NATALIE GREEN

Aesthetic and Usability Standards for Online Learning Environments

Our team works cross-functionally to design and develop interactive online asynchronous courses, which we also refer to as “distance education” or “DE” courses. This work leverages the expertise of instructional designers and web and multimedia developers who work collaboratively using a production model. During my years with this team, I have led multiple initiatives to develop aesthetic and quality standards for online learning environments. For a team with diverse and overlapping skill sets to be effective and efficient, it is vital to develop a common language and practice. Although our collective work supports continuous improvement, we need to be intentional about practices and standards to ensure that we are consistent in supporting faculty in creating engaging learning experiences through the lenses of pedagogy and learning theory, aesthetics, usability, and technology.

Early in my career as an instructional designer, I leveraged my background and expertise in art and design to provide leadership in the development of a style guide that would inform our visual design and navigation, focusing on elements such as font, colour, graphics, organization, page layout, and naming conventions. Later, as I moved into management, the opportunity arose to revisit this work and lead the team to develop new conventions, not only at the course level but also across the online learning environment for our DE courses, to ensure that learners have a consistent, effective, and enjoyable experience within the learning management system (LMS). This work included developing a broader set of aesthetic, instructional design, and web quality standards to fit a new visual experience driven by the LMS vendor. The result was a learning environment prototype, which included a simple and clean aesthetic and intuitive and streamlined navigation.

The home or landing page of a course website is the first impression of the learning experience, so it is vital that the visual aesthetics encourage the learner to continue through the site. Our prototype included a course home page that values white space and includes bold graphical elements and a grid-like structure that organizes a variety of key information. We also streamlined the organizational and navigational features, creating a consistent and uncluttered appearance for the navigation bar and course contents, supporting consistency across offerings, and lessening the cognitive load of students so that they can focus on learning instead of finding materials.

In practice, I have seen how the aesthetics, navigation, and usability of the learning environment set the stage for the design of effective learning experiences. This approach gives one the ability to onboard faculty members much more quickly and ensure that the output meets a high standard, reducing the burden to refine presentation and aesthetics for those developing courses. Since the aesthetic standards and visual appearance of learning environments affect how students experience and interact within courses, these are not just pretty courses but high-quality environments in which both faculty members and students can focus on the discipline and enjoy teaching and learning.

MEGAN PICKARD

Styling Learning Environments through Democratic Leadership

Fifteen months after I started working at the University of Guelph, I became part of a research team tasked with assessing a new software upgrade to the institution’s LMS. During this time, I was an online learning quality assurance specialist, and my role on the team involved researching and writing a new style guide that would establish the aesthetic design of the upgraded system and enhance the overall usability and quality of our online courses. Like its predecessor, the new style guide included information on proper navigation, organization of content, accessibility best practices, and page layout examples, as well as instructions on how to use fonts, icons, and colour to ensure a consistent look and feel for all DE courses at the institution.

My biggest challenge in creating this new style guide was getting all potential users on board. As a young woman new to the field of instructional design, I was not in an official leadership position. Many of my colleagues were men and had worked in the department for several years. In early initiatives to implement aesthetic and quality assurance standards, I experienced significant pushback from colleagues because they disagreed with certain aspects of the standards, even though these standards were evidence-based. This disagreement resulted in my colleagues not following the standards, causing inconsistencies in the navigation, organization, and visual design of our course websites. To avoid past experiences, I used a democratic leadership approach to create the new style guide, and I met with my colleagues and listened to their opinions and suggestions.

In their recent meta-analyses of gender differences in leadership behaviour, Shen and Joseph (2021) found that women are more likely to use a democratic leadership style. In writing the new style guide, using an approach that involved my colleagues in the decision-making process proved to be an effective strategy. Once the system upgrade was in place, my colleagues used the new style guide and started to provide me with unsolicited but welcomed feedback on what was working for them and what was not. It became clear that listening to their feedback and involving them in the development process helped them to view the new style guide as a positive experience rather than an authoritative encroachment on their professional agency.

VICTORIA KENNEDY

Putting It in Practice: Course-Level Design Aesthetics

The first time that a course author submits draft content for a new distance education course, it is typically either a text document containing a written lecture or a slide deck from the in-person version of the course. “You’re just going to upload this to the course website, right?” the course author sometimes asks or refers to the work that I will do as “formatting” the content. But my work goes beyond formatting; it is a type of instructional leadership by which I guide both how the course is designed and how it is studied.

The strategies that instructional designers use to deploy colours, images, layout elements, icons, and other aesthetic tools are intended to increase the likelihood that students will not just read but also understand, analyze, reflect on, and synthesize the content. Aesthetics can create a certain pace and insert pauses, entice learners to complete activities, or invite them to read content deeply that they might otherwise skim. Indeed, the aesthetic choices that online instructional designers make mirror the mechanisms through which people learn: they create repetitions, patterns, and contrasts.

Consider how design aesthetics in Examples 3.1 and 3.2 change how you read and respond to the same content.

In Example 3.2, aesthetic elements such as the activity panel, the shading, the heading (with its implied repetition of a previously established pattern of activities), and the icon all work to prompt a pause in reading in order to think about the content more deeply.

Aesthetics that are pleasing and functional in online courses are crucial to convincing the learner to engage fully in the learning process.

SANDY HUGHES

Aesthetic Links at a Program Level

Over the past few years, I was involved in the complete redesign of the horticulture diploma, a program consisting of approximately 20 courses. The study of horticulture is both a science and an art. In fact, horticulture is often defined as the art or practice of garden cultivation and management. The study of this field involves a strong aesthetic component. When designing the online horticulture program, there was a need not only to design the course website aesthetics in a functional way but also to inspire students in the visual aspects of the subject matter.

With the program content in mind, I led the aesthetic development of the program, creating a malleable template and an approach for the courses. These courses include many images (how could this not be the case when discussing plants, flowers, and landscapes?), but consistent layouts kept the sites from feeling cluttered and presented images in thoughtful and effective ways. We also used icons and specific colours as identifiers for recurring types of activities to establish behavioural learning patterns. The consistency of these elements across courses within the program gave students a familiar, welcoming feeling with every course that they took.

Enrolments and student evaluations suggest that these efforts were a considerable success. Students loved the new look (and, of course, refreshed content), and enrolment nearly doubled the first year after relaunching and increased a further 30% the following year (Open Learning and Educational Support, 2021, “Continuing Education” section, and 2022, “Continuing Education” section). The aesthetics of the program helped to bring students “into” the world of horticulture as they learned. Aesthetics speak to more than just using a particular font or colour or making a course “look nice.” Aesthetics comprise an active component of how students engage with the content and (hopefully) the transformative learning experience that they expect.

CYNTHIA EDEN

Maintaining Intentional Design: The Balancing Act of Course Maintenance

My role as an online learning quality assurance specialist involves reviewing and updating existing online courses with instructors who might or might not have been the course authors in the initial course development processes. It requires an ability to work with limited time and resources while balancing the need for existing quality standards to be upheld, the evolving needs of learners, and the need for course instructors to have agency.

The beauty and tension are that refining an existing course requires an understanding of how aesthetics contribute to quality course designs and quality learning experiences. As Parrish (2010, p. 204) outlines, “just as artworks can be designed to draw in readers or viewers to puzzle out a plot or to sympathize with characters, … or to have a vicarious somatic experience in watching a dance, learning experiences can be designed aesthetically to stimulate similar forms of engagement.”

What I have found most helpful in working with course instructors to update existing courses is using the Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric Standards, Sixth Edition (Quality Matters, 2020), as an educational resource to begin a conversation on aesthetics and the quality standards that they serve. A common request from instructors is to update the images in courses that they have inherited. I often approach these conversations by creating spaces in which to discuss how image selection sets the stage for deeper learner engagement, deeper student learning, and learning-centred design. More specifically, we discuss how an image visually scaffolds core concepts, offers learners a space in which to engage with course content more deeply, and becomes the primary focus. From there, conversations on accessibility emerge. Part of the leadership that I provide is to guide the merging of aesthetics and accessibility standards, and I have found that the most effective approach is to begin by asking questions. Doing so allows me to understand better the instructor’s aims and the context in which students will be able to understand and access the requested media. Although these conversation cycles take time, they result in a process of course revision that naturally situates aesthetics within quality standards for course design.