#62 Why Your Online Course Feels Confusing, Even When the Content Is Valuable

What makes an online course feel clear, easy to follow, and worth completing?

It is not just the amount of information inside it.

In this episode of The ART of Online Course Creation, Shannon explores why many well-intentioned course creators accidentally make their courses harder to learn from by adding too much content, too many options, and too much explanation without enough structure.

You will hear why cognitive load matters in online course design, how confusion quietly leads students to disengage, and why strong teaching often looks deceptively simple from the outside.

This episode is for course creators who want their students to move through their course with more clarity, confidence, and momentum, without dumbing down the material or stripping away its value.

Inside this episode, you will hear about:

•  Why “more content” does not always create a better course 
•  How cognitive load affects student learning and follow-through 
•  The difference between deep learning and unnecessary mental strain 
•  Why students need a clear learning path, not just access to your expertise 
•  The invisible structure that makes good teaching feel simple 

If you want to create an online course that does more than deliver information, this episode will help you think more carefully about the clarity, structure, and learner experience behind your content.

Get started on your own course creation journey or learn how to make your existing course even better at The "Your Best Course" Build Lab, my interactive and supportive online community.

To get started creating your own online course, check out my new freebie that will take you through the steps of choosing a topic that will be profitable for YOU.

To book a call to discuss your options and see if working together makes sense.  Click here. 😊

Transcript

Shannon Boyer 0:35

If someone has to spend a lot of mental energy just figuring out where you're going with your course, they have far less energy left to actually learn from you. Hello and welcome back to The Art of Online Course Creation. I'm your host, Shannon Boyer. In episode 60, we talked about the fact that a course is not just a container for information, it's an experience of learning. We looked at why two courses can cover similar material and still feel completely different to the person moving through them today. I wanna zoom in on one specific part of that learner experience, and that's clarity. More specifically, I wanna talk about what happens when clarity is missing. This is one of the most common problems I see in online courses, and it's also one of the easiest to overlook when you are the one creating them. Most course creators are not trying to make things confusing. Usually the opposite is true. They care deeply, they want to be helpful, and they want students to feel like they're getting real value. So what do they do? They add more explanation, more options, more nuance, more examples, more context. But from the learner side, that doesn't always feel helpful. Sometimes it just feels overwhelming and difficult to follow. The student is trying so hard to listen and learn, but at the same time, they're also trying to figure out what matters, how do things connect and are they even interpreting the lesson correctly? What are they supposed to do next? That kind of mental strain makes learning much harder than it needs to be. And that strain has a name. It's called Cognitive load. And while that phrase can sound a little academic, the idea itself is very practical. Cognitive load is simply the amount of mental effort someone has to use in order to process what is in front of them. We all have limited working memory. We can only hold so much at once. So when a course is unclear or overly broad, badly sequenced, or full of unnecessary decisions, the learner ends up spending a lot of their mental energy on things other than the learning itself. They're sorting, interpreting, comparing, orienting and guessing. And that's a problem because the more energy they have to spend on managing confusion, the less they have left for understanding, reflection, and application. So in this episode, I want to talk about why clarity matters so much, what cognitive load really means inside a course, and why reducing unnecessary cognitive load is part of our responsibility as course creators, because when teaching is done well. A lot of the most important work has already happened before the learner even arrives. And if you don't understand that, it's very easy to assume that value comes from putting more in when often the real skill lies in knowing what belongs, what does not, and what the learner needs from you. Right now. okay, so as we've just said, one of the easiest mistakes to make as a course creator is to assume that more information will naturally make the course more valuable. And that assumption makes sense, especially when you care deeply about your students and you genuinely want to help them. If you know a lot, it can almost feel irresponsible not to share everything. You don't want the student to hit a problem later and think, well, why didn't she tell me this? So what you do is you keep adding more, more explanation, more examples, more options, more nuance, more bonus materials, more ways to approach the same issue, more little videos, answering questions that people have asked. From the creator's point of view. That can feel generous and it can feel like you're actually keeping your course up to date. But from the learner's point of view, it can feel heavy. And this is where I think a lot of course creators unintentionally confused, being thorough with being effective. They are not the same thing. A course can be full of useful ideas and still be hard to move through. It can be extremely knowledgeable and still feel mentally chaotic. It can have real value in it and still leave the student wondering what they're supposed to do with all of that knowledge and all of that information. And that happens because information does not teach itself. The learner's not just receiving content, they're trying to make sense of it while it is coming at them. They're deciding what matters, what applies to them, how one lesson connects to the next, and whether something is a core part of the path or just an optional variation if the course creator has not made those things clear. The student ends up having to do the work themselves, and that's where the cognitive load starts to become a problem. At its simplest cognitive load is the amount of mental strain being placed on the learner at one time. Some of that effort is absolutely necessary. Learning always takes mental work. If someone is grappling with a new concept, practicing a new skill, or stretching their thinking, that is appropriate. That is part of the real work of teaching, but there is another kind of mental effort that is not really helping the learner at all. It comes from poor organization, unclear framing, too many competing ideas, too many decisions too early or too many options without guidance. In other words, it comes from the way the course is designed and that is the kind of load that we have a responsibility to reduce. Because if a learner's limited working memory is being used up trying to understand your structure, there's less room left for them to understand your content. That's why a course can feel exhausting even when the topic itself is not the problem. The student isn't tired because the material is too deep. They're tired because too much of their mental energy is being spent on navigating the experience instead of learning from it. I think this is one of the reasons so many people quietly disengaged from courses that looked promising when they bought them. They may still believe the teacher is smart or knowledgeable. They may still believe that there's a value in the material. But each time they go back to the course, there's a kind of friction waiting for them. They have to reorient themselves. They have to remember where they were. They have to sort through too much. They have to decide what to focus on, and eventually that starts to feel like work before the actual work even begins. That's not a motivation problem, at least not primarily. Often. It's a clarity problem, and once you understand that, you start to see that one of the most valuable things a course creator can do is not add more, but think more carefully about what the learner actually needs in order to move forward without carrying unnecessary mental strain. I had a really clear experience of this myself when I took a course that was so confusing. I didn't even know where to start. From the outside, it probably looked substantial. The creator clearly knew a lot. There was a lot of material, a lot of possible approaches, a lot of nuance, a lot of ideas. If you'd glanced at the table of contents or the imaginary table of contents, you probably would've thought, well, this person is giving so much. But that was not what it felt like to be on the inside, what it felt like was disorienting, and I kept asking myself the same question over and over, where is she going with this? That was the experience. Not curiosity, in a good sense, not a feeling of being thoughtfully led somewhere, but more like a constant effort to figure out the logic of the lesson. While I was trying to learn from it and I kept wondering how this connected to what I just learned, I was trying to figure out whether I was looking at options, examples, separate methods or things that all had to be combined. There would be one module on doing something one way and another module on doing it differently. But the relationship between them wasn't clear. I couldn't tell whether I was being shown alternatives or whether I was expected to somehow synthesize everything into one larger approach. So before I could even begin applying anything, I had to decode the structure. And that's exactly the kind of invisible labor that good course design is supposed to remove. And this is such a common mistake, course creators want to help. So they show all the possibilities. They want the student to feel fully informed. So they include every route, every variation, every option they know. But what often happens instead is that the learner ends up with without a clear sense of direction. And there's an authority problem buried in that too. People are not joining your course because they want access to every possible way that something could be done. They'd go to YouTube for that. They're joining because they want to understand the path you recommend. They want to know where you would begin, what you would prioritize, and how you would lead them through the process. That's part of what makes teaching feel trustworthy. If I enter your course and you immediately hand me a dozen possible directions without enough guidance, I don't feel supported. I feel like the burden has quietly been handed back to me, and now I have to sort through it and decide what applies and hope I make the right choice. That doesn't feel like leadership. It feels like extra work, and that's exactly why. Trying to be everything to everybody so often backfires In an effort to include everyone, the teaching becomes less clear for the person who's actually trying to follow it. What the learner usually needs is not more possibility. What they need is a stronger sense of direction. They need to understand what path they're being invited to follow. They need to know what matters now and what can wait. They need enough structure that they can settle into the learning rather than staying in a constant state of interpretation. And that was what was missing in the course that I took. The problem was absolutely not that the creator lacked knowledge. The problem was that the knowledge hadn't been shaped into a learning path. And when that shaping has not happened, the learner feels it immediately. Even if they can't describe it in those terms, they just know it feels harder than it should. This is the part I think a lot of people miss when they look at really good teaching. When teaching is done well, much of the hardest work is invisible. The learner sees the finished lesson. They hear the explanation. They move through the examples. They complete the activity. What they do not see are all the choices that made that lesson feel clear in the first place. They don't see what was cut. They don't see what was saved for later. They don't see what distinction was intentionally delayed because introducing it too early would've made everything harder to follow. They don't see how many decisions were made In advance so that they would not have to make them well learning. And that's one reason why good teaching can look deceptively simple. From the outside, it reminds me a little of abstract painting really. People sometimes look at an abstract painting and think, oh, a child could have done that, but what they're missing is all the trained judgment behind it. They're not seeing the artist's understanding of composition, balance, color restraint, movement, proportion contrast, and visual tension. They're only seeing the final piece, not the years of knowledge, and then the many invisible decisions that made it aesthetically powerful instead of random. Good teaching is like that from the outside, it can look obvious. It can look easy. It can even look simple enough that people underestimate the craft involved. But clear teaching is not accidental. It's the result of discernment. It requires the ability to step outside your own expertise long enough to remember what it feels like not to know yet. It requires understanding which distinctions matter right now and which ones will only create noise at this stage. It requires resisting the urge to put everything in at once simply because you know it. And this is where I think a lot of course creators get tripped up because they worry if they narrow the focus too much. Someone will feel left out. They worry that if they simplify the path, people will not see how much they know. They worry that if they don't include every angle, they will not seem thorough enough. But quite the opposite actually happens when the course feels overcrowded. People don't usually come away feeling more confident in the teaching. They come away feeling uncertain. They might not know exactly why, but they can feel that they were not being well guided. Strong teaching creates a very different experience. It tells the learner often without saying so directly, you don't need to carry all of this at once. I've already thought carefully about the path. I know what matters here and now I know what belongs now. I know what belongs later, and you can trust the sequence. And that trust really matters. It reduces unnecessary cognitive load, gives the learner more capacity to focus on the real work of learning. It lowers the amount of mental sorting that they have to do, which means more of their attention go, can go toward understanding, reflection, and application. And that's why clarity is not just a nice touch, it's a serious part of good design, and that's our responsibility as course creators. Not because we're trying to spoon feed people or remove all the challenge. Learning should still require effort. Thinking should still require effort. Practice should still require effort. I am not against effort, but the effort should come from grappling with meaningful material, not from trying to decode the teaching itself. That is the important distinction. A good course may still stretch the learner. In fact, I'm gonna say a good course will still stretch the learner, but it doesn't waste their energy. And that brings me to today's one bold idea. What makes a course feel clear is not just what the teacher knows, it is the invisible structure underneath the teaching. And most people don't realize that structure is even there. And I think that's such an important thing to understand because a lot of course creators assume clarity is mostly a matter of explaining well or cutting a few things out. And yes, those things can help, but they're not the whole story. What people often don't realize is that there's an underlying structure to good teaching. Information has to be organized in a way the learner can actually process. It has to be broken into pieces that make sense together. It has to be introduced in an order that supports understanding instead of making the learner work to assemble the logic on their own. Even the way something is framed matters because framing affects whether the learner understands why this idea belongs here, what they're supposed to notice, and how it connects to what came before. And that's the part that many people miss. They see a course that feels smooth and clear, and they assume that is just because the teacher knows a lot or is naturally good at explaining what they don't see is the structure underneath it. They don't see the decisions about sequencing, chunking, emphasis, pacing, and scope. They don't see the way that learning has been shaped so that the student can move through it with less mental strain. And because the structure is mostly invisible, it's easy to underestimate how much skill it takes to build. That's one of the reasons people think that if they have seen a good course, they know how to create one, or if they know their subject really well, they'll naturally know how to teach it well online. But there's more going on than most people realize. A course can look simple on the surface and still be held together by a great deal of expertise underneath. It can feel natural to the learner precisely because someone has done the hard work of building the path carefully. That's why clarity is such a strong marker of quality. It tells me that someone has not just poured their knowledge into a course, they've shaped that knowledge into a learning experience, and those are not the same thing. So as we wrap up, here's what I hope you take with you. If your course feels mentally exhausting to move through, the issue may not be that it lacks value. The issue may be that the value has not been shaped clearly enough for the learner to receive it. Well. Students don't just need your knowledge. They need a well-designed path. Through that knowledge, they need you to reduce unnecessary cognitive load so that their mental energy can go toward learning, not sorting through confusion. And that's one of the hidden marks of a high quality course. If this episode is making you realize that good teaching involves far more behind the scenes decision making than most people understand, that's exactly the kind of work I help course creators do inside my signature program. Your best course experience. Inside the program, we focus on building courses that are not only full of value, but intentionally designed so that students can move through them with clarity, confidence, and momentum. If you wanna learn more about your best course experience, you can message me on Instagram, Shannon l Boyer, or set up a call with me to talk through your situation about whether the program would be a good fit for you, and you can find the link to do that in the show notes. Until next time, keep learning, keep growing, and keep asking questions.