| | JANUARY FEBRUARY 20259as TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram, which engage us by providing an addictive stream of new things to keep us online, are deliberately designed to encourage us to interact superficially with multiple input streams. Designing an online course using similar principles is likely to lead to cognitive overload and surface learning. Similarly, the lack of physicality in online environments means online courses are frequently the site of what can only be described as digital hoarding ­ courses bloated by the number of resources presented to students. Online environments hide the time cost of learning materials in a way that traditional on-campus classes do not. Without careful curation, the proliferation of learning materials can result in an online course that is no longer a coherent learning experience but rather an unstructured and complex collection of resources, making it impossible for the student to distinguish between valuable and unimportant information.Understanding the causes of digital hoarding in course design would take more than the space available for this article, but one key factor is worth considering: hoarding often occurs as compensation for the absence of other socio-psychological needs. In terms of online learning design, teachers accustomed to the energy of the physical classroom often mourn the loss of their synchronous and personal interactions with students. Without expert guidance and support for the development of appropriate mechanisms to maintain these interactions, online teachers may find themselves using content as an extension of and as a proxy for their teacher identity. Engaging with an expert learning designer is a reliable way to address this challenge. Rather than seeking out the mythical ed-tech silver bullet to slay the online learning werewolf, engaging with a learning designer can help teachers create clear pathways through learning for themselves and their students. A coherent learning narrative is an essential part of this process. A learning narrative tells the story of the course from beginning to end. It guides, supports, and cajoles the students through the highs and lows of learning a subject. It helps them make sense of each activity or resource in a course by overtly unpacking the connections between it and the learning that has gone before and which comes after. Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of human communication, but all too often, we forget the value of telling the story of our course or discipline because we are focused on overcoming the challenges of technology and the platform. The support of a learning designer can make the difference between a course that engages students deeply and critically with the content and one which presents an overwhelming and ultimately disengaging accumulation of content. But this can only happen when the expertise of the so-called `third-space' professionals is recognized and acknowledged as a core part of the online learning design process. The support of a learning designer can make the difference between a course that engages students deeply and critically with the content and one which presents an overwhelming and ultimately disengaging accumulation of content
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