Pedagogical Justifications

Why This Work Matters

While this self-paced course is called Beautiful Canvas Pages Made Easy, it’s still work for you to add these designs to your course sites. Visual design is always work, but it’s work that is worth it for your students. Visual design is one part of your course design toolkit – and putting time and effort into the visual design of your course can have a profound impact on student learning.

There are two closely connected areas that we’ll be focusing on here:

  1. Learning: The visual design of your course site impacts student learning at all stages, including motivation, processing, and review.
  2. Behavioral Nudges: The visual design of your course site can nudge your students toward certain behaviors that are beneficial to their learning.

The Effects of Visual Design on Learning

From the first moment a student opens your course site to the late-night hours spent studying for an exam, the visual design of your course site and course content impacts student learning in a myriad of ways.

Motivation

Motivated students are more likely to persist through the ups and downs of learning, making them more likely to have better outcomes. For example, one recent study found that 72% of statistics students’ difference in achievement was attributable to motivation Links to an external site..

Visual design plays an important role in learning motivation. A well-designed page that is easy to read and navigate can boost initial motivation to work through the content. Even more, visual design helps reduce fatigue, helping students stay motivated. As David & Glore (2010) Links to an external site. state, “Participants in studies ... reported that the aesthetics of a course, particularly the layout, the use of graphics, and the ease of use, were important in motivating them to engage and persist in web-based learning.”

Further Reading

David & Glore’s 2010 article, “The Impact of Design and Aesthetics on Usability, Credibility, and Learning in an Online Environment,” Links to an external site. provides a comprehensive examination of the question of how much aesthetics and design matter to learning and online education.

View the Full Text

Consider, for example, a PDF reading of an academic article. If the article is a low-quality scan from a book which doesn’t contain section headers or other designs to break up the content, then reading fatigue is likely to be quite common. Many students may simply quit reading, not because the article is uninteresting or bad, but because they become tired working through difficult-to-read walls of text. Compare that PDF to a high-quality PDF of an article from a digital journal, which includes images, section headings, and lists to divide the content and increase comprehension. Students are less likely to experience reading fatigue, and thus less likely to abandon the activity altogether.

Processing

Visuals also have a profound impact on processing and comprehending information. In particular, visual design elements such as section headings, lists, and tables all help learners make connections and create mental maps for concepts and information.

Consider, for example, the humble bulleted list. Lists can help with reading fatigue (see section above), but they also help visually separate items so that our brains can process them individually and reinforce the fact that they are both connected and separate. For example, compare this sentence to its bulleted list form. “Edible mushroom varieties include button, crimini, shiitake, maitake, oyster, enoki, and black trumpet.”

Edible mushroom varieties include:

  • Button
  • Crimini
  • Shiitake
  • Maitake
  • Oyster
  • Enoki
  • Black trumpet

By giving each mushroom variety its own line, the bulleted list helps learners identify and process each variety separately, as well as to make the connection that these are all related by the fact that they are edible mushrooms.

Other visual design elements – including captions, section headings, and tables – serve a similar purpose, organizing information and allowing for better processing and comprehension.

Review

No matter how you view learning, you almost certainly agree that no one learns something new in “one go” without ever reviewing. Visual design can make the review process immensely easier and quicker. This also ties back to motivation, as a smoother review process is more likely to motivate a student to spend the time and effort reviewing.

Visual design elements help learners review in two primary ways:

  1. Locate specific information. Returning to the mushroom example above, if a student is reviewing (such as for a quiz), then the list helps them quickly and easily locate the relevant information. Similarly, section headings can help a student pinpoint where a concept was discussed in the text.
  2. Review connections and overall structure. Consider this page. If you were reviewing this page for the concepts discussed on it, the section headings help you identify those concepts and make the connections between them much more quickly than you would be able to without the headings.

How to Use Visual to Nudge Students

We’ve discussed several important ways that visual design elements impact learning. Visual design has a more subtle effect on learning, though, in the form of behavioral nudges.

Nudge theory Links to an external site. is the idea that changes (often subtle in nature) to the context around an activity can change people’s behavior, “nudging” them toward a more desirable decision. For example, personalization of emails is a common form of a behavioral nudge. One study from the Behavioral Insights Team Links to an external site. (a UK group also known as “The Nudge Unit”) found that personalizing (using “Dear David” instead of “Dear colleagues”) a company-wide email asking for charitable donations increased giving from 5% to 12%.

What does this mean for you as a teacher? You almost certainly know that certain behaviors are more likely to lead to student success. For example, you may know that students who make use of the Writing Center are more likely to produce better essays in your course.

The written word is an important tool to help nudge students’ behavior in this regard. For example, you could encourage use of the Writing Center by telling students about what it is, why it’s so valuable to use it, and how they could use it to improve their papers.

Visual design works in concert with the written word to nudge students toward particular behaviors. For instance, a large button to “Schedule an Appointment with the Writing Center” is more likely to be clicked than a normal in-text link. Similarly, a well-designed and organized layout of the Writing Center’s hours will make it easier for a student to identify how they might fit it into their schedule. Visual design can also help create a more positive impression of the Writing Center, helping students view it as a welcoming place.

Other considerations for nudges include:

  • Visually reminding students of important dates or due dates
  • Highlighting important tips or pitfalls for students to avoid
  • Encouraging students to follow links to additional resources through buttons or lists
  • Embedding a video on the page rather than through a link to encourage watching the video