Developing an Animation - Part 1: Objectives
Educational animations are usually 2-3 minute short clips that include some combination of photographs, real-life video shots, illustrations, and visual highlights. They are usually supported with brief text pieces as needed, and usually covered with sound effects and narration.
In terms of their effect on learning, animations are stronger than text-based materials, especially in explaining complex concepts thanks to the power of visualizations. Animations are often even stronger than real-life videos because you can use animations to illustrate objects which is not possible to get a video of, such as electrons.
The main steps in the development of an animation are:
Setting the learning objectives
Writing the script
Developing the storyboard
Visual and Sound Production
Testing
Setting the Objectives
Determination of learning objectives is the first step in development of an animation. This is, in our experience, the most important step as any problem with the objectives will require, at the best case, a major overhaul of the animation to fix and quite often will mean the animation is useless and has to be scrapped.
A very common error done by inexperienced instructional designers is to skip this step, or do it improperly. This step will determine the animation’s scope and boundaries - where it starts, what it covers and where it ends. Without clear boundaries, the scope of the animation will creep, quite often towards one of the prerequisites. Because the duration of an animation will be limited, this creep will probably mean the animation will fail to cover its core topics properly.
To set the learning objectives of the animation, the instructional designer should have a good understanding of the curriculum the animation is part of and should have a functional concept map which connects the concepts of the curriculum together.
The animation should start as one or more nodes on the concept map, cover a number of nodes (more on this later) and end at one or more specific nodes. This method will display the exact prerequisite concepts of the animation and will greatly help in preventing any creep.
The catch here is that the instructional designer must have a good concept map. For topics which the instructional designer is familiar with, a 2-minute sketch on a piece of scrap paper will work. For topics which require expertise the instructional designer does not have, this step requires researching the topic, and/or a workshop with a subject matter expert.
Another important question at this step is “How much content should the animation cover?”. There are two factors influencing this decision, and both must be taken into consideration.
First is the cognitive load of the animation. An animation loads the short-term memory of its viewers, and short-term memory has limits. If an animation has a cognitive load that is too heavy, the viewers will tend to mash the concepts together to reduce the load. This will mean many of the connections between separate concepts will be lost. This reduces the effectiveness of the animation greatly.
The cognitive load of the animation depends on the number of new concepts introduced, the intrinsic complexity of the concepts, the level of experience the target audience has with the topic, and how the details in the animation are presented.
The instructional designer often has to make a judgement call where to stop. Concept maps can be helpful here - the instructional designer can start with the prerequisite nodes and mark the nodes that will be covered in the animation. If the target audience is new to the topic (for example a chemistry course in a high school), the animation should not probably go more than two nodes away from the prerequisites. If the target audience already has experience (established schemas) in the field (for example showing how to do a certain repair to a group of mechanics), it is safe to cover more nodes with the animation.
The second consideration is the running length of the animation. High school students can follow animations which run for 2-3 minutes. Adult viewers can follow longer animations, while middle schoolers and younger people can follow shorter animations.
An educational animation typically has an average of 125 words per minute. This puts a word count limit to the amount of content that can be explained within an animation. At the objectives stage, the instructional designer has not started the script yet and can only estimate how many words they will need to explain specific concepts. Still, the instructional designer should evaluate the complexity of the concepts and adjust the objectives of their animation accordingly.
Highlights
Setting the learning objectives is the first step in developing an animation
A concept map should be used to determine the prerequisites of the animation, to prevent scope creep
The amount of content in the animation is limited by the cognitive load of an animation and its estimated word count
Kozan Soykal has been working instructional technology for over 14 years and has developed 150+ animations and reviewed 350 more. Samples of his work can be seen at: http://www.ortuslearning.com/services
