Today’s learners have high expectations for visual content. When text-heavy PowerPoints just won’t cut it, instructional designers can utilize design principles to ensure high engagement and usability. Come and get a behind-the-scenes look at practical tips and production strategies that will help you take your content from blah to ahh!
Content presentations are often key in online courses. Screencast videos and animated presentations convey content through auditory and visual channels, thus create a multi-sensory learning environment. However, without proper instructional design, it may reduce student satisfaction and decrease learning effectiveness. For presentations that do not contain useful audio/visuals, students reported they could just easily read the transcript for the same information (Hibbert, 2014). How do we solve this kind of problem? What can be done to enhance students’ learning?
Following design principles can ensure a surefire way of producing successful products. Online courses are no exception; these principles can be used to develop great courses. The universal principles of design provide ways to enhance usability and influence perception. The principles have been used as the set cross-disciplinary design guidelines for engineers, architects and designers (Lidwell, Holden & Butler, 2010). This workshop will introduce four of the Universal Principles of Design: Alignment, Consistency, Storytelling, and Garbage In Garbage Out.
To fully understand the value of the design principles is to apply it first-hand, which is why we are proposing to conduct an Express Workshop. We will explore these principles then bring participants through four hands-on content development scenarios applying each principle.
Upon completion of this workshop, the participants/attendees will be able to:
- Identify the four mentioned universal principles of design
- Explain the reasons for applying each principle
- Illustrate strategies of implementing these principles
- Apply these principles in different course content development scenarios
Resources:
Hibbert, M. 2014. What Makes an Online Instructional Video Compelling? In EDUCAUSE Review online.
Lidwell, W., Holden, K., Butler, J. 2010. Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated: 125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions