An investigation on the impact of colour coding on student retention in online lectures

Abstract: Online education has become more prominent during recent years and it is therefore of interest to study and improve. Colour in presentations have shown to increase the attention and retention among students and colour coding can use colour to highlight important key words and topics in online presentations. As part of this study experiments were conducted with 16 computer science students. Some were shown colour coded presentation images and some were shown the same images without colour and were then asked to answer questions about the content. An eye tracker was also used during the experiment to gather quantitative data that was analysed with respect to eye-movements and gaze fixations. The main conclusions drawn from this study are that colour coding is positive as long as it is used sparsely and that too many different colours may affect students negatively, which is in line with previous research.