ABSTRACT
With increasingly advanced tools available for online teaching and learning, it is easy to get carried away with the possibilities for designing flashy, fun, and seemingly motivating learning modules, games, and experiences. Inserting videos, animations, sounds, pop-ups, mouse-hovers, and so on may appear to enrich the learning experience in ways that have never before been possible. Implicit (or even sometimes explicit) in many training programs are the assumptions that if the experience is made enjoyable and easy, learning will occur, and that conditions which support quick acquisition and high performance accuracy during training will lead to effective long-term learning. Decades of research, however, have demonstrated that learners and instructors alike (and, more recently, learning technology developers) do not always understand what strategies are most effective for long-term learning, nor do they appreciate that conditions which appear to support rapid acquisition often do not promote long-term retention. For recent reviews of this subject, the reader is referred to Bjork et al. (2013) and Soderstrom and Bjork (2015).
