AVOIDING THE DREADED COGNITIVE OVERLOAD

If you’re new to eLearning development and instructional design, the term ‘cognitive overload,’ may be completely foreign to you. Let’s face it in Learning and Development we absolutely love a buzzword, acronym or abbreviation and sometimes it can feel like there’s a dictionary’s worth to learn!

So what does cognitive overload really mean?

Simply put, it is overloading someone with too much information at once or asking them to perform too many tasks simultaneously, resulting in them not being able to properly process the information.

When creating an eLearning, it can be really easy to slip into doing ‘too much.’ As developers we always want to try and make our eLearning courses as interactive, engaging and visually pleasing as possible, but sometimes simple really is better. ELearning already has a pretty bad reputation for being long and boring, so throw in a bit of cognitive overload too and you’ve well and truly lost your learner, who will very quickly disengage and run straight to the end assessment.

But what does cognitive overload actually look like in eLearning?

Have a watch of the video below, where I take you through an eLearning slide that is the definition of cognitive overload and explore how to simplify it to better suit our brains!

Now you know what cognitive overload can look like within an eLearning, here’s my 5 top tips for to help you when designing your slides and interactions.

1. Keep colour consistent and limit your colour scheme.
   Pick a colour scheme and stick to it! Using 4 - 5 colours is enough, this should include a main text colour (usually a dark shade such as navy or black), a light background colour, and a couple of accent colours. I love using coolors.co to generate a colour palette. If you are working with a company branded colour scheme, ensure you use only these colours!
   
   

2. Limit your slides to one or two forms of media.
   Now this doesn’t mean only put two photos on a slide for example, as sometimes interactions may call for multiple icons or images. What this means is don’t go bonkers and overload one slide with illustrations, icons, photos and video all at once. Not only does this not look great visually, but as with colour, consistency in design can help limit cognitive overload. It’s best to stick to one or two forms of media, for example photography and icons and keep this consistent throughout your entire eLearning.
   
   

3. Simplify your interactivity.
   If you’re finding an interaction or activity has more than 3 instructions or rules, you may want to consider simplifying it. Remember cognitive overload can also be a result of giving the learner too many tasks at once. An example is, “read the passage, then answer the multiple choice question. Click submit when you are done.” This would be the maximum number of steps I would want the learner to take on one slide. Anything after this, should be on a separate slide or layer.
   
   Top tip! Get a colleague to read the instructions for your interaction, see if they can relay back to you what it is they need to do. If they find it difficult to remember or understand then your interaction is probably too complicated!
   
   

4. Add in more slides.
   You may be thinking what?! But surely my eLearning is going to end up at like 50 or 60 slides?! Yes, maybe, but that’s not always a bad thing. More slides doesn’t always mean a super long eLearning. Think of it like this, a scenario activity that’s designed to take 5 minutes will take 5 minutes, whether it’s all crammed onto one slide or split over multiple slides. In fact, having it all crammed on one slide is likely to take the learner longer to complete the activity, as they will spend a greater amount of time trying to process all of the information.
   Splitting text or activities over multiple slides gives you more creative freedom too, just think of all that extra slide space for nice imagery!
   
   

5. Set yourself a word limit per slide.
   When dealing with informative content, such as compliance or technical based eLearning’s, you will often be faced with quite a lot of explanatory text. This can mean we fall into the trap of over explaining and then copying paragraphs of text onto a slide. Not only is this really quite dull, but our learner’s will not read an essay.
   When writing your content, set yourself a word limit per slide, you’d be surprised at how quickly a slide can get filled up with text. I like to stick to around 100 - 150 words per slide (or per layer), anything over this has to be carried over. If you find yourself having to carry a paragraph of content over 3 or 4 slides, question whether you need to paraphrase or condense your wording.

Reducing cognitive overload not only helps to sustain engagement in learning, but simpler, well thought out slides and activities are more accessible too. A win-win for everyone!