Visual content	Issues for visual content	Image production	Image acquisition	Image manipulation	Image creation

Issues for visual content in educational websites

Visual content in websites may enhance or degrade the students' learning experience. It may be essential or gratuitous, efficient or bulky and distracting, useful and useable in many contexts, or ineffective beyond a single use.

These issues should be considered while designing the visual content for your website or course:

• Is the student’s learning experience improved by the inclusion of this content?
  Making the material more attractive, more varied and more interactive can improve learning performance. Gratuitous and distracting visual elements may detract from learning performance.
• Is the visual content essential for supporting, illustrating or otherwise enhancing the educational material?
  Requiring the download of unnecessary graphics or other media may reduce the efficiency of the website. Try to ensure the efficiency of visual elements by using the most appropriate format (eg, a Flash animation may be more efficient than a GIF animation)
• Consider the size and amount of images, animations and other media.
  Students may be reliant on dial-up Internet connections that make downloading of large chunks of visual material impractical. If such material is essential, you could consider supplying it on a ‘hard copy’ for alternative access, eg providing a printed copy, CD-ROM or videotape.
• Consider image copyright issues
  Using images acquired from elsewhere will involve applying for clearance or license to use the material.
• Consider the accessibility of visual elements
  Users browsing without access to graphics and other visual media need alternative ways of accessing the information – a text description of photos, graphics and animation, a data version of graphs and charts, a transcript of video.
• Consider the re-useability of visual elements
  they are time-consuming and can be expensive to produce, and if they can be created to be more ‘generic’ may be able to be used in the context of other courses, or even shared with other teachers in a resource archive.
• Resources available for producing such media may be a limitation
  your preliminary course/site analysis will have identified resource limitations, make sure these are considered when planning for your visual content production.
• Basic image production is something that you may be able to do yourself — it will still take time.
• Advanced graphics production is something you may prefer to hand over to professional designers — eg template design, visual identity design or complex drawing and retouching jobs. This will take time and (probably) money.
• Interactive and animated graphics (eg Flash, Shockwave) or web applications (complex interactivity requiring server-based programming) will probably need to be created by professional designers and programmers, and will take substantial time and money.

Summary

Among the issues to consider while designing your visual content are:

• the learning experience of the student
• the relevance and efficiency of visual material, including re-useability
• copyright considerations
• resources available.