You never know what’s going to happen when you go to a DevLearn session with Cammy Bean, folks. In her excellent session on Avoiding the Trap of Clicky-Clicky Bling-Bling, someone asked about the value of onscreen characters and Cammy mentioned the research I did for my M.Ed. capstone project this year… which reminded me that I still haven’t shared it here!

So, for regular readership and those who might have wandered here because of that session, here’s the super-short version:

I created two versions of a course with only a slight difference in multimedia, then invited participants to take the course, tracking behind the scenes which participants were given which version. I reported on the differences in:

• immediate understanding of the content (level 2 for those of you who roll that way)
• self-reported engagement measures (level 1)
• LMS-reported engagement measures (whether the learners finished the course, how much they explored the optional areas)

And what aspect of multimedia did I test? I specifically focused on the use of a fully animated learning agent* — one that moves her lips and gestures with her hands — versus a static (image-only) one. And I found no statistically significant difference in positive outcomes. Zero. Zip. Nada. Bupkus.

So basically, if you’re thinking about sinking a lot of development time or money into developing fully animated learning agents in hopes of increasing engagement or retention, I think this is research that you will want to read. Some vendors of those tools distribute research that others have done, supporting the use of learning agents in some situations, but nowhere in my background research or in this project did I find evidence that animation — lip synchronization, hand gestures, body movements — increases positive outcomes.

You can read the full report here, and I would love to receive your feedback, comments, and questions below.

* A learning agent, also called an animated pedagogical agent (and sometimes dubiously called an avatar), is a character that guides the learner through the course, somewhat like a teacher, although learning agents can be interactive or merely multimedia.