Context matters with any type of learning, but it’s even more important when planning an eLearning course. You can easily spend hundreds of hours working to design the navigation so that it is intuitive, picking the perfect copy for each slide and laying out the website nicely. However, if you don’t spend time making sure that the visual context of the course makes sense and works well, your course likely won’t be effective. Context is critical to motivating those taking your eLearning course and ensuring comprehension.
What Does Context Mean?
Think of context like the framework for your training. Why does the information that you are conveying matter? How will they be expected to use the information? How does each slide in the eLearning course factor into the bigger picture? Context means intentionally choosing every piece of copy and graphic in your course so that it helps learners to understand why the course is important and gain greater understanding. Context is even more critical if you are educating about something abstract or technical.
Visual Context Ensures Comprehension
When designing your eLearning course, you should remember that visuals are about more than just making your course look nice. Instead, they are a way to help:
- Simplify difficult concepts
- Lay out a lot of information in an easier to understand format, such as through infographics or other graphics
- Clarify meaning when a concept is abstract or confusing
When using visuals, keep in mind that you have many different options to choose from. Real photographs, vector images, illustrations, icons, charts, graphs, infographics and even gifs and animations can all be part of your eLearning course.
Don’t Just Decorate
While visuals are critical, you should not just decorate your slides with as many visuals as possible. Studies have found that we can process visuals faster than we process text because they are easier for our brains to understand. However, filling the screen with too many can be a type of information overload. When we have too many things to look at, it doesn’t make the information any clearer.
Deliver a Better eLearning Course with Help from Zenith Performance Solutions
Zenith Performance Solutions wants to transform the ways that you and your employees learn and help motivate your employees. We offer a comprehensive range of training course design services, including updating existing courses and consulting. We work with companies of every size to create innovative and instructionally sound materials that boost employee performance and satisfy your objectives. To learn more, please contact us by calling (970) 409-4013.