capacity to absorb and integrate all the material. What would have been a really good idea would be to replace the text at the bottom with an audio narration.

The course prompts the leaner to click on "Next" to proceed through each screen. When the media example has two processes it needs to teach about, it presents two "Play" buttons on one screen. This is confusing since the user might want to know about both processes and will have first choose one "Play" option and then remember to click the other one. This design causes unnecessary load on the learner's mind.

Learn Genetics - Tour of the Basics has more media components and sophistication to it than the Groundwater Media example. 

It uses a combination of text, narration and animation graphics to teach the learner about genetics.

This example fulfills the Contiguity principle partially by using arrow pointers alongside text to point our certain elements on the graphic. It also uses small pop up windows to describe some key terms. The narration by itself is high quality and compliments well with the graphics in keeping with the Modality principle. However there are instances where the graphic animation does not have any narration and animation keeps going on deeper into the image to explain different elements. The explanation is done through text at the bottom of the screen instead of on the screen by the image, and the animation goes too fast to be able to make sense of what it being shown. 

The screen text which is duplicate of the narration, violates the Redundancy principle. By displaying the text on screen, it removes focus from the graphic as the learner is trying to do three things at the same time - listen to the narration, read the text on screen and look at the graphics. It also overloads the visual channel with screen text and graphics, causing extraneous cognitive processing.

The genetics course uses "next" and "previous" prompts to guide the user through the course. With regard to the course flow, after viewing all the screens in one tab such as "DNA", the user is supposed to intuitively select "Genes" to learn about Genes. I believe proper instructions should be provided to the learner on how to navigate to the next lesson.