Reducing Cognitive Load and Instructional design

 


Cognitive load (Source: Google Image)

Students and Cognitive load

    When teaching online, reducing students' cognitive load is essential. (Guyan, 2013)  This will assist in an easier understanding retaining of the information provided. When students come to the class and as instructors, we shouldn't assume that the information we provide them will be absorbed by them easily. Students are taking another 3-4 courses besides your course. Adding more information will add to the cognitive load. As an instructor, we need to design strategies that will allow reducing the cognitive load. These strategies could reduce the amount of content to be shared and how it is being disseminated.  Instructors need to be aware of the basics of the cognitive load theory. What cognitive load theory is that instructions or information should be provided in a manner that doesn't profuse the learner's mental capacity. If the information is given at once, then it will have an overload on students'' cognitive capacity.

Intrinsic or Extrinsic

    For teaching online, the cognitive load could be intrinsic, extrinsic or germane. With intrinsic overload, students will have difficulty learning certain activities. The extrinsic load is when the information is presented, but the learners have to make extra effort to understand it, e.g. an image presented without adequate explanation or caption.

Strategies to reduce Cognitive load

    Various guidelines or strategies have been provided (Pappas, 2014) for cognitive load theory during online teaching. During the development of the course, CBLG 699 -Social Factors in Drug Development' layout and design, these strategies and guidelines will be considered. The idea is to provide the content at small, e.g. recording short videos of the content or lecture than adding a full 60-minute video. Adding materials at specific places in the online course, e.g. on the home page, in the modules and under the assignments tab in the online course, where students can have easy access to avoid redundancy in the course design. During synchronous sessions, using the visuals will help. During the synchronous session, if the slides are presented then the information presented should be clear, concise and less cluttered as reading word to word from the slide adds a burden to the learner's memory.

References

Guyan, M. (2013, November 1). 5 ways to reduce cognitive load in eLearning. eLearning Industry. https://elearningindustry.com/5-ways-to-reduce-cognitive-load-in-elearning.

Pappas. C. (2014, February 5). Cognitive load theory and instructional design. eLearning Industry.  https://elearningindustry.com/cognitive-load-theory-and-instructional-design


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