For hundreds of years, verbal messages – such as lectures and printed lessons – have been the primary means of explaining ideas to learners. Although verbal learning offers a powerful tool for humans, this book explores ways of going beyond the purely verbal. An alternative to purely verbal presentations is to use multimedia presentations in which people learn from both words and pictures – a situation that I call multimedia learning. Recent advances in graphics technology have prompted new efforts to understand the potential of multimedia as a means of promoting human understanding – a potential that I call the promise of multimedia learning. In particular, my focus in this book is on whether people learn more deeply when ideas are expressed in words and pictures rather than in words alone.

Multimedia encyclopedias have become the latest addition to students' reference tools, and the World Wide Web is full of messages that combine words and pictures. Do these forms of presentation help learners? How do people learn from words and pictures? What is the best way to design multimedia messages? These are the kind of questions prompted by advances in graphics technology. My premise in this book is that the answers to these questions require a program of careful, systematic research. To understand how to design multimedia messages, it is useful to understand how people learn from words and pictures.

Throughout the 1990s and beyond, my colleagues and I at Santa Barbara have been conducting dozens of research studies on multimedia learning.