Instructional Materials Development

Visual aids are recommended for use in virtually any kinds of college or university presentation.

Professors use visual presentations to increase students’ understanding of the topic and chosen theme.

Visual presentations are necessary to foster student’s learning and understanding of events, sequences and relationships. These visuals allow students to make abstract events and events distant in time more real for students. The following essay will speak about the importance of visuals in modern day education. I will comment on the selected visual and express my educated opinion on the importance of visuals.

Now let’s analyze the goals of visual communication as depicted below:

• Ensuring legibility. Visual communication does not guarantee that the visual aids are legible. The writer should use little visuals to assure their readability. The use of proper color palette, necessary font size and images is what can assure that the visual communication is legible. The visual used for writing this essay certainly was legible as the use of colors and fonts were properly selected.
• Reducing the effort required to interpret the message. A picture is worth a thousand words, so typically a visual aid used in our example quickly provided the reader with the necessary information to interpret the message. The visuals should have a legend to make the visuals even easier to understand. The message needs to be legible to reduce the effort required to interpret the message. The visual should be relevant to the topic discussed. The visual aid used for writing this essay certainly reduced the efforts required to interpret the message as it is structure and limited amount of words and graphics make the visual useful.
• Increasing the viewer's active engagement with the message can be achieved only through the use of legend, bright colors and vivid statements. Once again, the proper use of colors, fonts, images and relevant size of those is what can make the visual involving for the viewer. Only the relevant visual could engage the viewer. The visual used to write this essay engage the reader’s and viewer’s active engagement. Still, I believe that the use of different colors such as red and yellow would certainly make the active engagement even greater.
• Focusing attention on the most important parts of the message can be achieved with the use of colors and bold lines. Indeed, the proper format of the visual is what can make it readable, legible, and attractive for the viewers. Still, it is necessary to make the visual aesthetically pleasing and eye-catching. Sometimes it might be advisable not to use colors at all or use many colors at once to achieve that perfect balance that effectively can illustrate and uphold the idea.

I had discovered that while the first slide of the example visual aid clearly provided the information about the pupation of 3 chosen American states, the second and third slides were less easy to understand, memorize and interpret. The primary reason for the ineffectiveness of slides #2 and #3 to reach the reader on a deep level is because of the lack of legend on a comparison chart and pie diagram. Using percentages and correct figures to complement the visuals allows students to benefit from these visuals the most.

In conclusion, I would like to note that the visuals are used by professors and students to illustrate the points related to calculations, statistics and numeric data. These visuals allow one to get a better understanding of the facts and things described in the presentation or text. To make presentations useful the author needs to pay attention to the overall pattern, arrangement, verbal elements and appeal.