Post 281 What is good Visual Design for an Online Classroom?

Post 281: What is good Visual Design for an Online Classroom?

Good visual design involves simplicity, clarity and organization. Just like when you create a Powerpoint presentation, you want to have a unified theme for your slides, the same goes for a unified theme and look for your online classroom.

Visual learners are confused and put off by confusing design.  When you design your classroom, keep in mind, you want to have these following characteristics for a clear design:

*Lots of white space between paragraphs.

*Keep paragraphs short. Unlike written text on paper, online text represents 'speech' so you can have one or two sentence paragraphs.  White space gives the reader's eyes rest as the reader's eyes get more tired reading online text than printed text.

*Have a variety of resources to appeal to different student modalities. You should have audio clips, videos, powerpoint presentations, interactive quizzes, animated characters and stories, charts, posters, and infographics to appeal to students of different modalities.

*Use chunking. Keep your videos to no more than 3 to 5 minutes. Do not create an hour long lecture. Hour long lectures may work for face to face class, but online students get tired faster so keep it short. Chunk your video sections for one short skill at a time.

*Have frequent self-assessment quizzes that are easy and based on the last 3 to 5 minutes skill that the student just learned from your video.

*Your layout should be uncluttered. Do not put too many images, videos or audio clips at the same time. Space them out logically based on what you are teaching. For each unit, use the same routine to give your design a unified theme.

*Use the same color scheme, same style headings and subheadings, the same font throughout to give your classroom a unified theme.

*Use sans serif fonts like Arial or Verdana. When I was at AMU, I used Verdana throughout my online classroom.