For this month’s podcast recommendation, we suggest an episode entitled Creating Digitally Accessible and Visually Appealing Course Materials from the Lecture Breakers podcast. This podcast is hosted by Barbi Honeycutt. She is a teaching and learning consultant, instructional coach, author, and speaker. From the Lecture Breakers podcast website, “The Lecture Breakers podcast is the place where educators share innovative teaching strategies to help you break up your lecture, energize your classroom, increase student engagement, and improve learning.”
The episode we suggest for this month is a conversation between Barbi and Dr. Dawn DiPeri, author of the book Graphic Design for Course Creators. They discuss ideas and strategies to create courses that are visually appealing while still being accessible.
In the episode, Dawn shares tips for improving the visuals in courses. She emphasizes considering the purpose of visuals that are included. An example of thinking about the purpose of visuals that was discussed in the episode was about owls. If you are presenting about owls, you might want to include a picture of an owl. This is a helpful visual, but to make the visual even more impactful and facilitate learning, she suggests showing a map of the owl’s range/territory. In this way, the visual is adding to the learning experience rather than just showing the students something they might already have a concept of or already have an understanding of. She also emphasizes being careful in choices of fonts and colors as these can at times limit the student experience due to accessibility issues. To dive into more of Dawn’s tips check out the podcast on the website.
Would you like to discuss the media or visuals in your course? Schedule a consultation with one of our multimedia specialists.
