From the very beginning, online learning design has principally focused on developing analytical and linear cognitive capabilities. As we are told repeatedly, these capabilities are essential for learners to hold down a successful job and build a powerful economy. Overwhelmingly learning design has engendered the cognitive operations of mind most commonly found in Mathematics, Chemistry, Language, Engineering and Business education.

This approach is underpinned by cognitive load theory which holds that for online instruction to be effective, care must be taken not to overload the mind’s capacity for processing information. Consequently, designers become concerned with extraneous load, working memory, redundancy and concerns about temporal and spatial split attention. All to ensure that students never become cognitively overloaded.

Kadenze Academy has developed an instructional design learning framework called Technology Enabled Creative Learning [TECL]; an arts-led learning framework which encourages learners to stay with all their senses (not only their cognition). We acknowledge that many creative arts and design experiences are deliberately designed to stretch the limits of cognition; that not all cognitive overload is necessarily negative. In such cases cognitive overload does not result in a loss of meaning or intelligibility. Indeed, it can be understood as cognition in the making, where the very fabric of cognitive life is renewed as it struggles to make sense of experience.

Kadenze educators see productive possibilities for learning in the overload, not simply as events which inhibit and confuse, but ones rich with imaginative and adventurous potential to transform knowing and understanding.