Lesson 10: Visuals and Learning


Reflection on your learning

Congratulations, you have almost completed this course on visual literacy. In this course, you learned about a variety of approaches to interpret and analyze visuals, to use visuals effectively, to design and create meaningful visuals, to understand many of the ethical issues surrounding visuals, and to integrate these visuals in your personal and professional life.

In this course, you learned how people perceive and process visuals as you studied Gestalt psychology and cognitive information processing. You analyzed and interpreted the emotions that visuals can convey with the help Molly Bang’s principles and you also created visuals yourself that convey specific emotions. You now know the basics principles of semiotics and can use semiotic analysis to study how meaning is constructed in visuals. You also got to create visuals by learning about photography, video, data visualizations and infographics. Furthermore, you learned about visual storytelling and told your own story. By taking this course, you are hopefully also more aware of ethical issues surrounding copyright and visual manipulation. In this final lesson, you have created a visual mini-lesson to improve learning and performance. Overall, you have learned about a wide variety of topics in quite a short amount of time. Therefore, to conclude the course, let’s take some time to reflect on everything you have learned.


Assignment 10.2: Reflection


Description

Please answer the following four reflection questions. You can either type out your responses in Microsoft Word or use any other media to answer these reflection questions (such as a video, animation, photo sequence or even an infographic). If you use other media, add your infographic or visuals to your Word file or add a link if you use an external resource such as YouTube.

  1. How much did you know about visual literacy before you took this course?
  2. To what extent do you believe you are more visually literate after taking this course (i.e. to what extent do you believe you are now better at interpreting, analyzing, evaluating, using, and creating meaningful visuals or do you now do this differently from before)? To what extent did any specific readings, course materials, and assignments contribute to this?
  3. To what extent do you believe you will apply the knowledge and skills you learned in this course in your personal and professional life?
  4. Now that you have learned more about visual literacy, are there any visual literacy related skills and knowledge that you would like to advance (even) further in the future?

Submitting Your Assignment

Under your last assignment (10.1) in your Word file, write “Assignment 10.2” and type out your responses to the four questions in this assignment. When you have completed all assignments of this lesson, save the document as a file on your computer and make sure the file is named “Assignment10”. After you have saved your file, go to the student interface and submit your assignment for grading. Click here if you need additional information regarding the submission of your assignment.


Grading Criteria

  • Your reflection carefully addressed all four questions. (2)
  • Your responses went beyond a basic description of course content. You analyzed how your experiences in this course contributed to gaining visual literacy skills and knowledge by providing examples and connections between the content and your own learning. (6)
  • Your reflection showed that you are aware of your own thought processes, biases, and preconceptions, and how these may have changed over time. (2)

Points: 10