White Paper: 6 Steps to Reduce Content Overload

Learning content has never been easier to create

It is true that creating learning content comes with its own sets of challenges, but the plethora of tools available today have made authoring somewhat easier. What is not getting easier, however, is information overload for the learner.

Organizations with the ability to easily create content on the fly means that new content is often created for every situation. Now, learners have to sift through mountains of content to get the information they need. A recent report showed that 24 percent of learning leaders said content overload was a huge problem in their organizations, and 38 percent more said that knowledge transfer and retention of content are their biggest challenges.

John Sweller, an Australian educational psychologist that is known for formulating an influential theory of cognitive load, says there are three types of cognitive load: intrinsic, extraneous, and germane, that together add up to total cognitive load.

A recent report showed that 24% of learning leaders said ‘Content Overload’ was a huge problem in their organizations.

Sweller states that there is a need to develop instructional design principles based on our knowledge of brain and memory. So in essence, these three types of cognitive load must be less than the current working memory capacity of the learner.

Due to the limitations of working memory, it is important to reduce this problem of learning content overload.

Here are six, manageable steps you can take:

1. Bring Your Content Under One System
2. Reduce the Amount of Content You Have
3. Update the Most Used Content First, Then Reintroduce and Reuse
4. Tag and Organize to Increase Findability
5. Increase Availability of Learning Content
6. Analyze and Revisit

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