Visuals for Teaching and Learning Research

Research of all types plays a critical role in instructional design. For example, instructional designers/developers require information about a number of disciplines, about their field, about human learners. They also conduct user research to pilot-test the learning designs. And, they also need to conduct research to better understand the teaching and learning dynamics. In any number of research approaches, visual stills (diagrams, photos, maps, data plots, and others) and moving visuals (video snippets, 4D simulations, and others) may be used to elicit information and discover new insights. This chapter addresses some of the visual ID related to research.

Getting Visually Acquainted With a Learning Discipline, Related Professions, and an Overarching Domain

Instructional designers create learning about subjects about which they are non-experts and outsiders. Using formal and informal visuals to learn about a field will shed light on aspects of a discipline and its related professions and overarching domain. The imagery may offer a path to learning that may be more accessible than through other modalities at least initially, and these images may be a gateway to further research and learning (textually). Here, using visuals is shown to complement other modes of learning about a field.

Visual-Based Character Origination, Design, Development, and Evolution for Learning

People can be highly responsive to the so-called “personality frame” through which to learn. Such framing may be achieved through a live human actor, a tutor agent, a non-playable character in a game, a representation of a professional, a digital avatar in a virtual world, an artificial intelligence (AI) robot, or some other representation of an individual being. Various types of characters—real or imaginary, dynamic (animated) or static, humanoid or animal or other—may appear in online teaching and learning. Various dimensions of a character's appearance, sound, communications, behaviors, actions, and other dimensions may communicate something of their designed (scripted) personality and motivations, resulting in learner engagement, learner interactions with the learning. This chapter explores visual-based character origination, design, development, and evolution for learning.

Creating and Advancing Storylines for Learning With Visuals

A common vehicle used for teaching and learning involves storytelling in a number of forms: story problems, riddles, challenges, historical incidents, biographical incidents, anecdotes, cases, scenarios, and others. Stories are told in e-books, videos, serious learning games, immersive virtual worlds, and other contexts. Visuals are important to advance storylines in terms of defining narrative structures and trajectories, characters, locales, and dramatic moments; they are important for the design of looks and feels. This chapter explores effective storytelling strategies, the critical storytelling elements, and effective learning designs for co-written, elicited, and co-performed stories.

Visual Instructional Design for Effective Learning

Visual instructional design is applied in all three phases of the work: the design, development, and deployment phases. In each of the phases, some visuals are used for back-end and private work purposes, some for private-public purposes, and some for public consumption. This chapter describes practical/applied visual instructional design approaches. It explores how visuals determine learning contents and the learner experience, how visuals are used to determine appropriate modalities for learning and more, and how visuals can be used to determine the proper launches of the designed and developed learning content.

Picturesque Rollouts

The rollout of a new learning sequence, whether for formal or nonformal or informal learning, requires that members of the general public find the (promise of the) learning appealing and useful. The public messaging has to capture attention, represent the actual learning contents, be memorable, and motivate targeted individuals and learning groups to action. This chapter focuses on visual-based marketing for learning content rollouts and targeted outreach. Given the tight budgets for instructional designs, this marketing rollout will be based on “guerrilla (shoestring) marketing” techniques (for marketing, for advertising, and for branding).

Versioning Learning to Different Target Learner Groups

A fairly common practice in instructional design is to originate a new instructional design over new content and then version the learning onto different tracks for different learning groups. Some learners may require a particular learning experience while others do not (based on learner experience mapping). Visual instructional design helps in the segmenting of various learner groups, the definition of various learning paths, various methods for customizing learning through customization, differentiation, addition and subtraction of elements, content revision and editing, cultural overlays, and some whole or partial redesigns for an effective and evocative learning experience for the target group.

Multi-Messaging and Multimodalities for Online Learning Contents and Digital Leave Behinds

“Online learning contents” for online learning tend towards complexity (and multi-messaging) and may instantiate in different modalities (a variety of analog and digital). “Digital leave behinds” are learning contents that are hosted on websites or repositories or other spaces and are used as part of a post-learning or post-event sequence to help learners refresh on their main ideas, make informed decisions, and advance their knowledge, skills, and abilities/attitudes (KSAs). These digital leave behinds may also be used as stand-alone learning contents usable by the general public, even if the users were not part of the original formal learning or event. These objects must be as comprehensive as possible and practical in application. This work describes the uses of visual instructional design for the creation of multi-messaged and multi-modal (1) learning contents and (2) digital leave behinds.

Orientation, Functions, Navigation, and Experiences

The design of learning resources is both enabled and constrained based on the available technologies. To save on costly and effortful development, the design planning involves drafting user interface designs (orientation) and wireframes (which suggest how users would navigate the learning space and engage various functions). These early designs are enabled by drafting tools, wireframing tools, authoring tools, and hosted learning and content management systems. Ultimately, the designs are to serve the users and the ultimate designed learning purposes. To these ends, user interfaces/user experiences (UI/UX) are both considered important. This chapter explores design approaches to designing user interfaces and navigation in digital learning resources.