Images can be effective for explaining concepts that cannot be described adequately in words alone (Ainsworth & Loizou, 2003). The terms “image,” “picture,” and “graphic” in this post refer to static visual representations that include, but are not limited to, drawings, photographs, microscope images, and screenshots. Choosing images to include in the course material is not trivial because having more pictures does not always mean better learning.
When incorporating an image into educational material, the first step is to evaluate whether the image is relevant to the learning objectives and has non-redundant information. Having decided to use an image, there are additional details to think about to improve communication through the image. The self-explanatory aspect of each image is especially important in Open Learning because students navigate the educational materials on their own, with minimal guidance from an instructor to interpret each image.
Incorporating drawing as a learning activity to accompany textual information can be helpful for meeting learning outcomes compared to no drawing (Leutner & Schmeck, 2021). According to the drawing principle, the exercise of drawing allows students to engage in generative processing (Leutner & Schmeck, 2021) of text by establishing complex spatial relationships (Fiorella & Mayer, 2021).
Numerical data are commonly presented as tables or graphs (Ainsworth, 2021). Tables have the additional advantage of including non-numerical data, as exemplified in Table 1. A typical reason to display numerical data on a table is so that students can extract these values to perform calculations. Moreover, interactive tables on electronic platforms allow the viewer to sort the table entries in ascending or descending order according to the data in a column of choice. The sorted dataset ranks the entries and facilitates comparisons.
According to the mapping principle, people learn deeply when they translate complex word-based information into a combined word- and visuospatial format (Adesope et al., 2021; Fiorella & Mayer, 2021). The collaborative mapping principle goes further to suggest that concept mapping can be a collaborative activity with other learners (Adesope et al., 2021).