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Best Practices for Screencast
Do you want to deliver presentations, share tutorials, or teach complex applications in your online course? If so, creating screencasts may be a great option for you. This piece defines what a screencast is, identifies important development considerations and common instructional use cases, and highlights best practices for creating screencasts for your online course.
Creating Video: Personal Experience Insights
In our Personal Experience Insights series, members of the Everspring Learning Design department share first-hand accounts of creating online learning content and meaningful takeaways from their professional experiences.
Data-Centric Recommendations for Video Engagement
Incorporating prerecorded videos and animations into online learning experiences allows students the opportunity to access content at any time after the material is delivered. The inclusion of video and animation in online learning is now ubiquitous. To promote engagement, it is imperative that such content be delivered to learners clearly and effectively.
Hyperlink Dos and Don'ts
When designing a course, you will want to ensure that all students can access the websites and documents that you link. Accessible hyperlinks are particularly important for students with screen readers, who will hear links read out loud. This piece contains best practices for writing and formatting accessible hyperlinks so that all learners can access the content that you have curated for your course.
No Sweat Alt Text
What is “alt text”? Alt text is descriptive text linked to an image, graph, or other visual content that allows users to understand the visual without viewing it. Any image online should contain alt text, but guidelines differ depending on whether the image is simply decorative or related to other content on the page.
Representation in Course Images
How many times have you looked at an image and thought, “Have I seen this before?” Chances are, if you are browsing a stock photo site, it’s often. That feeling of déjà vu occurs because images reflect an amalgam of artistic, cultural, and ideological influences (Hall, 2015).
Incorporating Multimedia in Your Course
Multimedia, which helps create an engaging and interactive online learning environment, has been shown to contribute to improved student performance (Cheng et al., 2009, p. 1). Though many online courses incorporate videos, they neglect to feature other forms of multimedia. And, while videos are a staple of multimedia use, there are other exciting options to consider: podcast episodes, graphics, and animations can all enhance course content, enriching the student experience. To maximize the benefits multimedia can provide, consider including these underutilized forms of multimedia in your course.
Leveraging White Space
Good page design requires balance between white space, or negative space, and positive space. Positive space encompasses all aspects and types of content; on a course page, these objects might include an introductory paragraph, video thumbnail, infographic, callout box, opinion poll, or provocative quotation. Relative to these course components, white space might seem like a nice-to-have. Because it promotes clarity and reduces distortion, however, white space is just as important to instructional page design as content.
Enhancing Student Learning Through Course Consistency and Accessibility
Course developers (those who build individual courses) play a crucial role in the success of an online degree program by providing expertise and bringing unique perspectives. Accordingly, it is valuable for faculty to customize their course spaces by infusing them with their own knowledge and personality. At the same time, it is also crucial to prioritize structural consistency within and across courses in an online program, as course consistency is a key aspect of accessibility and a key contributing factor to student success. In particular, students must be able to perceive, operate, and understand the course and course materials using program-standard devices and certain assistive technologies, and this should be true across all of the courses in a program. This is where program chairs and administrators can help support faculty in standardizing key elements of courses to facilitate a seamless student experience. In this piece, we discuss how maintaining structural consistency within and across courses can positively impact accessibility.
Easy and Essential Online Course Elements
Transferring your course online opens a world of possibilities. In fact, you might be tempted to spend hours trying to locate and learn new educational technologies, or to rebuild your entire course in the learning management system (LMS). But while effective use of technology can certainly enhance learning experiences, it can also introduce obstacles for both faculty and students.