online course graphics
We had the pleasure of working with a team at Boston College School of Education on graphics for the online course, “Preparing the Whole Person for Global Citizenship.” They wanted the students to have a clear and all-encompassing picture to help orient them as they go through the course online. When they are learning about a specific concept, they can see where it falls in the big picture, and how it relates to the other concepts.
Below is more about our design process.
Final overarching graphic for the course
Concept glossary that includes which module the concept is covered.
Step 1: Organize
We met with the team at Boston College to go over their draft course description and discuss the concepts they wanted to communicate to their students. Since it was a new course, they hadn’t fully worked out the details of what would be taught. In the course description there were many different ways that concepts were identified, and the connections and relationships between them weren’t totally clear.
Often we find that we can help facilitate a conversation between team members to get them on the same page and clarify their messages. We sketch initial visualizations that express how we interpret their content. They give us feedback on our interpretation, and the graphics become a tool to facilitate internal conversations. This process is a valuable service to our clients because it helps them understand their own content more clearly.
Here is an examples of a sketch that helped in this process.
Portion of the initial organizing sketch for the course graphic. We were looking for main themes throughout the course description, where they fell throughout the course modules, and what the hierarchy of concepts was.
Step 2: Visualize
Once we had met with the BC team and had a clear idea of the course concepts, we decided to center the graphic on the “whole person”. This final visualization gives the most weight to the “whole person” and their relationship to “global challenges”. The lenses “whole person development” and “realizing privilege” are sub-points that surround the central point, and they are equal to each other in importance.
Step 3: Stylize
The stylize step was to refining and polishing the design. We also set it up so that each course module could be highlighted within the overarching graphic. When a student is on the webpage for a particular module, that module is highlighted on the graphic. We also provided them with the original assets to be animated in their course videos.
See below for a screenshot for how it appears in Canvas (their online course web platform) and a video cycling through the different module graphics.
Course overview
Graphic for Module 3
