Fonts and Colors and Pictures, OH MY!
One service available to eCollege Educational Partners is a Course Review, provided by the Academic Training and Consulting Team. As a part of a course review, the team examines a course from a best practice perspective, evaluating things like readability, opportunities for student engagement, flow of content, and use of course tools. In reviewing courses over the past few months, I've seen a lot of great teaching and I've seen a few areas for improvement. So, today, I've decided to write about best practices for elements of design when creating an online course.
Let's begin with fonts and colors. While software may allow you to create page headers in hot pink, it may not be the best choice for your students. Keep in mind that online students are spending a lot of time staring at a monitor. Studies have shown that it is easier to read a “serif” font (a font with tails, such as Times New Roman) on paper, but on a monitor it is easier to read a “sans serif” font, or one without curly-q’s or tails (something like Verdana or Arial). You can use color to emphasize a point but it is also important to bold or italicize the colored font so that a disabled student, using a screen reader, will be cued to your emphasis. Screen readers indicate font attributes (bold, italicized, sub or super) but not font color. Finally, it’s best to stick to two or three at the most and to keep them in the same color family or complementary colors.
Inclusion of relevant images is another item to think about when creating a course. Photos of yourself and your family pet, included in a Virtual Office under Course Home, are a great way to create a sense of community with your students and it gives them a peek into your life. It humanizes you and reminds them that their course is being taught by a person, rather than a computer. Additionally, relevant images on the unit homepages can act as a great visual organizer for the student. For example, many images of M.C. Escher's work would be excellent choices for a unit homepage about perspective drawing. There is a world of images available to you on the web, just make sure you're not infringing on any copyrights when you select your image. Ultimately, while you may be excited to share a photo of your dog, dressed as a pirate for Halloween, it is best to keep images like those to your Virtual Office.
A final item to think about is how the content displays to the student within a page. Is your presentation of the material easy for the student to read? Do they have to scroll left and right to read a lecture? A quick and easy solution for this is to create a 1x1 table (1 cell = 1 column & 1 row), using the visual editor. Once you've created it, change the border to a darker color and create your content within the table. This acts as a frame for the content and is visually easier for the student to read.
Ultimately have fun when creating your online course, but keep in mind that adding a few of the suggestions above can make the online experience a lot more enjoyable for your students.
Stephanie Pfeifer, MA
Academic Trainer and Consultant
Online Interactivity Addresses Employer Concerns
I had a conversation about online business programs with several hiring managers last week and the discussion turned to a comparison of online versus traditional brick and mortar programs. One business owner expressed a concern about not having any idea what took place in the online classroom. I explained that everything online is documented so you actually have a more detailed record of what took place than you would in the face to face environment.
Another concern was that online students miss out on soft skill development such as communication, presentation, negotiation, and conflict management skills along with a connection to real-world business settings. As a constructivist with eight years of course development experience, I could easily come up with examples of how to meet each of those learning outcomes online but this reticence to appreciate the value of online degrees reminds us that we must continuously strive to educate stakeholders about the quality present in our curriculum.
A third critique of education in general was the perception that most professors serve as the ‘sage on the stage’ which they felt did not represent the collaborative, cross-functional dynamics of the workplace. Again, well-designed online courses excel at transitioning teaching faculty from being dispensers of knowledge to serving as facilitators that support students in the acquisition of knowledge with professional guidance, moderation of peer to peer discussions, and thoughtful feedback to performance based assessments.
Ultimately, I believe their concerns stemmed from a desire to have students interact in rich and meaningful ways with content, peers, case studies, and faculty throughout a degree program. Brenda Bannan-Ritland from the Graduate School of Education at George Mason University conducted an extensive literature review on this topic and came up with the following five categories of interaction in online education:
(a) learners’ participation or active involvement,
(b) specific patterns and amounts of communication,
(c) instructor activities and feedback,
(d) social exchange or collaboration, or
(e) instructional activities and affordances of the technology (2002, p. 167).
Bannan-Ritland explains that online programs put students at the center of the learning experience. This means that all of their actions associated with a course are goal-related whether it is to figure out how to order the required reading materials or to determine the requirements for the next assignment. As such, the perception from both students and faculty is that online requires a higher degree of interaction than a traditional classroom where students can rely on peers or simply zone out during a lecture.
An excellent example of integrating interactivity online comes from an Open University (UK) Environmental Studies course where geographically dispersed students each did a biodiversity survey in their local context and then uploaded the data into an online database which was later referenced as raw data in a subsequent course assignment (Thorpe, 2008, p. 61) . This is exactly the type of learning activity that my corporate friends were looking for.
So, challenge yourself to look at ways to increase student engagement with your content, their peers, and you as the faculty facilitator. Feel free to share additional ideas and resources as a response to this entry. We’ll add the information to our best-practice idea bank.
References
Bannan-Ritland, B. (2002). Computer Mediated Communication, eLearning, and Interactivity: A Review of the Research. The Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 3(2), 161-179.
Thorpe, M. (2008). Effective online interaction: Mapping course design to bridge from research to practice. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 24(1), 57-72.
Brian McKay Epp, M.Ed.
Academic Trainer and Consultant
Why YouTube?
EducationTube: If you checked out the Educator’s Voice Tip last month, you saw how to upload a YouTube video into your course. We heard several comments from teachers about it. Mostly we heard cheers and gratitude, but we also got a chunk of instructor’s who said, “why?”
Let’s see if I can answer the “why” a bit here. As one of the thousands of web 2.0 sites, YouTube is big. How big? In 2007, YouTube held as much information (in size) as the entire Internet did in 2006. That’s pretty big. And it’s used for a lot more than silly stuff today. A simple query of “education” in the YouTube search field provided 29 pages of items, some of which were quite enlightening!
User generated content is important to the current generation (and many other non-millenials too). I believe that we are headed into the next “age” of man – the age of creativity. And digital assets have allowed that to happen. As educators we need to learn how to teach creativity. As directors, we need to learn how to funnel creativity and manage creative people. As creative types, we have to learn how to make our innovations useful, profitable, and helpful. And YouTube is one of THOUSANDS of ways this age of creativity is being demonstrated. For example:
Let’s start with motivation, humor, and inspiration. Check out the following YouTube videos for a slice of encouragement:
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY – Sir Ken Robinson at the TED conference speaking about creativity in schools today.
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cagxPlVqrtM – Don McMillan explaining how NOT to use PowerPoint for presentations. (By the way – my public speaking students LOVE this one…what a great modeling tool.)
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAm3KWiDPKU&feature=related – A presentation of “New Math” in a very funny fashion.
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M_336pDWoM – A show in the stylings of Mike Wesch (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o) to remind you about today’s learners.
Hopefully, you found these interesting and perhaps even began searching for other content! If so, perhaps you tried finding something for your discipline. Yep, there is specific subject matter appropriate content on YouTube. See what you think of:
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZKOPKIHsrc&feature=related – vedic math
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24IKLJRZ_WY – business leadership
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ukPD4G5eSw – a view of a cell from the inside
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGZyG0Jchjo – a great example of how NOT to start your speech
There are hundreds, if not thousands more than what you see here. Teachers, students, and schools from around the globe add to YouTube every day. It’s not just for teenagers trying to have fun or singers looking to get noticed. It’s for everyone! You can even follow thought leaders on YouTube to see what videos they have bookmarked as favorites, saving you some potential time in searching. (I’m bordenj71 if you’re interested.)
So, find a video you like, grab the TIP from the Educator’s Voice, and add some video content to your class. You (and your students) will be glad you did!
Jeff D Borden, M.A.
Director of Academic Training & Consulting
Learning Styles
It is commonly accepted as a truism in educational settings that individuals (students or trainees in our case) have different “learning styles.” A key here, most practitioners in the field note, is that the learning style employed at any given time is a “preference” of the individual student. Practitioners also tend to agree that most students are comfortable using more than one style or a mix of styles depending on the learning context and content.
In order to create an educational environment in online courses which knowledgeable observers would designate as appropriate for a mix of learners, instructors must be familiar with broad descriptors of learning styles.
Learning Styles
Learning styles is a concept most frequently described as preferred ways that individuals accumulate, comprehend and process information for later use or application in a variety of settings. Many theorists and practitioners have examined different aspects of learning styles, produced a variety of learning inventories and personality style guides, and developed explicit or implied guidance for the design and development of instructional materials. Two common categories include cognitive styles and personality types:
Cognitive Styles: A variety of models have been proposed to explain or describe how students “prefer” to receive and process information. In our own field of education two widely-know models are: Kolb presents a two-dimensional model with learning style preferences ranging from Active Doing to Reflective Observing on the horizontal Processing continuum and from Concrete Feeling to Abstract Thinking on the vertical Perception continuum. Gardner presents “seven intelligences types” which encompass awareness involving bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical and spatial aspects.
Personality Types: Different inventories and models have been used to describe learner’s individual differences and their potential influence on the learning process. One model commonly used in educational settings is the Myers-Briggs personality types inventory. This tool identifies and measures four individual preference areas: extroversion-introversion, intuition-perception, judgment-feeling, and attitude-perception.
Learning, as we are all aware, is a complex process. The few models briefly mentioned above are an indication of the somewhat subjective manner in which we have approached an understanding of the learning process. It’s also commonly noted in the literature that individual’s learning styles and preferences may well change, at least to some degree, over time. Thus the models can provide means to capture an “at this time” or “snapshot” view of individual preferences for learning. With our “photos” in hand, we can use this information about student learning styles as we design our courses.
Ken Switzer
Senior Academic Trainer & Consultant
