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The following is a brief overview of the 4 basic principles of design :

C R A P

Reference: Williams, R. 1994, The Non-Designer’s Design Book, Peachpit Press, USA

Understanding Colour

Review the Colour Matters site and determine why some colours appear to hurt the eye!

From the same site – Color Matters – explore how computers generate colours and what this can mean to your multimedia images:           

The Psychology of Colour

Some colours make us happy and others, sad.  Colours have the ability to provoke a psychological reaction. Look at the objects around you: their colours have been chosen specifically because they create a mood or an association for the viewer.

Because of their power to provoke reactions in us, we use colours for their symbolic meaning. It is no accident that fire engines are painted red; red is a hot colour and denotes the idea of danger. Police uniforms are blue; being a cool colour, blue projects the idea of being under control, being calm and collected.

You can use colours in your visual designs to convey a mood, create an association or express your feelings about a particular event, activity or object.

Choose colours to convey the following:

Selecting Colours

Many things will affect your choice of colour. Consider the situation and choose your colours wisely. Think about the following factors.

Fashion
Colours go in and out of fashion. Bright colours are used to demand attention and make a statement. Designers of luxury items want their products to appear reputable and durable, and be seen to outlast the fashion of the day; gaudy colours such as bright pinks and yellows are unlikely.

The mass market
Strong and bold colours are used to attract the mass market. Advertisers usually use primary colours because they are the most appealing colours to the bulk of the population.

The environment
Australians live in a hot, dry environment so often use cool colours (such as pastel tints) in their buildings to make their physical environment seem cooler. In a European environment that is predominantly cold you tend to see warm, bright primary colours, creating a cheerful, cosy illusion.

Culture
Culture and history shape colour choice. If you visit Asia you will find temples painted in bright, primary colours. A European church is more likely to have more sombre colours.

Consider your e-Learning product – what colours might work? Why?

Exploring Visual Design

“At the beginning of a project, the screen is a blank canvas, ready for you, the multimedia designer, to express your craft. The screen will change again and again during the course of your project as you experiment, as you stretch and reshape elements, draw new objects and throw out old ones, and test various colors and effects – creating a vehicle for your message…many multimedia designers are known to experience a mild shiver when they pull down the New… menu and draw their first colors onto a fresh screen…this screen represents a powerful and seductive avenue for channelling creativity.”

Tay Vaughan, 1998

Visual design takes the composite of elements: text, symbols, photos, colours, video, in fact any graphic element and much more, to communicate your message – it is your primary connection with the learner.

Visual design is the process of producing visual images that are able to communicate information to other people.

Visual images are made up of lines, colours, textures, tones, hues and shapes applied in a spatial composition. We are surrounded by visual images in our everyday lives. Each visual image is trying to tell us something.

 

To produce images that people understand, you need to consider the following:

1.       What message are you trying to communicate?

2.       What audience are you trying to communicate with?

3.       What is the best way to visually communicate that message?

4.       What are the elements and tools necessary to produce the visual image?

Complete the quiz in UTSOnline – Visual & Interaction Design – available in the Course Information tab.

Understanding Perception

When you look at a visual image you see lines, shapes, colours, tones, hues and objects in a spatial dimension.

The eye collects visual information from these images and objects and this information is transmitted to the brain. The brain interprets and constructs meaning from this visual information.

To design visual images that are meaningful to an audience you need to understand the way your audience actually sees. That is, how does the eye collect visual information and how does the brain interpret it? This line of inquiry is called the science of perception.

Discovering the way the eye works will help you understand how visual elements function in visual design.

Understanding Visual Communication

No two people ever see the same thing quite the same way. Cultural differences, the level of acquired knowledge, an individual’s psychology and socialisation will all affect the way we construct meaning from a visual image.

Physiology can also affect the way a person sees. The eye itself can have defects in the retina lens or suffer from colour blindness. The brain can also have its own problems that affect perception such as brain dysfunction, and alcohol and drugs.

To cater for these differences in perception you need to construct a clear, unambiguous image and know your audience well enough to construct visual images that they will easily recognise and comprehend. For example, a road sign needs to communicate its message to a wide audience instantaneously.

Review the image below:

Visual hierarchy

Read:

About Page Design and Visual Hierarchy from the Webstyle Guide

http://www.webstyleguide.com/page/index.html

Use the navigation on the right hand side.

How would visual hierarchy influence learners?

7 Principles of Multimedia Design

1.       Multimedia principle: Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.

2.       Spatial Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.

3.       Temporal Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.

4.       Coherence Principle: Students learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included.

5.       Modality Principle: Students learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on-screen text.

6.       Redundancy Principle: Students learn better from animation and narration than from animation, narration, and on-screen text.

7.       Individual Differences Principle: Design effects are stronger for low-knowledge learners than for high-knowledge learners and for high-spatial learners rather than low-spatial learners.

Now consider your course and make notes where multimedia may be of value:

Task:

“Multimedia is an eerie wail as two cat’s eyes appear on a dark screen.

It’s a small window of video laid onto a map of India, showing an old man recalling his dusty journey to meet a rajah there…”

Tay Vaughan, 1998, Multimedia: Making it Work

Multimedia is understood to mean a product that is digitally constructed utilising and seamlessly integrating various media: text, graphics, images, video, animation and sound.

Multimedia enriches the user through medias and technologies with the intention of engaging people’s minds!

Initially the delivery of multimedia products was via CD-ROM, but the internet provided a global distribution system that changed the structure and style of the multimedia products.

High levels of interactivity are now achievable using a range of software that runs on almost any current desktop computer.

The future of multimedia will be even more challenging as a plethora of delivery systems and displays are marketed. Enhanced program material provided on digital television and internet information displayed on mobile phones are just two examples of new multimedia systems.

How do you define multimedia in today’s e-Learning context?

Multimedia is media that utilizes a combination of different content forms. In general, multimedia includes a combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity content forms.

Albert Bandura (1977) combines behaviourist reinforcement with cognitive processes for understanding the behaviour of others.

Bandura empasises the importance of observing and modeling – his 2 key elements for learning are: experience and expectations

§         Experience enables us to learn the consequences of our actions

§         Expectations are formed by our experiences

Four processes underlie this type of observational learning:

1.       Attention: focus on the features of behaviour to be modeled

2.       Retention: how well the behaviour is remembered

3.       Reproduction: observed behaviour must be turned into action, practice and feedback

4.       Reinforcement: to motivate learners to reproduce and perform the behaviours

How could you apply Bandura’s Social Learning Theory in an e-Learning context?

Bruner’s Constructivist Theory:

Bruner (1966) based his theory on learning by discovery – information should be  organised in a spiral manner that allows the learner to re-arrange and re-assemble content to create new insights.

According to Bruner, discovery and meaningful learning enhances recall and transfer of learning. The main objective is to build upon knowledge the learner already has.

“By creating learning environments that foster the self-development of learners as they explore a situation or problem, teachers can enable learners to arrange, rearrange, and transform evidence so they can gain new insights and experience a sense of achievement in making their own discoveries.  The problem–solving strategies they develop are more transferable, as they have personal meaning and value in terms of the learner’s own purposes and intentions.”

Burns, R. 1995, The Adult Learner at Work, Business & Professional Publishing,

Sydney.

Applying principles of Bruner’s theory:

1.       Instruction must be concerned with the experiences and context that make the learner willing and able to learn (readiness)

2.       Instruction must be structured so that it can be easily grasped by the learner (spiral organisation)

3.       Instruction should be designed to facilitate extrapolation and/or fill in the gaps (going beyond the information given)

The Current Debate:

There is a great deal of current debate in education fields that can be summarized into distinct views:

1)       Directed Instruction

Primarily the behaviourist and cognitive learning theories

2)     Constructivist Learning

Characteristics of the 2 types of instruction:

            Directed Instruction                              Constructivist Learning

How could you apply constructivist learning principles in an e-Learning environment?

The Humanist approach developed from the Cognitive but focuses on experiential learning and the assumption that the individual is ever seeking greater personal adequacy, self-esteem and self-actualisation.

Humanists emphasise the individual’s innate need to achieve personal worth, dignity and creativity and believe a better society will evolve by nurturing these qualities.

Humanist teachers can create a positive classroom climate and encourage the psychological growth towards the creation of self-actualising people.

Humanists believe that learners respond to their environments as they experience it – part of that is the person themselves – the self.

Feeling and emotions play an important part in learning.

What effect might e-Learning contexts have for the Humanist approach?

Principles emphasised by Humanist theory:

§         People learn by relating the world to their previous experience – they learn by doing

§         People learn in a free environment that permits and encourages development of potential, self-expression and self-determination

§         People learn co-operatively, which includes constructive feedback in a non-competitive environment

§         The learning that has most meaning for people is that which is contructed by individuals out of their experience

Cognitive psychologists emphasize the role of experience, the development of meaning, and the use of problem-solving and insight as the sources of learning.

The individual learner will perceives organised wholes – rather than disconnected pieces.

Each person will behave and learn in terms of what is real for them.

Learning is therefore based on the re-organisation of experiences into systematic and meaningful patterns that lead to problem-solving and insight.

This will mean that interpretation is subjective – reality is what each of us perceives and understands at any given time.

Meaningfulness:

According to cognitive theory – our brains look for patterns and completion.

Our brains have the capacity to associate anything with anything else and will find associations if we allow it to! This allows us to be creative and problem-solve.

Each person will create their own meaning based on the current context and their past experiences.

Insight:

The sudden Blinding Flash of the Obvious!

The realization of how to solve a problem by a cognitive restructuring of the environment – looking at things differently!

Until we start thinking around the problem (restructuring and reorganising) we will not be able to gain any insight into how to solve the problem.

What effect might meaningfulness and insight have in e-Learning contexts?

Advance Organisers:

An advance organiser provides a scaffold for the ideas – or cognitive structure – which will bridge the gap for the learner between the content – what’s known and what they will need to know before new material becomes meaningful.

The scaffolding is intended to provide a higher level (more generalized) concept that will then allow the learner to incorporate more detailed and differentiated materials into the structure.

Advance organisers use current and relevant concepts that the learner already has – to make it possible to put new learning into the framework.

The sequencing of content must allow new concepts to be related to old ones.

How can we use Advance Organisers in e-Learning contexts?

Principles emphasised by Cognitive theory:

§         The perceptual features of the problem as interpreted by the individual affect what is learned

§         A learning problem should be structured by the teacher so that the essential features are open to the learner’s inspection

§         The organisation of knowledge should move from simple to complex to create a meaningful whole

§         Feedback as hypothesis testing is a basis for correcting faulty learning

Behaviourists attempted to study behaviour and learning from a scientific approach – only observable and measurable behaviours are reliable. 

They explain human behaviour in terms of cause and effect – therefore learning is a modification of behaviour by application of stimuli, shaping of responses and the provision of reinforcement.

Learning is demonstrated in the response or behaviour of the learner.

Examples you may be familiar with:

Classical Conditioning – Pavlov’s  Dogs

The learner (dog) is conditioned (learns) to emit a response (dribble) which was originally a natural response to another stimulus (food) to a new stimulus (a bell).

Classic conditioning can also be demonstrated by our ability to generalize our responses to stimuli.

Eg. A household drill may cause a reaction for a person that has had an experience with a dentist’s drill!

What effect might generalizing have in e-Learning contexts?

Operant Conditioning – Skinner

Skinner argued that people learn to behave in ways that help them obtain things they want or avoid things they don’t want.

Reinforcement is used  (money, promotions, success, praise etc) to increase the likelihood of the desired response being repeated.

Skinner believed that by ignoring a response, without reinforcement the behaviour will die out.

Negative reinforcement – knowing how to avoid unpleasant or dangerous circumstances.

Punishment – creating unpleasant situations to decrease unwanted behaviour.

Feedback – is used to reinforce behaviour and let learners know how they are doing.

Principles emphasised by Behaviourist theory:

§         The learner must be able to respond actively

§         Frequency of repetition of responses is important in acquiring skill

§         Reinforcement is vital to obtain repetition of required or correct behaviour

§         Generalisation suggests the importance of practice in varied situations

§         Immediate feedback of results is strongly motivating

§         Shaping behaviour by the reinforcement of approximate responses is essential in learning new skills