The design of content affects users' ability and willingness to interact with it. If a lesson appears disorganized, a searcher may immediately dismiss it without realizing it may actually be a great lesson. In this lesson, we'll look briefly at design frameworks, principles, and quality standards. These can help your content stand out and give you additional criteria for evaluating other content.
Standard K of the Instructional Materials Rubric asks if, "The visual design of materials is clean and coherent, lending itself to ease of learning." Individual criteria supporting this standard include:
K1: Uses visual cues and/or prompts to highlight, emphasize, or draw attention to key features or critical information and ideas.
K2: "Chunks" information into smaller elements where possible.
K3: Reduces or eliminates unnecessary distractions and extraneous information, unless they are essential to the instructional goal(s).
K4: Composition of materials effectively uses the principles of contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity, and white space to help convey information.
The composition of your instructional materials can make it easier or harder for users to navigate, find information, and flow through the lesson. Composition is the way your content is arranged. The Goodwill Community Foundation's GCFLearnFree says, "It doesn't matter if you're working with text, images, or elements in a graphic; without a thoughtful, well-composed layout, your work would basically fall apart."
Learn more about composition in the following video.
To learn more about composition and how to apply the principles of proximity, white space, alignment, contrast, and repetition to your work, read the Layout and Composition lesson. For more, review the full Beginning Graphic Design course from the Goodwill Community Foundation.
Other Design Resources:
Just as the visual design of a material can influence our opinion and use of it, the design and construction of multimedia, images, video, and presentations affect people's learning. Richard Mayer's research organized this concept into 12 principles that can provide guidance on how to create effective multimedia. See the Principles of Multimedia Learning for details and how to address each principle.
Any materials submitted to Open Space should meet the criteria presented in the Open Space Submission Rubric. This includes the areas of Safety/Privacy, Sales/Marketing, Content, Standards Alignment, Interactivity, Usability/Accessibility, and Assessments. Be sure to review these standards before submission to ensure your content is approved on Open Space.
