INTRO
Most of my learning over the past several years has happened through a screen; sometimes intentionally, sometimes out of necessity, and occasionally out of sheer desperation. Like many professionals in the field, I’ve moved fluidly between formal digital learning environments (learning management systems, structured online courses, and blended programs) and informal spaces like YouTube. But one thing for certain is my relationship with digitally learning didn’t begin as a carefully designed experience grounded in learning theory. It began in survival mode.
EXPERIENCE
When schools shut down during COVID, I was teaching 5th and 6th grade science, and overnight, my classroom became a screen. There was no gradual transition, no professional development runway, and certainly no deep discussion of multimedia principles. The goal wasn’t “effective digital learning” it was: keep students connected, engaged, and learning enough to get through the week. At the time, I thought I was doing digital learning. Looking back through the lens of my LDT coursework, I now realize I was mostly doing digital content delivery.
During that period, my digital instruction leaned heavily on whatever tools were immediately available: slide decks with narration, recorded lessons that mirrored my in-person lectures, long assignments uploaded to the LMS, and the occasional live session that felt more like a roll call than a learning experience. I packed slides with information because I was afraid of leaving something out. I talked through everything because silence felt like disengagement. I added visuals because they were there not because they were purposeful.
Unsurprisingly, students struggled. Attention waned quickly, cameras stayed off, and engagement was inconsistent at best. I remember feeling frustrated that students “weren’t paying attention,” when in reality, I was overwhelming them cognitively. At the time, I didn’t have the language for it, but I was violating nearly every principle of effective multimedia learning. Redundant text and narration, cluttered visuals, long unsegmented videos, and minimal opportunities for application were the norm, not by choice, but by necessity and lack of preparation.
Despite my best intentions, much of what I designed during COVID prioritized coverage over comprehension. Students completed assignments, but retention was questionable. Learning felt fragile and easily disrupted by connectivity issues, home distractions, or simple fatigue. As a teacher, I was exhausted. As a learner designer (though I didn’t know that was the role yet), I was improvising without a framework.
Fast forward to my experience in the Learning Design and Technology (LDT) program, and the contrast could not be sharper. For the first time, I wasn’t just using digital learning, I was being asked to analyze, design, develop, implement and most importantly evaluate it. Suddenly, terms like cognitive load, signaling, coherence, and segmenting weren’t abstract concepts; they explained exactly why my COVID-era teaching felt so hard and often ineffective.
In the LDT program, Mayer’s Multimedia Principles stopped being theoretical and started becoming design constraints I had to work within. I had to justify why something was on a slide. I had to decide what information belonged in audio versus visuals. I had to remove content I personally liked if it didn’t serve the learning goal. This was uncomfortable at first. As a former classroom teacher, my instinct was still to explain everything. LDT forced me to unlearn that impulse.
One of the biggest shifts for me was realizing that less really is more. In my COVID teaching, I equated thoroughness with effectiveness. In LDT, I learned that clarity often comes from subtraction. Segmenting content into smaller chunks, aligning visuals tightly with narration, and eliminating decorative but distracting elements made learning feel lighter even when the content itself was complex.
Equally transformative was encountering Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction. During COVID, most of my instruction lacked a true problem-centered focus. Students were simply completing tasks because I had asked them to. In contrast, LDT assignments consistently asked me to ground learning in authentic scenarios, activate prior knowledge, demonstrate concepts, and provide opportunities for application and integration. The result? I didn’t just complete assignments, I remembered them. Concepts resurfaced across courses and contexts because they were connected to meaningful use, not isolated exposure.
Perhaps the most humbling realization has been empathy. Teaching during COVID gave me empathy for learners dealing with chaos, inequity, and cognitive overload. The LDT program deepened that empathy by showing me how design decisions can either support or sabotage learners’ limited attention and energy. I now see how many of my former students weren’t disengaged, but rather overwhelmed by designs that didn’t respect how learning actually works.
These two experiences, teaching science through COVID and learning through LDT, have fundamentally reshaped how I see myself as a learning designer. COVID taught me resilience, adaptability, and the realities of constrained contexts. LDT gave me the theoretical and practical tools to do better the next time constraints appear (because they always do). Together, they’ve shifted my mindset from “How do I get this content online?” to “How do I design learning that works because it’s online?”
If I were to redesign my COVID-era science lessons today, they would look radically different; not because I’d have better technology, but because I now have a better understanding of learning. And that, more than any platform or tool, is what makes digitally mediated learning effective rather than merely survivable.
CONCLUSION
As a learning design practitioner, these experiences have fundamentally shaped how I approach my work. I am far more sensitive to cognitive load, pacing, and relevance than I once was. I pay closer attention to whether learners are being asked to engage or simply consume. I also think more critically about whether a learning experience respects learners’ time, context, and constraints.
If there’s one lesson I’ve learned from digitally-mediated learning, it’s this: technology doesn’t make learning effective, design does. The best digital learning experiences I’ve had were not the most sophisticated, but the most intentional. They made it easy to focus, meaningful to apply, and possible to retain what I learned long after the course ended. As I continue developing as a learning designer, these experiences serve as both inspiration and reminders of what to emulate, and what to avoid, when designing learning for others.
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