Visually presenting facts in online courses

What do you do when you have an eLearning course that contains a bunch of facts: numbers, trends, statistics, rates, and so on? How do you make your graphs, maps, charts, and tables visually engaging? More importantly, how do you help your learners remember some of this information?

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The make-or-buy decision, as defined in the Encyclopedia of Management, is the act of making a strategic choice between producing an item internally (in-house) or buying it externally (from an outside supplier). The buy side of the decision is also referred to as outsourcing.

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Yesterday afternoon, I spent a fun hour with our Learning Design team in one of their brown bag sessions on presenting content effectively. Each team member was to make a brief 10 minute presentation on their home town, which would be judged by an in-house panel and the rest of the participants on various parameters such as clarity (style, potential to enable retention), visuals (relevance, appeal, potential to enable retention), engagement (fun, interest, enjoyment), etc.

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Recently, I read an article on how all learning charts are wrong. People don’t actually remember 10% of what they read and 20% of what they see. While I agree with the debunking of this myth on the surface, I’m not entirely convinced that some of the myths aren’t true. Since those percentages were just estimations derived from Dale’s Cone of Experience, the exact percentage may be wrong, but the notion was correct.

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While creating a storyboard for online courses, I usually turn to templates to make my task simple. If you’ve more than a few members of your team working on the same project and you need the look and feel of the course to be consistent when done, it is ideal to use templates. 

Templates include various different elements such as buttons, icons, color schemes, images, games and much more. Tools such as PowerPoint master slide layouts allow you to have a range of pages ready to insert content. The whole idea of a template is that you can use the elements an infinite number of times for different projects. Let me tell how I benefit from using templates while developing online training course: 

• First, it saves time and effort. Re-creating buttons, icons, colors, etc, each time when I create a storyboard is time-consuming. It is nice to have a few sets of interface, layouts, icons, buttons, colors and frequently used components handy. I enjoy dragging and dropping the elements into the place and voila, I’m ready to roll out a course!
• A library of templates elements is valuable to whose (like me) do not have web or multimedia designer at their disposal. An amateur takes a long time to create a Flash movie or design a button than an expert. Besides, the quality of work may not be up to the mark. I prefer to focus on creating good learning materials for the course rather than drawing a pretty button.
• Many of the clients I have worked with prefer their courses to have a consistent look and feel – same colors, quality and more. They provide me with their readymade set of templates to use for developing of course materials.
• If a company is using LMS, there are certain requirements for proper functioning. By having custom-designed templates compatible with the LMS, life is easy for all of us. Templates mean less troubleshooting time and faster turnaround of course development.
• Not all IDs (yours truly!) have web designing or multimedia skills. It is best to have various elements of templates created by experts as it gives a touch of professionalism to the courses. I just need to edit the template and its elements to add the course content.
• As I mentioned earlier, an ID has to create good learning material and not design templates and elements. By using templates while developing courses, IDs can think of creative ways to make a course interesting and churn out more courses in a short span of time. 

These are the few benefits that I see from using templates while creating an e-learning module. 

Do share your thoughts with me on the same.