Instructional design/Reducing cognitive load in multimedia instruction/Overload Scenario 2

Essential processing (in both channels) > cognitive capacity
Problem:

Too many pictures and/or words and audio at one time leads to Dual Channel Overload

Multimedia Principal

Modality- best use of visual and auditory channels

Instructional Rxs:

Segmenting:

Break up the topic or concept into to smaller bites.

How: Break up concepts in the most logical places. Provide navigation to move forward and backward within the instruction (learner control).

What if you can’t segment the instruction for some reason? Try this:

Pretraining:

Helping the learner construct a mental model of the components of a system before learning how those components operate within the system. How:

Provide training in names and characteristics of components before training on the system itself.

Why this Works: Helps to reduce overload by introducing components before the entire system instead of asking the learner to absorb both at the same time.

Why this Works:

Better transfer occurs when a lesson is presented in learner-controlled segments rather than as a continuous unit. (It will be important at some point to bring all the bits back together.)