First: your blog rocks — it’s in my “first read” group so I’m happy to have you reply here.

OK, regarding my hokey blog title. I was being a little tongue-in-cheek with the title and you’re right, there is no official term called “cognitive underload”. I just thought it was catchy:-)

I wasn’t suggesting that randomizing the UI or learning objectives was my idea of mixing things up. I’m just interested in different ways to design e-learning, and sometimes not listing the objectives in 1, 2, 3 format can be effective.

In one of his books, Michael Allen describes an airline mechanic training scenario that incorporates multimedia to simulate lightning crash sounds, screen flickering and gushing winds that create a sense of drama in place of the course objectives. (Google Books http://tinyurl.com/npx4kz). I think it’s about whether a learner prefers to read why the content is relevant or experience why it’s relevant.

Thank you so much for your comments and participation.

Learners are not like flatbed trucks; you can’t “underload” their working memory per se. I sympathize with your sentiments when you suggest that “our corporate elearning is predictable.” However, learning is (in one sense) meant to be predicable: sorry, but learners need know in advance what the learning objectives are – if they don’t know this, why should they bother investing time, effort and money in undertaking the learning activity. I agree that judicious use of audio wildtrack and Foley FX can assist in creating compelling and immersive content, but can I remind you of the old adage that “less is more.”

I would assert that what you are proposing here is in fact an extraneous load, where non-relevant information is delivered to the learner with appropriate content, meaning the learner has to expend precious working memory to filter the valuable from the useless information.
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I am researching the effect of music on learning in virtual environments and I can support your statements. Instrumental background music at a slow tempo and reduced pitch not only improves learners enjoyment of the virtual environment, but also improves their memory for the content. And this is a statistically significant effect. I can’t give too many details at this moment because I am submitting my thesis at the end of March (2009), but take a look at some of the publications, referenced on my website http://www.fassben.de/Fassben.de/Publications.html
They will at least give you an insight into results from Experiment 1 and preliminary results from Experiment 2.
If you can’t access the papers from the research databases, drop me an email and I’ll send them to you.

Best wishes,

Eric

Background music is typically not going to be the right addition to eLearning, but we shouldn’t forget the lessons learned from tv and video. All sorts of supporting sounds and images are used to enhance the believability, memorability and overall immersion that we encounter as we watch, ***and we’ve all grown up used to these things.

This is but one possible approach for designing elearning scenarios. You’re right, it’s not going to be appropriate or accepted in every organization.

Having multiple design options in our elearning toolkit is an important part of the value we add. Will every design be right for everyone? Of course not. Our industry is replete with many learning models and designs but there isn’t a single, agreed upon rule for how to execute those models. I think that’s what makes our jobs so much fun.

Thank you again for contributing!

David Anderson