Many postsecondary instructors are teaching online courses, but are these instructors making informed decisions in their online teaching? One common mistake that online instructors make in their teaching is to provide students too much instructional content of little or no relevance. Cognitive load theorists suggest that this practice presents students with too many options, leading students to experience cognitive overload. The recommended solution for this problem is to hide nonessential course content from student view. Hiding unnecessary course content from students ensures that informational resources in a particular course are relevant to instructional topics being addressed in the course and limits student access to nonessential instructional content. Providing students context-specific information decreases the cognitive demands that complex tasks place on the limited resources of students’ working memory.
A second problem that is quite common in online pedagogy is the lack of instructor support for course navigation. Many students become confused or disoriented when attempting to navigate an online course, as students are forced to recall multiple navigation paths. This problem is exacerbated by course navigation procedures that are complex, inconsistent, and insufficient. The recommended approach to helping students navigate an online course is to use a consistent layout and navigation structure. Students should be able to easily locate course tools and informational resources by adhering to consistent navigational routines.
Course organization is a third factor that online course instructors often ignore. A poorly-organized course can increase the complexity of learning tasks in a given online course, making learner fulfillment of learning tasks difficult. The difficulties that learners encounter in a poorly-organized online course result from the instructor’s failure to consider brain architecture in their presentation of instructional materials. This architecture suggests that information is stored in the brain as a network of concepts or ideas. Cognitive theorists use the term “chunking” to refer to this web of ideas. It is recommended that course instructors organize information by themes or categories to achieve such networks that are consistent with human brain functioning.
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