Course Design Formula: How to Teach Anything to Anyone Online

The difficulty that is an integral or built-in part of a subject matter is intrinsic cognitive load.

And the brain, like everything else in the world, resists change. Things resist change in order to maintain their integrity. If everything was open to changing all the time, the world would be a shapeless mass of gelatinous goo in which nothing would hold its shape or maintain its structural integrity. If you want to change your brain, you have to

You will get your learners’ attention if you make it clear to them that your course is going to provide something that they want and need in order to make their lives better.

Do they already have the schemas they need, so you are now just going to help them put some additional new information into their existing mental storage bins? Or are you going to have to help them build entirely new mental storage bins from scratch (which takes more work on the student’s part and more guidance from you)?

Schemas: Mental Containers for Storing Knowledge Once a new piece of information has passed through the narrow doorway into the brain’s storage area, it has to be unpacked, analyzed, sorted, and labeled before it can be stored.4 That

It takes less mental effort to learn something new if we can relate it to something we already know. That’s why metaphors are useful teaching tools. A metaphor makes it easy to relate something new and unknown to something familiar.

and use it after said “helper” is gone, you’ll never find anything in there again, no matter how nice it looks. (Don’t ask me how I know this.) The same is true for learning. We learn best when we are able to process, label, and organize new information using our own mental models and our own mental storage and retrieval system.6 We have to build s

it turns out that learners don’t have any existing closets or drawers (schemas) to hold the new clothes (information), then they are going to have to build some. Building a closet from scratch takes a lot more work than just hanging up a new outfit in an existing closet. It takes a lot more work, but it can still be fun, as long as learners get the

Effective teachers make sure they have the students’ attention, make sure their students are clear on what they are about to learn, and make sure students can access relevant prior knowledge needed for the upcoming lesson.

The things that a design situation allows the designer to do, are called affordances. The things that a design situation prevents the designer from doing, are called constraints.