Practices, Laws and Legislations of a Digital Learner Designer

Practices, Laws and Legislations of a Digital Learner Designer

There are many practices, laws and legislations that affect a digital learning designer works. Not only do these affect the way we work, it also affects how we work.

One major law that restricts digital learning designers is the copyright law, this means that images are protected and cannot be stolen. This means that we can’t use any image we find, they have to be free to use or labelled for reuse. This can make it difficult to find the perfect image and is also time consuming. Sites such as Pixabay and Pexels are great as they are free image sites, meaning that all images are copyright free and ready to be used. 

Designers often take inspiration from other work, this can be an issue as plagiarism can occur if the creator has taken more than inspiration and actually carbon copied work like for like.

Licensing can also be an issue as software can cost a lot of money and might be difficult to obtain.

Recent developments in legislations help eLearning to be more accessible to everyone. For example, the Special Education Needs and Disability Act (SENDA) was introduced in 2002 and it is now a legal requirement to take steps to ensure your eLearning packages and content is accessible to each individual.

This is a good thing as it makes the wonders of eLearning easy to access to everyone possible.

When using images in eLearning packages, you are more than likely to be using someone else’s images that you have downloaded, it is important to credit them for the images if they have requested you do so. It’s also important not to steal somebody else’s work, through direct copy or plagiarism. These are ethical issues that everyone should avoid in order to maintain personal creativeness and unique designs, not only that, it’s also stealing and taking credit for somebody else’s work.

Images in eLearning packages are just as important as text as just having plain text could make the learner lose interest and not engage them. The images need to be appropriate to the learning material they are being placed in as this could confuse them and keeps the theme and design nice. 

Images can also be used for interactions, such as drag and drop, or for use as a button, this is good as you can vary the way you move on to the next part and it doesn’t stick to the same old way every single time.

Images can also help with the accessibility for learners as some may find it difficult to take in a large amount of text in one session, this information can be given to you by the leader or the teacher of the subject for the preference of learning style for their students.

The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1998 is the current UK copyright law, this gives designers the right to control their content they create and how that can be used and distributed. This is important as content that is sent to us from teachers to be used often contains images and text from various websites, this means that they more than likely do not own the rights to it and you will have to look for an alternative to use or have the rights to use the content. For designers this is a mix of both good and bad as it protects your work but also means that the images you are using have to be free to use or have the rights or it is breaking law.

Images should be prepared appropriately for the use they are going to have, it is vital that the image is perfect size not just for the design aspect, but also for accessibility. For example, if you make images too small, they will be difficult to see but also for someone with poor eyesight they will struggle immensely to see it.

There are many formats of image;

JPEG – Images that are a good file size and keep a good quality. 

PNG – Good for websites and keeping transparency, small file size. 

GIF – Small file size that support animation and low coloured. 

TIFF – High quality and huge file size. 

Image formats such as JPEG and PNG are perfect for websites, as they have a small file size but are very good in quality.

GIF is perfect if you want a low coloured image for websites or if you want to have an animated picture.

TIFF is perfect for big printing or large images as the quality is very high.

Some factors that need to be taken in to account when using images mainly comes from both downloading and uploading, you need the right image size so it doesn’t appear stretched or pixelated. You can overcome this by downloading a large image size so when it is used and downsized it keeps the quality high, or if you are wanting a large image, make sure you have the right size so when it is made bigger it doesn’t appear pixelated.