Overwhelming Importance of Visual Design in your E-learning Course

Visual design is a great tool to help your E-learning course to be readable and to be easily retained. Many categories exist for visual designs like animation, images, custom characters and animated videos. You can try reading the same thing in full-text format or either watch an interactive video on the same topic. If you conduct these two tests, you will find that the second option shall help the learner to better understand and retain the knowledge rather than just reading it off some book or in text format.

Aesthetics and visual design have a great impact on how a user perceives knowledge, information, credibility and usability of any kind of data. The other things which you need to keep in mind are the main principles of e-learning sent visual designs. There are a lot of factors while designing an online course and the visual design and images in the form of graphics play a very important role in the course.

Some of the benefits of Visual designs are :

1. Contrast and Repetition – You can use contrasting colours, different font types or even opposing size. This shall help to draw the attention of the learner to some specific parts of the course. On contrast to this, by repeating the background theme or the font for the title and subtitle, a sense of cohesion on the same course is established. The learner feels interested in the course and the visuals speak to him
2. Colour palette and readability – While designing a course palette, you need to keep in mind the audience and the course type which will best suit it. You can read about colour theory or colour psychology. The basic theme of your course can invoke the users feeling. Readability should never be hampered and the colour combination should not hide the text within them.
3. Graphics help to remember previous knowledge: Most Learners fall under two categories of people who have prior knowledge based on their work experience and culture and new joiners with very little knowledge about the content. Visual memory is also important and graphics can help bring it back in the form of charts, mind maps, concept art or diagrams. A mind map can also be de-stressing and relaxing for many.
4. Minimize the Cognitive Overload: cognitive overload means that our memory is overloaded with lots of information in a short span of time and can generally happen when a lot of text is provided in a course and that ends up overwhelming the learners. You can use some simple tricks like to go for diagrams wherever possible instead of paragraphs of text. Procedural activities or steps should be portrayed by visuals. Flowchart or a simple step diagram can be used to achieve this. Maintain consistency in the course and to understand where an image would be better or where animation would fit mote appropriately. This will depend on the contents of the course.
5. Graphics can motivate Leaners – There is no doubt regarding the fact that E-learning and graphics are a very good combination and much better way than just purely relying on texts and paragraphs to convey the same thought or meaning. This can trigger motivation and interest in learners yo pursue the topic and apply the knowledge in real life. Instead of reading a manual of the work they are supposed to do, if you show them a video of the work or even an interactive video of the work, then, they can retain it better and will be able to understand the work better than just reading about it in bullets or steps.
6. Establishes relationship between topics: Human beings love patterns and graphics designing helps to achieve this feat by coherence between two or more slides or if you want to change the topic to something else, you can change the colour, background colour or the text colour. This establishes the fact that a new topic is beginning or till the same colour stays, the user will remember it all together in one module and this will help while he wants to recall information from memory.

Thus visual design is very important for any E-learning course and without it, the efficiency will go down a lot. Texts are good but courses in the form of visuals and interesting graphics are more soothing to the eyes and if you are confused regarding how to achieve such visual design for your course in a short amount of time? Then you can choose platforms such as Createonlineacademy.com which offer a number of packages with inbuilt tools that will help you to create amazing online courses in the field of E-learning