Visual Senses of “Online Learning” and “Instructional Design”

This chapter explores two social images sets extracted from a Google Image search around two education-related topics: “online learning” and “instructional design.” For both topics, hundreds of images were extracted, and both image sets offer insights on the target topics, who is using the imagery, and how the images are used. This chapter further tests a hypothesis about social imagery: that they are important parts of strategic messaging and that the social imagery for online learning may focus on messaging inviting participation in online learning (to potential and continuing learners) and those for instructional design may focus on messaging to practitioners and would-be practitioners to join the field and for administrators and executives to hire instructional designers. The coding approach was defined a priori, and then the images were roughly coded. The initial findings are reported.