Developing Course Material: Making Content Visually Appealing & Engaging

Capturing your learner's attention is a necessary element in online learning. You want your learner to be visually engaged with your content as well as pick up on the important information they will need.

There are some basic design practices you can follow to improve the visibility of your online content:

• One area to consider is color and contrast. You want to make sure that you have a couple of theme colors to work with, a neutral colored background and an accent color to pop. With contrast, you want to make sure that you provide enough contrast between two elements so you can distinguish between the two. 
• The basic role of fonts is that less is more. Choose only one to two fonts, preferably Sans Serif. Try to avoid overly decorative fonts, they are hard to read on screen. In visual design, unification is highly important. 
• You want to group similar items together so learners can make connections. You want similarity between the common items and text so the learner can categorize which items belong to each other. You need repetition to not only reinforce learning but to also provide consistency. 
• Organizing your materials around a central theme again provides that visual guidance that students need to navigate through your content. To help with visual appeal, consider your navigation through content. Because you want to keep your learner's attention, you shouldn't make navigating your course content and assignments overly complex. Make materials easy to find, keep your organization of materials consistent and remember, less really is more.

Making your learning materials approachable creates a better learning environment. Students need structure and organization in their learning materials in order to learn. Chunking content can be a useful tool in your arsenal. By chunking, or grouping content materials together, you can benefit your students in many ways.

• You can improve the overall recall of materials. We naturally seek patterns and commonalities to learn. 
• Chunking also eliminates unnecessary materials from your course, allowing you to better focus. 
• Chunking materials can also keep students engaged and prevent them from being overwhelmed. 

In other words, organizing your course from its most basic component to the individual lessons. For example, you could create a unit, modules with chapter lessons and topics for each of the chapters or lessons. There are many ways to create content order such as categorically, by the importance of the material, from simple ideas to more complex ones or a sequential ordering. Choose the most appropriate method according to your subject matter.

Another way to look at chunking is to decide visual layout, necessity of materials and transitions. It is usually best to try to avoid scrolling up and down a screen. It is a better idea to have multiple pages instead. Also, consider the content you actually need. Too much material can overwhelm the online student. Finally, don't neglect your bridges, or transitions from one topic to another. Connectivity is important in learning.