What Is Cognitive Load and Why Does It Matter in Online Learning?
Cognitive load refers to the cognitive processing power of the human brain to interpret information and complete tasks. People only have a limited mental capacity to devote to taking in new information, whereafter they experience cognitive overload and struggle to absorb information.
Avoiding cognitive overload is particularly important for learning of any kind. The more extraneous items that a person needs to devote cognitive processing power to interpret or navigate, the lower their ability to learn and retain new information.
In online learning, this cognitive load can be exacerbated by the medium itself. Additional cognitive load is required from participants to simply engage with digital devices to access the content. Participants then need to navigate learning platforms and interfaces, determine how the course runs, when to attend virtual calls, and how to earn the necessary points to pass.
To best facilitate learning in an online environment, digital learning providers need to make the experience as intuitive and predictable as possible. This enables the participant to focus on the learning and not have to worry about trying to navigate complex interfaces, unclear instructions, and working out how to pass the course.
Why Is This Important to Digital Frontiers?
Our Digital Frontiers Institute is over ten years old. It has evolved organically over that time, expanding into new topics, acquiring new technical experts, covering new technologies, and embracing innovations in online learning.
And in that time, participants’ expectations have changed. This has created two issues for our courses.
1. Participants are more visual learners than before. And these participants require more visual cues, a heavier focus on visual signposting, in the form of icons and banners, and more engaging visual stimuli. This is because of increased exposure to digital and visual stimuli through social media content and other more visually enhanced media.
The lack of visual cues and stimuli can negatively impact the cognitive load of participants. Instead of being easily and intuitively able to navigate or scan icons and visuals, participants have to apply their cognitive processing to these tasks. This means that participants have less cognitive capacity available to focus on the learning content.
2. Our course portfolio of over 30 courses has evolved over the last 10 years. In the past, our courses were highly customised by their course convener and technical experts. This means that not all our courses were designed and delivered in the same way. Our courses involved variable pathways for learning, often with different approaches, tasks, and assessment modalities each week.
This approach, while it helped appeal to a variety of learning styles and aimed to keep participants constantly engaged, did require considerable cognitive effort from participants.
For each course, participants needed to spend time and effort determining how the course operated, what was required of them, how to earn points, which activities were compulsory, and how best to navigate the course. This increased participants’ cognitive load and lessened their ability to focus on learning the new content.
Cognitive load on participants has also been exacerbated by the general increase in online learning. Participants now have preconceived ideas and expectations as to how online courses should appear and roll out. If courses did not follow the trends and established expectations, participants spent significant amounts of time trying to determine exactly what they were required to do.
How Is Digital Frontiers Reducing Cognitive Load for Participants?
Digital Frontiers has made reducing cognitive load a priority over the past year. We have spent many hours researching and finding ways to enhance our learning experiences and reduce cognitive load. We aim to make our courses intuitive, clear, and easily navigable, so that participants can focus on what is important – the learning!
We have done this in two ways:
1. Improve visual cues
This starts with simple tile structures for our courses. Instead of lists, we have converted to a more graphic tile structure to enable simpler navigation. This structure also includes progress tracking, with a simple graphical means for students to track their progress overall and for each module.
We have included clear and visually appealing banners and standardised icons across courses. These are used to highlight module openers and other key content, such as surveys, certificates, and assessments, among others. These banners and icons act as signposts for participants as they progress through the course.
We are also ensuring all new courses include more icons and visuals to appeal to our more visual learners.
2. Standardise course delivery
As online learning has evolved and formalised over the past ten years, so have participant expectations. Participants now expect courses to unfold in a certain way and for content to be released and assessed in a more academic and predictable framework.
Our learning designers have spent the last few months reviewing our courses and making the necessary changes to meet these evolving participant expectations. A large part of this work has been to standardise the learning journey to be predictable and intuitive across our Certified Digital Finance Practitioner and Advancement Programme course portfolio.
We have made these changes to ensure participants can better navigate the content, earn points more predictably, and more easily access resources and activities. These changes have been designed specifically to alleviate cognitive load, allowing participants to focus on their learning.
With standardisation, once participants have done one module or completed their first week, they will no longer need to think about:
- how content will be provided and rolled out each week,
- how many points are available each week,
- how to earn points for that week,
- how and where to access class calls,
- how to access activities and additional resources,
- how to submit assignments.
With these changes, participants will be better positioned to take in new learning content, improving retention, and ensuring they are able to apply their learning in their roles for lasting impact.
At Digital Frontiers, we aim to deliver user-centred learning experiences. We keep the contexts and realities of our participants front of mind and use these to inform both the design of our platform and our courses.
We believe that these changes, increased visual cues and standardisation, will help to alleviate the cognitive load for our participants, better meet participants expectations, foster learning and contribute to even more positive outcomes for our alumni.
By Megan Carver (eLearning and Development Manager at Digital Frontiers)