CARP and Webinars

When designing e-learning courses or trainings,  the principle of CARP is a valuable resource in your design. Today, we’re going to look at each of the CARP principles and also discuss which are most important when it comes to designing webinars and other live presentations.

CARP is the acronym for contrast, alignment, repetition and proximity when you’re designing presentations. When you’re designing a presentation for learning, it is important that you keep these elements in mind so that the learner can focus on the presentation and the information being presented. Let’s look at each one and discuss what they are:

Contrast: Sizes, colors, shapes and directions. You should use relevant sizes to your presentation and everything should be as uniform as possible. If you’re using comparisons, sizes can vary, otherwise, pictures, and other visual examples should be the same size. Colors: You should choose a color scheme and stick to it. If you want something to stick out, use a different color to add meaning to a point you’re trying to make. As far as direction, you should try to keep your text direction in the same direction as much as possible, changing direction to help something prove a point.

Alignment: Your presentation should have alignment from beginning to end. Imagining that every slide is a grid and lining up everything the same from slide to slide or grid to grid is important. Also, decide how your text will be on each slide (use left alignment or center alignment), and stick to that.

Repetition: Like alignment, everything in your presentation should be predictable as far as the design. Colors, layouts, texts should follow a pattern and the learners should not be surprised from page to page.

Proximity: Make sure that you keep things close to each other as much as you can. For example, a picture and caption should be in proximity to each other so they can be easily read.

As you can see, they are all similar in creating a presentation that looks clean, uniform and easy to follow. Without using all four, you could create a presentation that is hard for learners to follow and that could cause a learner to not pay attention to what they should be learning, but trying to figure out the presentation instead.

In my opinion, when you’re creating a webinar, you should focus on alignment and repetition. When you’re creating a live presentation that you’ll have virtual learners on, making sure that predictability will help keep focus for the learner. In a situation like a webinar, learners focus and attention could easily go to something else so having a clean and simple presentation will help the learner focus on the training at hand.