What Does "Less is More" Really Mean in Learning Design?
“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéringy
As often as we’ve heard the phrase “less is more”, there is value in taking a few moments to parse out the phrase with the hopes of understanding the importance within learning design. On the surface, it is quite easy to grasp the notion that content that is less complicated is often better understood and more memorable than content loaded with complexity. The rapid pace of business, competing demands for time and the ease with which information can be accessed have only placed a greater emphasis on the need to simplify the methods with which learning is delivered.
Brevity and the succinct delivery of information have greater value in a time when we seemingly have less time in which to accomplish more tasks. Yet in an era of push notifications, second-screens and status updates, multitasking is the status quo.
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What do these three things have in common? Constant multitasking has a similar effect on the brain as these three obviously cognitively detrimental activities. This is the context in which learning content is being consumed and is therefore even more of a reason that content is short and sweet.
The duration of video content was the subject of an informal poll during the recent Bridge webcast, Six Principles from Cognitive Science that Help Anyone Create Great Training. During that session, 95% of attendees cited that the optimal video length for attention was less than 10 minutes. The ideal duration was between 2-3 minutes for over half of those same members. It’s not a new concept that people will only stick around for a short time before the demands of their lives tempt them to do something else. But even a short video can contain too much information and be perceived as not useful to the end user.
One of the tips from the webcast presenter, Jared Stein, was to bucket the content and rank the information by importance and urgency as a way to ensure that just enough information is being delivered to the audience that needs it at the time they want it. This tool will help instructional designers see what really matters in the content and enable them to effectively kill their proverbial darlings and distill the content down to its most useful version.
Following through on the principal that the best learning content should be short bursts of only the essential information is a great rule of thumb, but that's not the whole bag of tricks to making that learning stick and literally make it work. Because information is simultaneously processed through the ears and eyes and into the working memory, for maximum learning efficiency, the stimuli must work in tandem so as not to create any cognitive dissonance. An example of this is when a keynote speaker, upon flipping to a text-heavy slide, apologizes for the image being a bit of an eye chart. Either the people in the room strain their eyes to read or their eyes simply glaze over while the speaker drones on about the ROI of XYZ. The reason that the people in the crowd aren't learning anything is because their mind can’t process verbal text both through ears and eyes. This is why a combination of words and pictures make for the best learning content.
Finally, one tried and true approach to making sure learning works is by applying the testing effect. Through the use of problem statements as opposed to expository statements and by deploying short quizzes you are enhancing the staying power of your content. So at the conclusion of any short burst of learning, there should be an outlet for the learner to apply what they have learned. This will ensure that there is a tacit understanding of the subject matter within the learner's consciousness, thereby allowing them to get on with business as usual, which as so often happens entails doing more with less.