Notes in this series
All sense-making notes- Why Teaching the Knowledge Isn’t Enough: How Practice Turns “I Know” into “I Can”
How declarative knowledge supports the early development of procedural skills, and how sufficient practice, feedback, and increasing automaticity free up working-memory capacity for learners to build increasingly complex skills.
9 October 2026 - Stop Choosing the Format. Diagnose the Learning First.
How to turn “match the instruction to the learning” into a practical design process moving from performance to knowledge to practice, and only then choosing the instructional format that addresses the actual learning gap.
7 October 2026 - Don’t Fill Working Memory. Equip It.
What information actually belongs in the learner’s head versus what can remain in the environment. It explores how chunking, prior knowledge, and context can help designers turn necessary info into...
7 September 2026 - Your Learner’s Working Memory Is a Desk. Stop Putting Everything on It at Once.
What working-memory overload really means: not simply too much information, but too many things the learner must mentally coordinate at the same moment.
31 August 2026 - A Clean Learning Experience Can Still Make Your Learner Look in the Wrong Place
Attention design is not just about removing distractions, it is also about directing attention toward what matters. It explores how to simplify first, progressively introduce realistic complexity etc.
26 August 2026 - What Happens When Learners Can’t Access the Information We Designed for Them?
Working out the sensory gap between making information perceivable and making it accessible. It explores how instructional designers can provide alternative pathways, especially through redundant cues
16 August 2026 - My Learners Can’t Remember What They Never Perceived
Where detectability fits into the learning process and, after the feedback, clarifying that instructional design begins with analysis, while perception is an early gateway in the cognitive...
6 August 2026 - We Don't Design for Neurons. We Design for the Thinking That Activates Them.
Why instructional designers should design at the cognitive level rather than the neural level and how existing knowledge acts like a learner's canvas.
3 August 2026