Instructional design/Reducing cognitive load in multimedia instruction/Reducing Cognitive Load in Multimedia Instruction--Conclusion

Reducing cognitive load is the responsibility of all instructional designers. In taking steps to make instruction easier to understand, the designer not only helps the learner but also themselves. Why create instruction that learners struggle unnecessarily to understand? The overarching objective of all instructional design and the designers is to transfer learning.

As more instruction utilizes more powerful and sophisticated multimedia, keeping the learner’s cognitive load in the forefront of the designer’s mind will grow in importance. Understanding how to create the best instructional design to facilitated meaningful learning when using multimedia is where good instructional design should begin and end. After you design instruction, it is also important to go back through the design and look for more issues that could cause cognitive overload. By employing the principals of modality, signaling, coherence, spatial contiguity, temporal contiguity, redundancy, pretraining, and segmenting most overload can not only be reduced but eliminated.