Visuals play a vital role in learning.
Be it for textbooks or for modern interactive learning platforms; the right visuals make education fun, exciting and comprehensive for learners.
But does mere addition of any visuals solve everything?
Just like for any other content development process, smart visuals are crucial for eLearning courses as well. And in this post, we are talking about how you can use them for boosting the effectiveness of your eLearning course.
So, buckle up. Here are the tips.
1. Tell Yourself That There’s No Rush
Yes, you may want to launch your eLearning course as early as possible. But can you compromise quality?
Certainly not!
So, tell yourself that it’s okay to take time while choosing the right visual content for your eLearning course.
Moving on to finding out whether a visual is suitable for your course or not, here are the factors to consider.
- Know What You Want To Convey: The first most important question to ask yourself before choosing an image or a video is “what do you want to convey through this visual?”Is it for engaging your audience with a new process that you are going to train them around? Is it for encouraging them to try a process? Or is it just for grabbing their attention?
Find out your motive, and the selection will automatically become easier. - Check Relevance: More often than not, you may come across visuals that are super-aesthetic and look attractive but don’t target your audience.In times like these, tell yourself that there’s no point using that visual in your current eLearning course.Maybe you can keep it saved for use later in content pieces, where they are relevant.
- Make Sure It’s Not Redundant: Don’t add visuals just to add visuals. It’s going to waste your and your learning audience’s time.The best content copies have 0% redundancy. So, stick to that and add visuals when and where they can add value to the course.
2. Words and Images; A Match Made in Heaven
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but to be remembered and recalled easily, it needs to be coupled with a sentence or two.
Think about it. All of our school textbooks had images with some text. Every newspaper places a caption below the pictures that it features. Brands using Instagram and Facebook for marketing prefer adding suitable captions to their images.
All of this because this technique of using text with images has been effective for years.
So, keep this in mind and try to add some relevant text with every image that you add to your eLearning course.
3. Use Visuals to Provide Content That Hasn’t Been Revealed Before
Okay, so this doesn’t mean that you need to create your own techniques. Or publish a new research paper before creating an eLearning course.
But is there a piece of information that’s exclusive to you? Or only to a limited number of people in your industry? Or is there something that you learnt after spending years in your particular niche?
Such experiences and information can be exclusive to you and super-useful for your learning audience.
So, if you can think of something on these lines, take action now. Make notes. See how this information can best be conveyed and repurpose into an engaging and shareable infographic.
Studies report that such infographics are 30 times more likely to be read than text.
Apart from this, make sure that you choose the right learning management system for creating your course. A good LMS will come with a large number of monitoring and managing features. Plus it will enable you to track important metrics for your course’s visual content as well.
So, don’t forget to compare and choose your LMS smartly.
Final words
Visual content is known for its shareable potential, recall ability and a number of other reasons — no wonder why it must be your priority while creating an eLearning course.
And so, to make the process easier for you, here we talked about three tips for using visuals in your eLearning course for boosting its effectiveness.
Hopefully, this was helpful.
