Online Course Design - Keep It Super Simple
He should have just stuck to Scooby Snacks.
A simple approach is always going to win. This is true for the LMS as well as for course designs. Canvas gives you the power to quickly embed multimedia and hypertext anywhere in your course. But with great power comes great responsibility. We want learners to focus on the learning activity, and not be weighed down by extraneous cognitive load1 that may arise from complicated or confusing design choices. Here are some tips that will help teachers and course designers keep instruction super simple:
1. Less is more. In general:
Shaggy in a hall of mirrors with a robot.
- “Omit
needlesswords”2... - ...And multimedia3. Only include video, slides, or external hyperlinks when they clearly support learning. List everything else as references.
- Avoid redundancy which splits attention or causes information overload.4
- Tear down the wallpaper. Avoid media as decoration; instead, grab students’ attention with relevant stories and anecdotes.
3. Clear, concise directions. Students need explicit directions (except when they don’t). But if we want students to read those directions, paying attention to the critical bits, we need to write as concisely as possible. Rubrics and Outcomes will help ensure that your assessment criteria are neatly expressed with clear ties to course goals.
4. Stay on target. Being able to clearly articulate how every learning activity maps to a specific outcome is one way of keeping the weeds out of the garden. If you can’t identify how a reading, activity, or assessment supports a course outcome, chances are you don’t need it.
Worst homepage ever.
So, while Canvas’s simple interface and rich feature set makes it easier to do more with your courses, remember Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s words, “Perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Keep learning,
Jared Stein
1
EduTech Wiki, "Cognitive Load"
http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Cognitive_load
2 Steve Krug, "Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability" http://books.google.com/books?id=g1QBFJxB_eEC
3 Ruth Colvin Clark, Frank Nguyen, John Sweller, "Efficiency in learning: evidence-based guidelines to manage cognitive load" http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iKVhZ4wj82cC
4
Richard E. Mayer, Roxana Moreno, "Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Overload in Multimedia Learning"
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15326985EP3801_6
5
A. Shapiro, D. Niederhauser, "Learning from hypertext: Research issues and findings"
http://www.mendeley.com/research/learning-hypertext-research-issues-findings/