Images have the power to move us in many ways. They can evoke our emotions, feelings, memories, and more. Images can complement and enhance text that we read or hear, or they can be viewed alone and worth “a thousand words”, as the old saying goes.
We’ve been working with a client this year to help them enhance their online course in a variety of ways. One of our main recommendations has been around the inclusion of – and in several cases, the redesign of – meaningful and relevant images that best support the course’s content and participants’ learning.
Beware of including images in your courses or slide decks that are only “eye candy”. These are images that look good but don’t contribute to people’s learning in any way. In fact, images can sometimes simply – and annoyingly – distract people and can even detract from a person’s ability to learn. When images represent a variety of styles, such as a mix of photographic, illustrative, and animated styles, it can make a course look messy at best and confuse learners at worst.
Our aim is to find or create images that convey meaningful and relevant information to enhance participants’ learning. When designing learning experiences, we include images in courses as memory aids, as well as to signify a stepped process, depict a model or framework, provide examples, demonstrate hands-on processes, support storytelling, and so much more. And like we said above, images can also be used as a powerful tool to evoke emotion in a learner, which can help them engage more deeply with content and hopefully retain learning more effectively.
So, to put it simply, we want you to make intentional decisions about including images in any course and especially in online courses where there isn’t a facilitator present, such as in on demand e-learning courses.
We have learning designers on our team who make intentional choices about images in collaboration with the client. We also have graphic designers who help us create effective images. We think you would be astounded by some of the transformations we have accomplished! (Watch for upcoming posts where we share a few examples.)
In the meantime, think about the images you’re creating and including in your courses. Are they meaningful? Relevant? Compelling? Useful? Reach out to us for support if you need expert eyes on redesigning your courses, whether you need help with the inclusion of images or effective learning design in general. We’d love to help.
