Starter kit + working checklist
A working reference for designing online lessons around how attention, memory, and load actually behave — not how a slide deck assumes they behave.
Part one
Six findings from cognitive science that should shape any lesson before a single slide gets built.
New information arrives in chunks of three or four, not floods.
Working memory holds only a handful of new chunks at once. Push past that and the extra material doesn't queue up politely — it just gets pushed out before it's encoded.
Never make learners read and listen to the same words at once.
On-screen text and narration that say the same thing compete for the same processing channel. The duplication feels like reinforcement; it actually raises load and crowds out comprehension.
Pair the right image with the right words — a second route to memory, not decoration.
Ideas encoded both verbally and visually get two independent retrieval paths. A stock photo with no relationship to the concept buys nothing; a diagram that carries the structure of the idea does the real work.
Highlight what matters before learners have to hunt for it.
Searching a screen for the relevant detail is itself a cognitive cost — and one that buys no learning. Cueing with color, arrows, or sequencing spends that attention on the content instead.
Ask before you explain.
The act of trying to recall something — even getting it wrong — strengthens memory more than another pass of being told the answer. Lead with a question, not a recap.
Revisit ideas across days, not just within one sitting.
Repetition packed into a single session feels efficient and fades fast. The same content spread across days, with a small gap to half-forget in between, sticks for far longer.
Part two
Five stages, in the order a lesson actually gets built. Check items as you go — the dial on the right tracks how the design is shaping up.
A lesson trying to teach three things at once teaches none of them well. One observable objective gives every later decision — what to cut, what to test — a clear standard to be judged against.
New material only attaches to something. Without knowing what's already there, content either repeats what learners know or assumes a foundation that isn't.
Deciding what "learned it" looks like before building content keeps the lesson honest — it's easy to write engaging material that never actually proves anyone learned anything.
Matches the segment size to what working memory can actually hold in one pass, rather than to how much fits on a slide.
A diagram that shows the relationship being taught does cognitive work. A photo chosen for mood adds a competing thing to look at and nothing to learn from.
Redundant text and narration force a choice between reading and listening, even though both are delivering the identical sentence.
Anything on screen that isn't load-bearing is still competing for attention. "Engaging but irrelevant" is still a tax on working memory.
A bolded term, an arrow, a highlighted row — small cues that tell the eye where the lesson actually wants it to land.
The effort of trying to recall — even unsuccessfully — does more for retention than a fourth explanation ever will.
A red X with no explanation closes the loop without teaching anything. The reasoning is where the second learning opportunity actually lives.
A single quiz block at the close tests memory of the last five minutes. Practice woven throughout tests — and strengthens — the whole lesson.
Too easy and nothing is encoded; too hard and the learner disengages before encoding can happen. The useful zone is narrower than it looks.
A fixed pace assumes every learner needs the same amount of time on every idea. None of them do.
New vocabulary and a new interface, introduced together, split attention between learning the content and learning how to interact with it.
A segment that can't be finished in one sitting gets abandoned mid-thought, and resuming costs more than starting fresh would have.
The designer already knows the answer, which makes them the worst possible judge of whether the lesson actually teaches it.
An inaccessible lesson isn't a brain-friendly lesson with a gap — for the learners it excludes, it's no lesson at all.
Every extra button, badge, or animation in the interface is drawing on the same attention budget as the content it's meant to be serving.
Without a scheduled return to the material, spacing — one of the most reliable levers for retention — never actually happens.