Abstract: There will always be instructors who use humor in their classes. While these practitioners have never numbered in the majority and often have been scorned by their peers, there has been a resilient insistence that humor has a place in education. As education moves more and more into online modalities, we find ourselves at a crossroad of opportunities. It has never been easier to find humorous content about any topic using technology. Simply searching Google for “humor in instruction” lists page after page of ideas, research and content designed for the classroom. At the same time, many of us are teaching in classes where we never see the people we teach. This can rob instructors of important feedback about whether their content (whether humorous or not) is connecting with the students. This literature review explores these crossroads, looking at the effectiveness of humor in teaching, theories that can guide humor in the classroom, types of humor to use in education, how to add humor to your online class and resources for implementing humor in your online class.

Multimedia has infused itself into all aspects of education be it online, distance or in the face-to-face classroom. Its presence has become ubiquitous in education and yet has it really benefitted students to the degree it could? This paper utilizes a review of the literature to define the role of multimedia in e-learning then looks at how multimedia fits into basic pedagogy, learning theory and learning styles. An examination of how multimedia optimally could be incorporated into the curriculum is also conducted. Finally a look at cognitive overload is undertaken to determine if there is such as thing as too much of a good thing; can instructors end up confusing students with poorly designed multimedia presentations? There are many tools to use to present multimedia lessons however, this does not mean they all need to be used in a single lesson, and selecting the right multimedia tool, and content is imperative to ensure learning goals are met. Careful selection and attention to instructional design remains the key determinant in successful learning models and the incorporation of multimedia should be used with basic instructional pedagogy in mind.