Beyond “eye-candy”: improving learning with animations

The use of animations is becoming increasingly widespread in electronic learning materials. Authoring animations is now relatively straightforward, even for university teachers without advanced computing skills. Many lecturers want to know how to convert the traditional static pictures and diagrams in textbooks into instructionally effective animated presentations. This presentation will show how this can be done by demonstrating animations that have been specifically designed to make learning easier by applying simple but powerful principles of visual learning. These principles are derived from human information processing research and are applicable to many different types of instructional content. When students are given static pictures that are meant to represent dynamic subject matter, they are faced with the cognitive burden of having to “mentally animate” the content. However, well-designed animations can eliminate this burden so that learner thinking processes are freed up and can be devoted to educationally worthwhile activity such as the development of understanding. The animations to be demonstrated were developed using a step-by-step design strategy that will be described in this presentation. Practical approaches for analysing the instructional content to facilitate the design of effective animations from static pictures will be explained and illustrated with a number of animated examples.