Abstract:

The nature of today’s communication is overwhelmingly visual. Images, as modes of communication, play a dominant role in our daily activities and are especially prominent in the lives of young people. Today’s students were born in image-saturated environments, the era of internet, digital technologies and touch screens. Tertiary education should take advantage of visual modes of knowledge by introducing at least some elements of visual literacy education across all disciplines. Visual literacy is a set of abilities that enables an individual to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media. Visual media literacy skills equip a learner to understand and analyze the contextual, cultural, ethical, aesthetic, intellectual, and technical components involved in the production and use of visual materials. Higher Education (HE) students must have opportunities to develop critical and ethical ways of engaging with visual information in order to become discerning citizens in today’s image-saturated society. Like all others, they should be equipped with essential skills, to engage capably in a visually oriented society and to participate fully in today's visual culture. This paper presents analytically the instructional methodology applied by the DAISSy research group of the Hellenic Open University (HOU), based on two widely accepted and broadly used approaches, that is, the "Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADDIE)" model and the "Bloom’s Taxonomy", for the design and development of the micro-learning Course entitled “Critical Visual Media Literacy and Fluency” for Higher Education students. On the one hand, ADDIE is an instructional Systems Design (ISD) model, used by instructional designers and training developers. As an instructional design model, it has found wide acceptance and use, since it applies to meet different teaching requirements in all online educational environments. Educators, instructional designers and training developers find the ADDIE's approach very useful since it includes stages clearly defined. This format facilitates the development and implementation of effective training tools. Thus, it is deemed necessary to properly design and then construct a course before starting the development of the learning, assessment and collaboration objects. On the other hand, the learning outcomes of this Course are designed based on Bloom’s taxonomy, which is perhaps the most prominent concept in education, particularly for teaching and learning. The contemporary requirements for constructing and implementing the course in online form demand great flexibility and adaptability to the needs of the target group of HE students.

Keywords:

Instructional design, methodology, visual media literacy, Higher Education, online course.