Web Writing for Online Courses
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I gave this talk for College of Veterinary Medicine in January 2018 and have customized it for other audiences as well.
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Web Writing for Online Courses
- 1. Web writing for online courses Ann Fandrey Twitter: @annfandrey fandrey@umn.edu
- 3. 10 reasons you’ll probably read this whole article
- 5. Compare to a page in Canvas
- 7. What can we do?!
- 8. How it looks Where the content lives What it says What it says + how it looks Web writing requires a holistic set of decisions Agenda 5 min 15 min 10 min 15 min
- 10. ๏ Techniques are presented in yellow bars
- 12. Is screen reading (still) bad?Paper may still be better for close reading Larson, Kevin. The Technology of Text, 2007.
- 13. Annotate Acrobat Note-taking Text Edit Aggregate NoodleTools File Mendeley Personal scholarly workflow
- 14. Course content should be downloadable and allow the student to choose their preferred format for study.
- 15. What it says Web writing requires a holistic set of decisions
- 16. All web reading is goal-oriented activity
- 17. Blah blah text
- 18. Blah blah text
- 20. ๏ Learn to recognize blah blah text
- 23. hemingwayapp.com
- 26. Inverted pyramid
- 27. Above the fold ↑ Below the fold ↓ Most important thing 2nd most 3rd most
- 29. Blah blah images
- 30. Blah blah images
- 31. ๏ Write with augmentative pictures
- 32. Above the fold ↑ Below the fold ↓
- 33. Above the fold ↑ Below the fold ↓
- 34. ๏ Either alt text or a caption for EVERY image captions help everybody!
- 35. Alt text, like captions, should describe the information in the image, not its properties.
- 36. defaults to the image file name (.jpg)
- 37. A diagram that shows relationships among organisms. A branching, treelike diagram in which the endpoints of the branches represent specific species of organisms. It is used to illustrate phylogenetic relationships and show points at which various species have diverged from common ancestral forms. Cladogram showing 3 families of the order Crocodilia: Gavialadae, Crocodylidae, and Alligatoridae.
- 38. Image of a gavial: a large, crocodile-like reptile about 350 pounds and 20 feet long, dark gray in color and an elongated snout about 12 inches long with a large boss at the end of the nose.
- 39. Decoration
- 40. How it looks
- 44. ๏ Format text for scannability
- 45. Lists! Augmentative images Descriptive, entiticing title Headings
- 46. Numerals
- 47. White space is the best tool to focus attention
- 48. Break after every 1-2 sentences (it will feel weird and WRONG!) ๏ Rethink your idea of paragraphs
- 49. Google DocsCanvas Moodle ๏ Format headings using paragraph styles
- 52. ๏ Page templates can enhance learnability Recurring headings
- 53. What it says + how it looks Web writing requires a holistic set of decisions
- 54. ๏ Take care with the first 11 characters
- 55. Find out how to turn in your final assignment Final assignment - due May 15 Final assignment due May 15
- 56. Your first journal entry is due May 1 Journal Entry 1 - due May 1
- 57. Unit 1, Week 1: Traditional Systems of Communication Traditional Systems of Communication (Unit 1, Week 1)
- 58. “Headings are pickup lines.” Hoa Loranger Nielsen Norman Group
- 60. You won’t believe what happens next. What does happen next?! I NEED. TO. KNOW. ๏ Create a question in the learner’s mind
- 61. Wow--new info! What did cause the Plague?! Really?! Oh, gerbils. Okay, interesting!
- 62. How can this be?! ๏ Defy logic or common sense
- 63. Make sure the online title is the same as the filename of the downloaded document!
- 64. Topic style vs. Summary style
- 65. Topic style
- 66. Summary style
- 68. Topic-style syllabus headings Grades Classroom policies Office hours Academic dishonesty policy Contact your instructor Summary-style syllabus headings You will complete a grade contract Please silence your phone during class Attend office hours if you need assistance Do original work Tell me if you need additional assistance
- 69. How to write a hyperlink embedded descriptive starts with a keyword
- 70. Click here for library eReserves readings Click here for library eReserves readings Click here for library eReserves readings eReserves (new window)
- 71. How would you rewrite these hyperlinks?
- 73. How it looks Where the content lives What it says What it says + how it looks Web writing requires a holistic set of decisions What will you take away?
Editor's Notes
- Web writing is a goal-oriented activity where people are driven (and impatient) to find the information they're looking for, but course authors don't write that way, especially academics who are used to explicating details and developing arguments in a certain expected way. Therefore, you must learn some tips and tricks for doing it differently than the way you write for print.
- z.umn.edu/webWritingForOnlineCourses
- This is an optimal screen reading experience https://themission.co/13-things-you-should-avoid-telling-yourself-every-day-da4c03f94fcd
- What do you notice here? https://medium.com/the-mission/13-things-you-should-avoid-telling-yourself-every-day-da4c03f94fcd The web typography, formatting and body copy of this article all contribute to helping you feel like you can achieve reading it.
- Assumptions: You are using a learning management system, rather than your own hosted fancy website You have little or no experience with HTML or CSS This is just stuff you can do if you have plain old access to HTML web pages
- Web writing requires a holistic set of decisions based on how your audience will interact with it. When we talk about how they interact with it, we’re asking questions like how they will interact with it: come back to it often? search it, read it, get tested on it? these decisions can be broken down into 4 categories: where this material will live in the ecology of their academic lives, what it says, and how it's displayed on the page
- When you’re writing for your course website, remember that you’re writing for everybody, not just the person who thinks and processes information the same way you do. This is a golden rule of communication. The tips and techniques in this presentation are meant to help you think INCLUSIVELY. Because you will have someone in your courses who is someone who's perennially behind, English language learner, using assistive technology, busy - and what we all have in common is that we read on the web, and web writing is a goal-oriented activity
- Let’s start with where the content lives. In this talk I make a distinction between course content and administrative information Course content = Journal articles, book chapters, long-form journalism pieces that live on external websites Administrative info = the syllabus, assignment sheets, online web pages that talk about the flow of the course
- Historical discussion: is screen reading still bad? you read faster and remember more on paper than is possible on screen brightness of the visual display, environmental conditions in the room and glare on the screen, compared the angles of people’s faces to the screen versus paper, resolution of typeface on screen versus print, screen flicker, aspect ratio--really all of the physical attributes of both mediums 30 years ago people did read slower on screen, understood less, remembered less, and on top of that they had greater rates of visual fatigue and blurred vision as compared to reading from paper. Interestingly, they were not blinking more often! People blinked the same amount when looking at those old CRT computer monitors as they did when they were reading from paper! screen flicker is barely perceptible anymore with today’s backlit LCD/LED displays, screen resolutions are much crisper, and font technology CLICK has addressed those very tiny pixelated bitmaps that once contributed so much to visual fatigue no difference in comprehension between reading on a mobile device and reading on a laptop screen, which was the comparison condition in this study. In fact, some participants did better reading from a mobile device. The researchers believe this is because they actually slowed down during the reading of the most complex material--so there was a speed-accuracy tradeoff that was explaining their success Most of the studies mentioned in my readings were from the early 2000s, and students were still reportedly printing paper copies of assigned readings, stating they preferred paper because they felt they remembered information better when they read it in print than on screen. Some students also said it was easier to highlight and annotate paper copies. As recently as 2014, students still reported they preferred paper copies when they had to study--these were eTextbook surveys, one of which was an EDUCAUSE survey that included U of M participation. Students’ decision to purchase eTexts was primarily driven by cost, and they would rather have had a print copy of their textbook if the cost was the same. Students also said they liked paper because it helped them focus and not be distracted by activity in other tabs and windows. In general, it seems we can conclude that it’s likely students may still do better at deep, active reading when they read from paper than from digital texts
- Depending what level of students you have, don’t assume that they know how to change the display width of their PDFs, how to annotate, have a good way to capture notes they make in PDFs, etc.
- For these reasons, my recommendation to instructors is that course content should be downloadable and allow the student to choose their preferred format for study.
- WHAT IT SAYS
- All screen reading is goal-oriented activity. Students have goals. Their goals are Find and get at the content as quickly as possible Due dates Check their grades Your goals are to get them to read every word that you’ve provided for them. How can you support both these sets of goals?
- Blah blah text is any text that is not scannable that doesn’t directly support
- Know what blah blah text is and learn to recognize when you may be writing it
- Blah blah text can sometimes be useful and should still be included on the page. That top sentence still has some orienting information but also allows readers to proceed to the main points so they can accomplish their goals.
- 5 steps to plain language Identify and describe the target audience. Structure the content to guide the reader through it. Write the content in plain language: short and to the point, helpful tone, right words: strong verbs in active voice in words the audience knows Use information design to help readers see and understand: headings, typography, whitespace, images Test the design and content with target users
- https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/20080/pages/who-are-you-slash-on-the-web-september-10-16
- https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/20080/pages/who-are-you-slash-on-the-web-september-10-16
- Inverted pyramid is a term borrowed from journalism. It can be a good way to remind yourself to start with the main point. Kill the suspense--don’t expect students to scroll all the way to the bottom.
- Start with the conclusion! Kill the suspense. Don’t assume they’ll scroll all the way to the bottom.
- Out on the “open web”, there are so many examples of images that are there for the express purpose of giving the eye a break
- We can learn a lot from commercial web design practices, but decorative images isn’t one of them. This is a wasted opportunity to use blah blah images on course websites Web usability - people learn your site. Students quickly learn whether you are using filler images that have no instructional content, and then they will overlook the image when you DO want them to look at it.
- Therefore, use them to augment the instruction that’s taking place on the page OR give them a preview of the content to entice them, put a question in their minds that will motivate them to engage with the content.
- The risk with images is that you need to be aware of the effect of the image’s presence and placement on the screen.
- Especially when you consider that some of your students will be accessing on mobile devices. This is an issue not just for length of scroll, but also for all the other visual context of your instructional pages that might be stripped away.
- Alt text = alternative text. It is seen and read by people who use adaptive technologies I often have instructors say to me, especially in the professional schools, “I know I don’t have any blind people in my courses.” Which may be true, but an instructional image can always benefit from an Every image on your site should should have either alt text or
- alt text can describe an image even if the image doesn’t load on the page. should describe content and function, NOT the image’s properties. Only describe the properties if they’re germane to the discussion content = what is the information contained in the graphic? summarize and draw conclusions, as necessary. If the image is a clickable button, that should be described too.
- Most modern learning management systems make alt text unavoidable--but also easy to ignore. Don’t ignore this field! In Canvas it will default to the image file name. You of course want to overwrite that attribute so it describes the content of the image, rather than the name of the file.
- Context is everything. You would describe different things in the alt text of this image depending on what you want your students to get from the image.
- If the point of this picture is to show what a gavial looks like, then yes.
- We’ve heard different things about what you should do with decorative graphics. Suggest “decoration” alt=""
- Behold the humble potato. Raw. On its own, it is hardly digestible. We *could* eat it, but it would take awhile and we certainly wouldn’t enjoy it.
- Compare to the French fry, which has been chunked into digestible and tasty bits. You can eat quite a lot of them--several potatoes’ worth--and enjoy them to boot!
- I posit that unformatted web page text is like a raw potato. You don’t really know where to start--and you don’t really want to.
- But a web page where some thought and care has been given to user goals and helping do some of the initial digestion, this makes the page feel like you could actually get it done. Information designers call these interventions the document’s macrostructure
- Find the white space. Preserve or create more white space
- Use numerals
- All of this is about either preserving or, more likely, CREATING white space. White space is the single best static tool for focusing attention.
- Rethink your idea of paragraphs. On-screen writing feels more digestible--more achievable in a sea of other information inputs--if it looks like some of the work has been done for us
- I’m toggling back and forth a little bit between web formats and document formats, but essentially you can do the same thing both places.
- format headings with paragraph styles rather than manually
- Shorter isn’t necessarily better. 52% said that when searching for information, shorter didn’t matter What mattered as that they could do a page search.
- Learnability
- Nielsen/Norman Group, first 11 characters OR first 2 words http://www.businessinsider.com/eye-tracking-heatmaps-2014-7 Enticing AND descriptive are sometimes at odds with each other
- microdecisions
- create a question in the learner's mind heading strategies: topic style versus summary style write with hyperlinks, anatomy of a hyperlink emphasis techniques: use bolding, be aware of the effect of hyperlinks in drawing the eye
- headings are pickup lines The following are 3 techniques for landing pages, that is, use them on a
- Techniques for landing pages
- cheap ‘n clickbaity method Technique for landing pages - I would not use these for the
- create a little good old fashioned cognitive dissonance
- Both of these techniques inspire clicks out of interest rather than obligation.
- Examples of each Advantages of the topic-driven is the quick searching--as long as you’re using the same terms that student use-- The advantage of the summary is the
- What heading style does this article use?
- Stop doing: Click here, read more, learn more, here, read, or go to Screen readers are able to isolate and read all the hyperlinks in a list, so a list of click here’s doesn’t do a lot of good. Visually our eyes are drawn to the blue underlined text, which helps for scannability - but can be problem for dyslexia
- Beware (or use to your advantage!) the fact that hyperlinks act like bold/emphasis in your course web pages!
- z.umn.edu/webWritingForOnlineCourses