Multimedia learning: beyond modality

The technical means to develop informational and instructional resources are now at everybody’s fingertips (e.g., by using MS PowerPoint, the most widely used multimedia and instructional “authoring tool”, although by design only a presentation (sic!) tool). It also has become very easy to distribute multimedia materials: one does not need to press CD-ROMs and ship them via mail, all that is needed is to upload resources to a web server; modern browsers can render all kinds of media, from text and pictures to animated 3D models. Having the hurdle of technical and logistical problems moved out of the way, issues of learning and didactics become more prominent again: how does multimedia learning work? Under what conditions does it help to present content with multiple media? How can students become engaged in active learning, in interacting with media? What are the well-founded (general) design principles? The contributions in this Special Issue address these and a number of related questions in great depth and with scientific rigor. All of the papers make important contributions not only to current issues in multimedia learning research, but also result in insights that are of relevance for practical applications—for designing multimedia-based instructional messages and learning environments. It is notoriously difficult to write for both purposes in a single paper— to foster research and to contribute to instructional practice. Most of the contributions speak primarily to the researcher. Because I find it important that readers with an interest in instructional design can profit from this Special Issue as well, one objective for this commentary is to identify and summarize the instructional messages contained in the research papers. My second objective is to try to identify central theoretical issues and to speculate upon further research directions. In order to reach these objectives, I will first step through the individual contributions and state what I see as their central points. In doing so, I shall not follow the exact sequence of articles. Of all the papers, the one by Richard Mayer is most clearly directed towards the