Why are colors important? We make use of colors regularly in online learning courses, but what are the impact of colors and the meaning they put into words? Do you think colors improve and drive quick learning? Yes, they do. Colors manipulate the mood, energy level, and engagement of learners. Therefore, the choice of color is considered a significant element of successful design. The colors used in learning design systems help to set the tone of a course. Warmer colors will modify learners differently than cooler colors. Furthermore, colors are used to convey information.
Color is an aspect of learner understanding. The best color selection will help to minimize the amount of efforts learners spend to access and recognize the content. Overall color schemes can reduce or increase the cognitive load that affects the success of learning programs.
Before making a color choice in elearning, let us understand the basic concept of color and how to use it in online courses.
Bright Colors
Bright colors are bold and vibrant (i.e., sunshine yellow and fire engine red). You should use these colors sparingly because these fun colors produce a large impact on designs. You can use these colors to gain interest or highlight some main points.
Jewel Tones
These are deep lush color shades like ruby red and emerald green that look like the tones of valuable and semiprecious gems. The colors are easier on the eyes than the bright colors. As such, you can use them more liberally throughout your design.
Earth Tones
Colors like greys, dark greens, browns and tans are considered earth tones. You must use a good contrast of colors to avoid an ordinary look and experience.
How do colors affect learners?
The visual plan of a learning design system plays a vital role, as does the content itself. Therefore, instructional designers need to think about the potential emotional relations of color and color combinations while designing an elearning color palette. The temperature of color describes how learners react to their design.
However, the brightness and saturation of colors can have a positive effect on learner emotions.
If you are an eLearning designer, you should consider using agile instructional design for your learning initiatives. Unlike the traditional methods of course creation, the agile method offers some significant benefits that will ensure that your results are outstanding yet also efficient. Below, we look at some of the top benefits of the agile design method.
Highly Interactive
Agile instructional design is heavily focused on the learners and how they will interact with the course material. At every step of course development, the needs of the learner and the manner in which they will participate and engage with the course will be taken into consideration. As a result, course developers are able to develop training materials in exactly the way a learner would find it easy to understand. This is one of the reasons why many instructional designers are switching over to agile design. After all, if you can produce high-quality, engaging content using agile, why bother wasting time on other, inefficient instructional design methods?
Rapidly Produce Content
A big challenge faced by most course developers is the time required for developing training material. This is mostly because developers usually tend to focus on creating the entire content of the course all at once. Obviously, this is normally a massive undertaking fraught with so many issues that the project will end up taking a lot of time. But with agile design processes, designers can now develop courses faster, using less time and fewer resources. This is because agile methods look at the course development process as consisting of little chunks of content that need to be developed sequentially. Only when one section is finished can the development team move on to the next section. This process of course development ensures that the training material is created within a short period of time.
Better Collaboration
A huge benefit of the agile design process is that it facilitates easier collaboration among multiple individuals. Everyone involved in the course, right from the organization that invested in its development to the actual learners, can collaborate with each other and offer suggestions to improve the course. As a course developer, this gives you the chance to hear the feedback and understand which aspect of the course needs to be developed and what new, potential features should be implemented. This can go a long way in helping you fine-tune your next course.
No Last Moment Revisions Necessary
In the traditional course development scenario, developers often tend to make numerous changes and revisions to the content. This mostly happens because the course is developed all at once, and then largely revised later on at the end of development. As a consequence, designers often need to correct a lot of errors to ensure that the training material complies with expectations. However, since agile development involves completing the course in portions, all errors and changes are addressed along the way. As such, last-minute, large-scale revisions become unnecessary.