In many situations, an instructional designer will not be the person developing any given course. We often use a separate developer to create the animations or other treatments. In more than one case, I have worked with a developer that over-animated, or over-developed.When every concept is equally treated and animated, how can the learner know which is most important? It becomes more difficult, and puts more responsibility on the learner to extract meaning, and can often leave them wondering if they guessed correctly.
The old adage "keep it simple stupid" is a very important design concept for a developer to grasp, and the best way to do that is to read through and understand the content.
At first glance, most content looks pretty straight forward. Each sentence can be animated without understanding the content (well, maybe a Google search here and there). But as the course progresses, and repeat concepts build upon each other, the developer may find themselves adding emphasis to concepts that aren't as important as others, and not creating consistency throughout the course.
A full read-through of the course will allow the developer to highlight the important messages and repeat concepts, and decide how they will be treated throughout. This will prevent them from adding as much animation and emphasis for supporting concepts that do not need as much attention. As a result, the learner can more effectively extract the important concepts, and retain the information based on the consistency and repetition presented throughout the course.
