To continue my theme of late in looking at the research about cognitive demands in distance education, I will conclude with my assessment that there is a decent amount of research done about extraneous cognitive load in DE (the CL related to instructional style, design, or method), and a small but growing bit of research about germane cognitive load in DE (the CL related to schema making–the “good” CL). However, there is almost nothing about intrinsic cognitive load in DE. Intrinsic cognitive load is the cognitive load inherent in the material to be learned. For example, no matter how effective your teaching methods, there will be some cognitive load involved in learning Quantum Physics, because there is cognitive load related to that subject matter, regardless of the instructional design.
In our chapter for the upcoming new edition of the Handbook of Distance Education, we (Hannafin, Hill, Song and myself) discuss this lack of research related to intrinsic cognitive load in DE. In preparing for that chapter, I found that information literacy research has a few studies that could be relevant. For example, Jones, Ravid, and Rafaeli (2004) reported a trend towards high intrinsic load in informal online spaces. They based this finding on an analysis of more than 2.65 million postings in over 600 Usenet newsgroups over a six month period. They found that the higher the intrinsic load in this online material, the less the users participated. I know this finding seems kind of obvious, but still interesting because if true, then this could be one reason why DE has such a high attrition rate. Maybe there is some material that has too high of an intrinsic load to even be appropriate for DE. This could raise some questions:
1. Is intrinsic cognitive load more of a predictor of attrition in DE than in traditional education?
2. How much can good design compensate for high intrinsic cognitive load in DE?
3. How can you measure the intrinsic load presented by a particular set of material to be learned?
4. Does the community influence the ability of folks to handle higher intrinsic cognitive load? Can a well-supported online community keep participation high in these tougher subjects? Is promoting community learning perhaps, then, more critical for difficult subjects to be learned?
5. How do varying levels of expertise impact intrinsic load in DE? Could this have potential for adaptive learning in DE? (Federico, 1999).
As always, interested in your thoughts!
References
Federico, P.-A. (1999). Hypermedia environments and adaptive instruction. Computers in Human Behavior, 15(6), 65392-65392.
Hannafin, M. J., Hill, J. R., Song, L., & West, R. E. (in press). Cognitive Perspectives on Technology-Enhanced Distance Learning Environments. To be included in the next edition of the Handbook of Distance Education, edited by Michael Moore.
Jones, Q., Ravid, G., & Rafaeli, S. (2004). Information overload and the message dynamics of online interaction spaces: A theoretical model and empirical exploration. Information Systems Research, 15(2), 194-210.
To be fair, I should mention that there is very little research done
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