Appearance

In an online class, appearance is important.  Some things are simple - maintain a common font of appropriate size, use contrasting colors for foreground and background, choose colors that don't affect the colorblind, etc.  However appearance is much more.

In order to make online learning attractive and interesting, the course designer must integrate visual and even audio elements.  These can come as images, pictures, bullets, or videos.  For my assignment from TOOL, I was to explore learning modules from 10 instructional sites and identify 5 that exemplify sound design ideals and 5 that do not.  I do so now and describe why they do or do not meet these ideals.

I think that to be exemplary a site must have visual variety.  It must also have an ordered layout that integrates the images with needed text.  While some images are necessary to draw in students, I think it is important not to overdo the images.  Too many images serve as distractions.  Images and video in a website should serve a purpose.  If the purpose is not obvious, they should be left out.

Exemplary sites

Howard Hughes Medical Institute educational materials

This is the main page.  The pictures serve as eye catching headers for different areas of the site.  The text, highlighted by the yellow background, stands out from image.  If it weren't for the yellow background, the text would get lost in the noise of the image.  There are not too many choices for categories.  Three or four choices is optimal.  These three look great.

Serc direct measurement videos

I picked this site as exemplary, largely because I love the material on the site.  There are a lot of things that I like about the appearance, but there are a few things that I don't like.

The banner heading is nice - even if the use of the word pedagogy is a bit pretentious.  The site is broken up into 4 distinct areas.  They are headed by eye catching images and a distinct heading.

While I picked it as exemplary, I will now give a few criticisms.  While the site has 4 distinct areas with nice headings, the user has to scroll down to see all abut one of them.  This detracts from the organization.  Also, the sidebars are noisy and can distract from the site.

CK-12 Explorations

I actually found this site through TOOL.  I can not vouch for the quality of material on the site.  In fact, after browsing it just a bit, I think most of the material is subpar.  However, the appearance of the main page is exemplary.

The page that I've shown here is for physics simulations.  Each simulation has an eye catching image followed by  a brief description.  It is nicely organized.  My only criticism is that there are too many choices on one page, but it is as well organized as that could be.

EdX

This is one of my favorite resources.  It is nicely laid out with eye catching images for different classes followed by a brief description.

I will give this site the same criticism as the one above.  It is as well organized as it can be for the amount of information that is presented, but it presents too much on one page.

MIT OCW

Another of my favorite sites.  This site has attempted to do away with the information overload by having images of 4 classes that scroll periodically to 4 more.  This works nicely.  However, there is still too much noise around the site.

Now for the losers - the nonexemplary sites.

Losers

McGrawsh Science Site Virtual labs

Has some good material, but is presented as an uninteresting, hard to distinguish list.

Phet is another resource that I love.  The homepage actually has a fairly clean look, but when you go to look for simulations, you get a boring, somewhat difficult to navigate list.

Annenberg Learner is another great site.  I'm hesitant to put this one on the losers list.  The images used on the page are nice looking.  So why do I put it on the losers list?  The titles are hard to relate to topic for which your looking - even with the discipline tab on the side.  The biggest thing is though that there is a huge long list of activities but they go over 6 pages and the user has to scroll down lots on each page.

This is actually a good website.  It's nicely organized by lists, but it's basically dichrome with lists.  No pop.

Here is another resource that I have to use.  A website should never look like a letter on a page.  It's not easy to navigate, difficult to lookout, and not attractive to the eye.  I find that almost all government websites are atrocious in appearance.