From educational videos and online learning modules to recorded lectures and flipped classrooms, technology has gained a stronghold within medical education; 1 yet, health professional teaching at all learner levels still relies on in-person didactic sessions that fit into the daily scaffolding of clinical work. These sessions, which include case conferences, chalk talks and journal clubs, are paramount to the learning experience. In the face of social distancing guidelines, prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, many health professional schools and training programs have been forced to transition in-person education to an entirely virtual platform. As a result, various multimedia, that previously supplemented in-person didactics, have become pillars of clinical education. 2 In this new virtual era, widely accepted adult education theories and best practices should continue to guide use of multimedia for education.Mayer's work on the cognitive theory of multimedia learning is particularly important to consider as it guides teachers through effective use of multimedia educational platforms, inherent to virtual learning. 3 Mayer highlights the importance of designing multimedia instructional methods with human information processing in mind.Specifically, educators should be attentive to cognitive load to engage in an optimal degree of cognitive processing. Too much information can overwhelm learner cognition and detract from learning. With today's added burden of distance learning, technology requirements and flood of COVID-19 information, virtual-based teaching needs to avoid cognitively overloading learners.Given that virtual didactics are a fairly new phenomenon, the aim of this article is to provide a framework to optimize synchronous, or real-time, virtual teaching in health professional education. Using such a framework will help educators prepare, strategically deliver and assess their teaching sessions. We draw from Mayer's work, our

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