Embedding visual communication principles in Instructional Design phase of Learning Object (LO) creation process

The traditional LO creation process involves a number of specialized personnel such as the subject-matter expert, instructional design expert, visual communication expert, graphic designers and animators. While each team member brings in his or her own expertise into the process, the creation of high quality, usable LOs relies on frequent face-to-face interaction between the team members. Among these interactions, the ones involving visual elements is critical in the creation of highly usable LOs. However, the dependency on face-toface communication limits the number of LOs that be created in a given time. In this paper, we propose an alternate, simplified, LO creation process in which the visual communication (VC) expert and the graphic designers need not be present, even though their expertise in present in the process. We capture VC expertise, and embed them into a template that is used by instructional designers (who are not VC experts). We describe the VC principles used, and how we operationalized them into prompts for the instructional designer. We tested the instructional design documents (IDDs) produced via this process by having animators measure their usability on a standardized scale. We found that animators reported high usability for the IDD which contain visual communication principles embedded within.