Video 3: Maximizing Course Usability
In this video, we will discuss using course menus, colors and images in a way that will optimize overall course usability.
The course menu is the blue menu on the lefthand side of your course. Students use this menu to navigate to various parts of the course, and it also may contain links to websites outside of the course. (Just a reminder: students cannot see the grey “control panel” menu below the blue course menu.) Instructors and course designers can place whatever they wish on this menu, making it an invaluable tool in your usability tool box, but beware of making it too long! A too-long course menu will require students to scroll down and down and down, scanning dozens of menu items to find what they are looking for.
To add a link to your course menu, click the grey plus sign at the top left of the menu and select the type of link you’d like to add. A course link creates a link to a content area of your course that already exists. This allows quick access to your content folders. A tool link links students to a particular course tool, such as Wikis, Discussion Boards or Journals. A web link can be used to put a link to an outside website into your course menu. Dividers and Subeaders should be used to organize, divide, and label different areas in your course menu. When you add something new to your course menu, it will appear at the bottom, and can be dragged-and-dropped into appropriate locations. Organize your menu the same way you organize your course, into smaller, intuitive categories and chunks.
If you need to hide a menu item from your students, click the item’s menu and select “Hide Link.” This icon of the square with the line through it indicates that this item is hidden from students. If you wish to delete an item from your menu, select “Delete.”
Build your course structure first, and then using the Course menu judiciously to create links to areas of your course that your students will need to access regularly.
Consider, rather than putting links to every content area into your course menu, creating a “To Do This Week” heading in your course menu and linking the content that is relevant to what your students are doing right now. If you’ve used predictable design and good organization in your course, your students will know where to find older or not-currently-relevant content should they need to.
Your course menu is a valuable tool for usability, allowing easy access to relevant course areas. When you create a new menu item, give it a descriptive name and drag it up to where you’d like it to be displayed. Use subheaders and dividers to organize all of your menu items and keep menu clutter to a minimum by deleting or hiding old or unnecessary links. So that your course menu fully meets the needs of your course structure, design your course first, then build out your course menu.
Instructors are free to change the theme, background, and color scheme for their course, but should keep in mind the importance of readability. The default Blackboard theme at Pitt offers a good contrast between text and background—either white text on dark blue background, or black text on white. This contrast makes the text easy to read. A light text on a light background or dark text on a dark background might look cool, but it will result in reduced usability. Also beware of backgrounds. Busy backgrounds can also make it very difficult to read text and should be used very, very sparingly, if at all.
Instructors can also add a banner image to their course, which can be a nice way of personalizing and making it immediately clear to your students what course they have entered. You should keep these banners slender. A too-big banner will force students to scroll down in order to get to the announcements, and will take up a lot of screen real-estate. Bear in mind as well that your students may be looking at your course from a mobile device or a very small laptop computer screen. Any large images may not actually fit on the screen of the device they are viewing the course on. Also be mindful of embedding large images in the page. Large images can break the layout, or just take up too much space. Blackboard will do its best to resize the image so that it fits but you can see that some strange things begin to happen once we get it down to the size of, say, a cell phone screen. The course menu gets collapsed and students may not know how to make it appear again. If there is a very large image you’d like your students to have, link to a version of it on the web using a web link, or attach the image as a file rather than embedding it.
Create a course that is welcoming to your students by using the course menu as a guide and roadmap to your content. Use readable, high-contrast text and avoiding eye-popping backgrounds and colors. And using small images and slender banners. Link to or attach anything larger.