Audio information in online courses serves learners best when it complements—rather than reiterates verbatim—ideas from the printed text. This conclusion is strongly supported by work conducted by multimedia education researchers Richard Mayer and Patricia Clark, as well as others.

For this reason, BAI’s courses use audio selectively to emphasize key concepts and learning goals of a course. Short, focused audio segments are interspersed throughout courses in locations where they reinforce critical information from the main text.