Teaching Online Through Visual Storytelling
Jose W. Diaz, Lorenza Smith, Jennifer Shloming


This study explores the use of visual storytelling in the online learning environment and the purposeful use of technology that would allowed us to create a truly visual online learning experience.

Storytelling can be traced all the way back to our ancestors. They left us many stories that paint a vivid picture of everyday life of ancient times on cave walls, scrolls and artifacts. These stories have been passed on from generations to generations. It’s historical data that transcends time.

Just like our ancestors we also are visual creatures. We watch our televisions to get the news, we use our mobile phones to find our way home and we look at street signs that tell us when it is safe to cross the street. We learn from reading books and we learn to read from looking at the words and pictures from a storybook.

The need to see, hear or tell stories is engraved in our human DNA. Storytelling has been an important method of sharing and interpreting human experiences. Visual storytelling is an effective educational tool because the learner becomes engaged through the images that tell the story. This is the fundamental reason we chose to use Adobe Spark. It’s flexibility of the virtual construction which allows the learner to connect diverse aspects of each module or unit to reconstruct his or her own version of history.

How then can we incorporate visual storytelling in the online learning environment?

We decided to incorporate visual storytelling on two online courses that were heavily dependent on visuals. The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) runs all their online courses on the Blackboard Learning Management System (LMS). Blackboard’s limitation on creating a visually stimulating experience led us to find an alternative tool that could live within Blackboard and allows us to create the visual storytelling. Finding a solution to this technological problem was our first challenge. We needed a tool that would allow us to paint on a canvas, and visually engage the students through visual storytelling.

We decided to use Adobe Spark to help us tell the stories of these two online courses. The first course is History of Western Art and Civilization: Renaissance to the Modern Era. The second course is Statistical Analysis. Two courses that are heavily depended on the visual content and storytelling.