Now seems like a good time to stop and ponder the limitations of designing text in eCampus (or any other learning management system). I expect you may have encountered one or two already.
At the present time, eCampus does not provide us a way to apply any unique formatting (font size, color, font family) throughout a whole learning module, let alone a whole course. We have to do it page by page. Unless you know how to create pages outside of eCampus with HTML (hypertext markup language) and CSS (cascading style sheets) some layout features can’t be done with the built-in text editor. Here are a couple of things that may affect your design choices as we go along.
This goes for your whole course (or website).
The heading size and color for one page must be the same for all pages. If you don’t mind changing the size and color of headings every time you use it, they will render as the eCampus default. You can’t reformat it on some pages and not others without confusing readers and risk looking like you don't know what your doing. This goes for paragraph fonts, too.
The “rule” is: keep things visually consistent.
The reality is: not sticking with the text editor defaults can be very time consuming (and perhaps annoying).
Web designers and print publishers control line length to make it easier for the reader’s eyes to go from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. Print publishers use the rule of thumb that the line length should be “between 1½ to 2 times the length of the lower case alphabet of the typeface used.” (Lem 2004)
What’s that look like?
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmn (1.5x, 40 characters)
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxy (2x, 52 characters)
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmn (2.5x, 62 characters)
Web viewing devices are not static like print is. Every computer and device renders pages a little differently depending on the operating system and how the user has the settings configured. Web designers have to design so that whatever is on the page will be easily read or viewed from any device — phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop — by any maker. It may look similar, but your screen will never look exactly the same as someone else's.
That said, the best designs tend to stick to reasonable line lengths. Some examples:
Based on these examples, readers can probably handle a full 3x alphabet line length on a computer screen which looks like this:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz (3x, 78 characters).
We can’t even control for that length with our eCampus text editor. Line length of pages built in eCampus is dependent on the size of the viewer’s web browser and screen resolution. There’s not much we can do about that. And it is in line with accessibility standards related to the ability to resize a browser window to accommodate any device — computer, tablet, phone.