Abstract
Since the students themselves are responsible for their learning in the asynchronous online learning process, there needs to be a power attracting them to the online learning environment. Humor, which has an educational power, can be evaluated in this perspective. Instructional multimedia is one of the most essential components in the asynchronous online learning process because it enables students to continue their studies individually. The chapter aims at suggesting a way for designing instructional multimedia using humorous elements for asynchronous online learning. Attention, recall, feedback, and humor breaks can be listed as advantages of integrating humorous elements in instructional multimedia. For this purpose, humorous elements can be easily added to instructional multimedia for asynchronous online learning. This chapter also focuses on the question of how to integrate humorous elements into instructional multimedia and offers various recommendations for future studies within this context.
TopIntroduction
High dropout rates, low retention, lack of motivation and participation are still problematic and negatively affect learning outcomes in the online learning process, although online learning has a significant role in higher education for the benefits it provides (Packham et al., 2004). As some scholars assert, learning starts with interest and enthusiasm and the lack of these leads learners to have low participation and engagement (Şahin, 2018). In asynchronous online learning environments, it is critical to engage learners in the tasks to achieve learning objectives. At this point, researchers state that well-designed instructional multimedia (IM) can support student-content interactions in online learning being maintained (Swan, 2001; Khan, 2001). However, the lack of emotional components in IM may negatively influence students’ engagement by leading them to give up studying with IM (Um, et. al., 2012). Therefore, researchers put an emphasis on decreasing the negative feelings toward IM that are considered as essential indicators of the lack of student engagement in online learning environments (Henrie et al., 2015). In this circumstance, previous studies have demonstrated that including the potential of humor in IM may provide positive emotions and feelings while studying with IM (James, 2004; Wanzer, et al., 2010). Positive emotions create an attractive learning atmosphere that learners enjoy and are at least not frightened of the course. When humorous elements are integrated to the learning process appropriately, the “haha!” of humor can lead learners to the “aha!” of exploration to encourage participation in online learning (Swan, 2002). At this point, instructors who act also as designers can take advantage of humor to design IM for online learning. The idea of how to employ these features of humor in the instructional multimedia design process seems to be vital for online learning. Based on this claim, this chapter aims to guide the process in making instructional multimedia humorous for online.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Humorous Elements: Humorous elements are videos, animations, pictures, texts, cartoons, etc., added to the instructional multimedia for the purpose of attention, recall, feedback and humor break.