Emoji for E-Learning Designers #77

E-Learning Challenge #77: Challenge | Recap

As e-learning designers, you know how important visual communication is to building courses. Without visuals, your only communication tool is text. While there's nothing wrong with text, the goal is to use pictures with words to improve learning.

The challenge for most instructional designers is that they're more comfortable breaking down content into meaningful lessons than breaking down concepts into visual representations. One way to practice using pictures to represent words is by breaking out your smartphone. 

Get Your Emoji On

Emoji are the cute graphics (hearts, smileys, thumbs up) you share when texting your BFF. If you’re an avid texter, you’re probably fluent in emoji.

Those same visual concepts apply in e-learning design. And that’s what this week’s challenge is all about.

The Emoji Quiz

Find out how well you communicate using emojis in this 10 question quiz.

Are You Fluent in Emoji?

Emoji Dick

Melville’s classic was recently translated into emoji. Here’s a really fun overview of the book and how it came together.

Living in Emoji: Emoji Dick

Combining Letters with Emoji

Another option is to combine an emoji character with letters to create words.

Challenge of the Week

This week your challenges is to design a quiz or activity using emoji. You can work entirely in emoji or combine words and letters to create your projects. It’s up to you.

The objective is to practice communicating with graphics in place of text.

Ideas for Emoji Demos:

• Emoji songs: Use emoji characters for your favorite song’s lyrics
• Emoji vocabulary quiz: Challenge your fellow community members on their emoji know-how
• Who am I: Create a series of emoji quiz questions that ask learners to guess the famous person

Tools

You can use Articulate Storyline, Articulate Studio ‘13, or PowerPoint to create your challenge entry.

Emoji Examples and Resources

• Emojitracker - Real time emoji use on Twitter
• Emojipedia - The encyclopedia of emoji characters
• Academics are using emoji to explain their research
• Emoji Versions Of 2014’s Top Songs
• What Your Favourite Emoji Symbols Actually Mean

Share Your E-Learning Work

• Comments: Use the comments section below to share a link to your published example and blog post.
• Forums: Start  your own thread and share a link to your published example..
• Personal blog:  If you have a blog, please consider writing about your challenges. We’ll link back to your posts so the great work you’re sharing gets even more exposure.
• Twitter: If you share your demos on Twitter, try using #ELHChallenge so your tweeps can track your e-learning coolness.
• Facebook: Share your work on our Facebook page by replying to this Facebook post with a link to your example.

Last Week’s Challenge:

E-Learning Challenge Recap #76: Challenge | Recap

Wishing you a week, E-Learning Heroes!

New to the E-Learning Challenges?

The weekly challenges are ongoing opportunities to learn, share, and build your e-learning portfolios. You can jump into any or all of the previous challenges anytime you want. I’ll update the recap posts to include your demos.