The Visual-Literacy.org e-learning course will be used as an online leveling course as well as a blended skill-building course for students of fourteen different university courses in four universities (for more than 500 students). These courses require advanced analytical and conceptual visualization skills in order to transform abstract thought efficiently into graphic, tangible forms and to manage the topic complexity and the problems addressed in each class. Often in these courses, ranging from knowledge management to software engineering, the professors make references to key visualization principles and methods, without the necessary tools to actually develop these skills with the students. So far, teachers and students had to rely on fragmented, ad-hoc material to provide visualization principles and exercises. They had difficulties making students experience what kinds of challenges arise when knowledge needs to be visualized for successful communication, strategizing or engineering tasks. Although the topic of visualization is a very creative one, students so far only had limited possibilities to creatively explore visualization in their application domains. With the Visual-Literacy.org online tutorial, professors and teachers can flexibly revert to an important resource whenever a course relies on conceptual visualization competence.
