Teaching by Design Visual Design for Multimedia Education

In order to have a truly effective educational multimedia application, the visual design has to be as pedagogically sound as the course itself. No matter how profound the content is, if the visual design does not take into account how students learn, then the course will not teach. In this paper, we look at what became the foundation of knowledge and theory for the digital design and planning of the educational multimedia course “B2E Systems”. We discuss a collection of current research, theories and strategies for effective visual design of multimedia learning applications, that came together to mould the development of the B2E course, from concept to production. B2E is a Multimedia CD-ROM developed at the University of Sydney in which visual communication aspects were given specific focus during its development. In the last section we discuss the teaching and learning rationale behind some of the key design decisions made during the development of the course.