Implementing digital learning materials design principles
Last week, I attended my second “Wagga Week” (spending a week on-site at my base campus at Wagga Wagga as part of my CSU remote working agreement). Three days of the week were devoted to a Learning and Teaching Retreat, where academic staff from the School of Information and Communication Studies heard presentations on and engaged in discussion on all manner of topics related to Learning and Teaching. One of the presentations was on “Designing digital learning materials and experiences”, presented by Vi Truong.
Inspired by the content in the presentation, I set out to make the slides that I use in my online class meetings more in tune with some of the best practices of digital learning materials design that Vi showed us. Many of the slides in the presentation were very dense in text. They were substantially just blocks of text copied from the Subject Outline, representing the rationale and learning objectives of the subject and the task description for the first assessment. Here is an example:
As you can see, the slide is almost completely filled with a dense paragraph of monotonous black text. Four of Vi’s design principles (Vi Truong, personal communication, November 5, 2024) came to mind as being able to be
relatively easily and quickly implemented to improve the design of this slide. These were:
- increase the amount of negative/white/background space (I cannot remember the percentage suggested, but it was certainly more than was found on this slide)
- try to use shorter chunks of text, such as bullet points, rather than long paragraphs
- use bold font to highlight words/phrases with key importance
- use colour purposefully to enhance meaning
I set to work incorporating these principles. This section of text is the rationale from the Subject Outline, I reasoned that students have access to the rationale and to the exact wording. My value add in this situation is drawing their attention to key principles, not reading verbatim what they can find in their subject materials. I converted the paragraph to bullet points, adding an extra line between each bullet. (This process spread the information over two slides rather than one.) Then I highlighted key words in bold text. Finally, I looked at the terms that represented the three main themes in the subject and assigned each of them a different colour – purple for the role of the teacher librarian, green for information processes/information literacy and related concepts, orange for reflective practice. I used these colours to highlight these themes/concepts throughout not only this purpose statement, but also the rest of the slides in this presentation. I plan to continue this practice throughout the remaining slide decks for the online classes I lead in this subject. Here are the revised slides:
This is my first time teaching this subject, so I will not really be able to have a sense whether or not this improved my teaching or the students’ learning experience. What I can report anecdotally, however, is that I found it easier to teach to the revised slides than I did to slides more in line with the originals that I used in my subjects last session. I felt that they enabled me to speak more engagingly and to focus on key points. Several students commented on the engaging qualities of my lecture/presentation, so I suspect that these changes did have a qualititative difference. I look forward to incorporating these changes into the slides for the other subject I am teaching this session and continuing to refine my teaching process to optimise the online learning opportunities for my students.
Have you applied design principles to your online or digital learning materials? What has worked well for you? Please share your top tips in the comments :)!
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