eLearning infographics can be a great asset to any online or digital education program.
Infographics can help learners digest and understand information easily. Infographics can also engage students in their learning topics.
What are the challenges of eLearning?
eLearning can present many challenges. Making sure that students stay motivated and engaged can be difficult. Without face to face interaction it can also be difficult to tell if a student has fully understood a topic.
Another challenge of eLearning is communicating difficult ideas and concepts succinctly. This is where infographics can help.
Why should I use infographics in my eLearning
Using infographics in your eLearning is a great way to ensure students stay engaged, and thoroughly understand the lessons. When students are given a task that seems challenging, they often lose the motivation to try. Especially digitally, communicating difficult concepts and ideas can be challenging.
By using infographics in your eLearning, you can present complex information enhanced with charts, symbols, lists, images, and other visual triggers. These are particularly important for visual learners.
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How can I make infographics work for eLearning courses?
Infographics can benefit eLearning in many different ways:
- Use eLearning infographics to engage learners
- Make use of infographics in the digital classroom to simplify difficult concepts
- Visualize data with an eLearning infographic
- Map your eLearning projects and timescales with a timeline infographic
- Summarize information easily with an eLearning infographic
- Get students involved in hands on learning with infographics
- Bring webinars and recorded lessons to life with an infographic
Related: Venngage for Training and Development Teams
1. Use eLearning infographics to engage learners
Our senses would be entirely overloaded if our brain took in every single piece of information we passed, and for our own sanity we block out a lot of information. That’s why eLearning infographics can be a great choice.
When faced with a thick textbook, or page after page of web content, we can filter out some of what we’re trying to learn, as shown in the infographic below.
Source
When we focus on a massive pile of content, our brains automatically want to skip to the important stuff, and we’re also more attracted to any segments with bright colors.
If you’re worried that there is too much content for students to absorb, or that they may not grasp the essential elements of a subject, using an infographic will help draw their eyes to the data.
Learning infographics will also help students remember the information, which will hopefully motivate them to continue with their learning. Visuals can be a highly effective way of appealing to different learning styles.
Related: Learning and Development 101: How to Get Started [With Visual Tips and Templates]
Writing down lists and numbers won’t help students half as much as visuals will.
In this eLearning infographic the 5 core elements of a story have been collected grouped together in a visually interesting way. Icons have been chosen to represent each element of a story. Fun space themed icons have also been used to help engage learners.
Sharing an infographic like this with students will have a much greater impact than just presenting a five point list.
2. Make use of learning infographics in the digital classroom to simplify difficult concepts
Certain subjects will always be unappealing to certain people. Not everybody feels comfortable around numbers or theory. Learners may be discouraged from continuing with their eLearning courses, as they could feel nervous, or even worry that they’re not smart enough.
Related: How to Create a Successful Employee Training and Development Program Using Visuals
This is a fact that is recognized by all kinds of businesses that offer types of eLearning. These companies can use eLearning methods like articles, forums, and answering questions, they use eLearning as a way to advise their clients, to educate their clients. Infographics are a great type of content for doing this.
Students embarking on eLearning will gain a much better grasp of the subject when it’s presented in understandable terms with clear diagrams and visuals to guide their understanding.
When a concept involves many stages a flow chart is a great way to visually break down each stage.
3. Visualize data with an eLearning infographic
Statistics can be hard to understand in written form. In eLearning, visual learners in particular can find digesting this information difficult.
Trying to make comparisons while keeping track of numbers, upward and downward trends can be difficult, and can lead to an inaccurate impression of the data you’re given.
Infographics can be used to show statistics and make comparisons. A visual aid is not only quickly understood, but can also enable a better analysis of the results; any trends and outliers.
You can use charts and graphs to quickly compare data:
Statistical infographics can also be used to help visualize the scale of a problem. In the infographic below many different pieces of data are used to create a coherent overview of child labor:
You can also use a SWOT analysis in education to encourage your learners to visualize strengths and weaknesses. For more information on how to successfully conduct a SWOT analysis check out this SWOT guide blog post.
4. Map your eLearning projects and timescales with a timeline infographic
Dates or stages in a process can be highly confusing to a lot of learners. They may accidentally skip steps or stages, or even get confused by the order of things. Luckily, infographics are great for eLearning.
Whether you need to create a timeline, a step-by-step process, or a model to show various stages of organization, infographics present the information in a clear and logical way. By using color and symbols together, the process is significantly easier to remember, and apply later on in life or in tests.
5. Summarize information easily with an eLearning infographic
Infographics are effective tools for summarizing information.
You can use an eLearning infographic to tie everything together nicely, to make links between the different things you’ve studied, and to consolidate information.
A summary of several different strands of complex information can all be put together, providing a holistic view of all the information your lessons have covered. Infographics also great for contextualizing all of the individual points within a bigger picture.
If you are looking to develop a comprehensive understanding of a topic, then you may decide against giving them infographics that summarize information during the body of the lesson. Instead you could use infographics to create prompts or worksheets that students can use to test their knowledge.
An eLearning mind map can be a great way to summarize the key concepts of a topic without providing too much information. One mind map educational example is this brief summary of the key components of being a successful business owner. In mind map learning, the titles work well as memory prompts, and the icons help learns visualize the topics.
6. Get students involved in hands on learning with infographics
Another reason you should be using infographics in your eLearning is that infographics are easy to make. Asking learners to create an infographic to summarize what they have learnt, or to share their own personal research is a great way to make eLearning more interactive.
But if you’re not a graphic designer, then it may seem daunting to try and come up with your own designs.
Fortunately, as infographics become increasingly popular, there are plenty of awesome online guides for how to create, promote, and repurpose your infographics. And plenty of sites offer templates to give you a helpful start.
Venngage even made a video talking you through how to create an infographic in 5 steps. We know that learners and teachers alike find this video really helpful!
Check out all of our infographic templates:
7. Bring webinars and recorded lessons to life with an infographic
Webinars and recorded lessons can be a huge part of eLearning. Avoid falling into the trap of boring presentations by including infographics in your eLearning slides.
Want to dive deeper into the world of webinars? The Venngage blog has an in-depth guide on, “What is a webinar and how do they work?“
Infographics are a great addition to educational presentations. Using an eLearning infographic in your educational webinars can help learners understand the information being presented. Infographics also help prevent you from just “reading the slides”.
Now it’s your turn!
Hopefully by now you’ve been convinced that not only are infographics pretty much essential to improving all aspects of eLearning, but are actually incredibly easy to make.
You’re probably just brimming with ideas what your first infographics will look like and how awesome your new resources will look! Do the research and check grammar and spelling before posting it, as your infographic will lose credibility if it seems flawed. Once you’re satisfied you know what you’ll be saying, you can release your creative side and enhance eLearning through the use of infographics.