Cognitive Load
Disregarding cognitive load is costing you, your learners and your business.
According to the Interaction Design Foundation, “cognitive load refers to the amount of effort that is exerted or required while reasoning and thinking. Any mental process, from memory to perception to language, creates a cognitive load because it requires energy and effort. When cognitive load is high, thought processes are potentially interfered with.”
In other words, if your learner is taking in or processing too much information in a given time period, you’re putting at risk their ability both to learn and to perform.
Cognitive overload is going to impact your learner in at least three ways:
They are forced to pick and choose what to remember. They likely aren’t even doing this consciously. If you don’t have a strategy and design for this, you risk them remembering the less important things and forgetting what’s critical.
They get tired. This is amplified in the virtual delivery environment, in my experience. Too much processing will literally bring fatigue, which makes even the best-designed learning experience start to lose its effect (or worse, impact performance when they’re back on the job).
They have to un-learn and re-learn on the job. Because they didn’t learn effectively in the learning environment, they’re learning on the job (often on their own) and to get it right, they have to back that incorrect code out of their system and re-encode with the correct instructions (so to speak).
Ironically, by shoving twice the amount of “training” content in your learning experience, you’re multiplying exponentially the amount of time it will take someone to actually learn what they need to learn in order to do what they need to do.
These are only a few ways (and I’ll say more in the future about how to mitigate this). How else do you see this impacting your learners and your strategy? How can you use this info to be more consultative with your stakeholders?