Sean Zdenek, PhD – Access, sound, captioning, film/media. Sean Zdenek is an associate professor of technical and professional writing at the University of Delaware. His book, Reading Sounds: Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture, won the 2017 award for best book in technical or scientific communication from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC).
Instructional Design Resources
HTML and CSS Courses | Udemy
Free HTML and CSS courses on Udemy.
Learn HTML | Interactive tutorial from web.dev
This HTML course for web developers provides a solid overview for developers, from novice to expert level HTML.
Learn CSS | Codecademy
In this CSS tutorial, you’ll learn how to add CSS to visually transform HTML into eye-catching sites.
Learn HTML | Codecademy
Start at the beginning by learning HTML basics — an important foundation for building and editing web pages.
Style
Visual Hierarchy
How to make strong designs using principles of visual hierarchy.
Alignment
How to make strong designs by aligning elements.
Typography
All about font.
The Non-Designer's Design Book
Excellent foundational book on design.
Visual Design Solutions: Principles and Creative Inspiration for Learning Professionals
This is a good foundational resource on visual design, particularly tailored for educators and instructional designers.
Design for How People Learn (Voices That Matter)
This is an excellent, to-the-point book with lots of examples and graphics.
Visual Design Principles: Color
This video covers best practices for using color.
Color Names – HTML Color Codes
Modern browsers support 140 HTML color names which arelisted here along with their Hex color codes and RGB values.
Inline CSS that's stripped in Canvas and Brightspace
This is a spreadsheet where I keep track of CSS that's stripped from Canvas and Brightspace.
Coolors – Color Palette Generator
Generate or browse color combinations.
Color wheel, a color palette generator | Adobe Color
DesignPLUS User Guide
If your institution has CIDI Labs (a plugin for Canvas), you should check out these guides. In particular, I recommend enabling the "advanced" features.
Canvas Style Guide
This page details the CSS class names you can use in Canvas. The style guide is no longer being updated BUT after some researching, it seems the class names included will continue to work in Canvas for the foreseeable future. Note that form elements (e.g. ) are stripped from the content editor so you can't really use the HTML in the "Forms" section of the guide.
Visual design principles
Foundational visual design principles for instructional design.
Online Courses | Accessible Technology – University of Washington
This page from UW links to guides on creating accessible webpages, working with accessibility in Canvas, and making videos accessible.
Hacking the LMS Examples | CodePen Collection | Amy Spielmaker
This CodePen collection has several example code snippets you can take and use anywhere you can add custom code.
Tables Tutorial | WAI W3C
This page goes over creating accessible tables with multiple headers, different sized rows and columns, and other irregularities. There's some work that goes into making tables accessible and many LMSs do not use good defaults (for example, Canvas does not add a header row to tables by default).
Images Tutorial | WAI W3C
Having accessible images online is about more than alt text. For example, what are you supposed to do if you're using an image as a link? Follow the guides in this tutorial to ensure your images are accessibility.
CSS Exercises | W3Schools
CSS practice exercises with immediate feedback from W3C Schools.
W3Schools HTML Exercise
HTML practice exercises with immediate feedback from W3C Schools.
Styling Lists | MDN
This guide goes over different list styles (alphabet, roman, square, etc).
CSS Values and Units | MDN
This guide goes over some foundational info you'll want to know when sizing elements and changing their colors.
Instructional Design Rubric
Detailed descriptions of standards for online courses. Originally devloped for students in ASTE 7090: Instructional Design for Distance Education, a graduate-level course taught at Utah State University by Amy Spielmaker.
OAI+ – Your Teaching Resource at PSU
Excellent resource-type site.