How to Deal With Too Much Content and Avoid Information Overload - Your eLearning World. How to Deal With Too Much Content and Avoid Information Overload Having more content than you know what to do with is a common problem.
It’s actually more common than having too little, with course creators beginning the process with years of research, SME input, and ideas on what their mega-course will look like. Here are 5 things you can do if you have TOO MUCH content! #1 Keep focused on your learner What skills or knowledge are essential for their improvement? The content being added should always pass the “need to know vs. nice to know” test. If you’re having trouble narrowing down what fits into each of these buckets, revisit the learning objectives and measure each chunk of content against that objective. . #2 Deliver it like a bullet Just as you can have too many content ideas and topics, you can be too wordy on delivering them to your learner. Master the method of explanation, so you can concisely transfer the needed skills and knowledge to your audience as efficiently as possible. Save. Backward Design, Forward Progress. Readers of Faculty Focus are probably already familiar with backward design.
Most readily connected with such researchers as Grant Wiggins, Jay McTighe, and Dee Fink, this approach to course construction asks faculty to initially ignore the specific content of a class. Rather, the designer begins the process by identifying desired learning goals, and then devising optimal instruments to measure and assess them. Only thereafter does course-specific content come into play—and even then, it is brought in not for the sake of “covering” it, but as a means to achieve the previously identified learning objectives.
Courses designed this way put learning first, often transcend the traditional skillset boundaries of their discipline, and usually aim to achieve more ambitious cognitive development than do classes that begin—and often end—with content mastery as the primary focus. Yet, backward design has benefits beyond those outlined above. Dr. L. Patch Adams, dir. More Content Doesn’t Equal More Learning. With access to a world of information as close as our phones, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all there is to teach.
New material continues to emerge in every academic discipline, and teachers feel a tremendous responsibility not only to stay current themselves, but to ensure that their learners are up to date on the most recent findings. Add to this information explosion the passionate desire by faculty members to share their particular areas of expertise and it’s easy to see why content continues to grow like the mythical Hydra of Greek legend. And like Hercules, who with each effort to cut off one of Hydra’s nine heads only to have two more grow in its place, faculty struggle to tame their content monsters.
The two most common strategies for managing course content rarely yield positive results. Cutting back or trimming content leads to agonizing decisions but does not produce substantive changes. Perhaps it’s time to rethink the role of content in teaching and learning. Have You Tamed the Content Monster in Your Courses? December 8th, 2015 By: Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti In our role as instructors, most of us deal with the problem of too much content.
We often embrace a “content coverage” model in designing our courses, in which we attempt to cover all of the material that we deem important or interesting in the area of our course. The result is a course that increasingly balloons out of control each year as more and more content is added, resulting in a harried instructor and frustrated students. Nicki Monahan recommends a different approach. The year is 2022. Most instructors will pick a fundamental concept or discipline-specific way of reasoning rather than a fact or data point. In her recent Magna Online Seminar, “Taming the Monster: Rethinking the Role of Content,” Monahan suggests five more key ways to help keep the course focus on the fundamental concepts that are most important: The content monster is not likely to disappear any time soon.
Seven Guidelines for Designing Effective Course Pages for the Online Classroom. June 18th, 2013 By: Rob Kelly The design of your course pages can have a significant effect on the learning experience in your online course.
Good design can draw students in, help them comprehend the information the first time they read it, and enable them to easily retrieve information, says Sheree Webb, an instructional designer at Tyler Junior College. In an interview with Online Classroom, Webb suggested designing courses in a simple, consistent manner, employing the following principles: Use meaningful headings and subheadings. For a demonstration, click on the video below. Reprinted from Course Page Design Tips Online Classroom, 12.6 (2012): 2-3. Nine Tips for Creating a Hybrid Course - Faculty Focus. October 29th, 2008 By: Rob Kelly Most instructors supplement their face-to-face courses with some online learning materials such as online syllabi, handouts, PowerPoint slides, and course-related Web links.
All of these can add to the learning experience, but they are merely a start to making full use of the learning potential of the online learning environment in either a hybrid or totally online course. Although there is no standard definition of a hybrid course, one characteristic that makes a course a hybrid is the use of the Web for interaction rather than merely as a means of posting materials, says LaTonya Motley, instructional technology specialist at El Camino Community College in California.