THE DESIGN IN THE ERA OF VIRTUAL LEARNING: A STUDY OF THE DESIGN OF E-LEARNING PLATFORMS

The development of forms of online education led to the creation of new educational tools that we assign of e-learning platforms. They exceed the time and space barriers and are already a reality on different teaching grades.

Considering that the visual language is fundamental for the efficacy of learning-teaching in virtual environments, in this study we tried to understand in what ways the visual communication and the Design have an impact on the student who uses these platforms.

With that proposition we propose a model of an e-learning platform where the contents and the interface are modelled by principles of Design. The model was tested by students of the College of Ciências da Saúde of the Beira Interior University, there were analysed four different platforms (a) A platform witch had a personalized interface and multimedia/interactive contents – The proposed model; b) A platform with a general interface and with the contents in PDF format – platform based on the Moodle, that is, the existing model in the College of Ciências da Saúde; c) A platform with a personalized interface and with the contents in PDF format; d) A platform with a general interface – based on the Moodle – with multimedia/interactive contents) in the end the students answered to a questionnaire.

The results reveal that the interface and the multimedia/interactive contents may have positive impacts on the satisfaction and the comprehension perception of the students, so the success of e-learning platforms may depend of the correct application of Design principles.