“Meet learners where they are.” It’s one of instructional design’s most foundational mantras. It’s warm, empathetic… and dangerously under-specified. In practice, it often means designing learning experiences optimized for phones, microbursts, and swipes. But at what point does accommodation metastasize into complicity? When does meeting learners where they are become speeding the plow on destroying their already limited attention span and ability to adapt to realistic scenarios?
I don’t ask myself this question as Luddite hand‑wringing; I see it as an instructional design problem with cognitive, behavioral, and ethical dimensions. Even if I wasn’t a learner-centered instructional designer, I’m a learner myself and I often ask myself “would this be good or bad for me?”
When the Medium Is the Distraction
Almost everyone has a phone. It allows for content access (almost) anywhere, at any time. If idealized instruction is built around the concept that learning should be “just in time” and specifically tailored to solving a real-world problem, then a phone can be a great delivery system for people without access to a traditional computer. Smartphones are not neutral delivery vessels; they are attention economies in your pocket. Research on excessive screen time and digital addiction consistently shows diminished sustained attention and working memory when learners are immersed in fast, fragmented content streams (Poles, 2025; Devi & Singh, 2023). Designing instruction for phones means embedding learning inside an environment engineered as much for interruption as it is for access.
The learner does not have access to a learning app in isolation; they can seamlessly switch from a into other apps competing for their attention such as mobile games and social media apps. Meta‑analyses of mobile multitasking show a medium‑to‑large negative effect on recall when learners divide and switch attention during learning (Chen et al., 2025). In other words, the very device we choose for convenience and accessibility may actively erode the conditions required for deep learning.
Cognitive Offloading: When the Brain Gets Laid Off
There is a second, subtler cost. Smartphones facilitate, perhaps even subtly encourage, cognitive offloading (the practice of using external tools to store information outside the brain to reduce mental effort). (Risko & Gilbert, 2016). This matters because memories are meant to be stored in your brain, not in your phone. Studies on the photo-taking impairment effect show that people remember less about experiences they photograph compared to those they simply observe (Henkel, 2014; Soares & Storm, 2022). The phone’s doing the job that is supposed to be done by the brain, that’s one aspect of why our brain can feel bored and life may feel flat. We outsource the work of remembering, and the brain responds by disengaging. This is my primary opposition to the idea of Connectivism as a learning theory, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Most people are just glued to the screens even on trips and vacations capturing instead of creating memories. Ironically, people don’t even reopen those photos often. Cognitive psychology labels this transactive memory failure: when external storage replaces internal encoding without meaningful retrieval (Lurie et al., 2025).
As instructional designers, we should hear the warning siren. When learning becomes another “captured” artifact (saved, bookmarked, screenshot, never mentally rehearsed) it fails to encode/consolidate. Learning that lives only on a device is learning waiting to evaporate.
While using an app to train isn’t in itself cognitive offloading, storing job aids or other retention support items on your phone can lead to a thought process of, “I don’t need to learn this, I’ll just look it up whenever I need it.” Eventually, if enough task repetition supports it, it might become less necessary over time to refer back to reference documents, but it is by no means a guarantee, and it also makes evaluations and assessments of learning at the end of a training difficult. Perhaps the evaluation scores were low, but repeated reference on the job still leads to the required behavior change. Perhaps the evaluation scores from the training were high, but it doesn’t lead to behavior change because long-term retention wasn’t there because the evaluations allowed the use of reference documents that weren’t always accessible, or the task wasn’t repeated enough to support long-term retention. It can be a tricky situation to judge.
Is Designing for Phone Based Learning Designing for Failure?
I won’t bury the lead… No, not always, or perhaps even often. But it is a possibility I don’t think we should ignore. If we confuse access with knowledge, pretending it is ideal for complex reasoning, transfer, and adaptive expertise ignores decades of attention and memory research. Mobile learning (defined as learning facilitated through portable digital devices) can support performance support, reference, and in‑the‑moment guidance (Garzón et al., 2025). But, designing exclusively for phones risks training learners to expect frictionless cognition; no struggle, no sustained focus, no transfer to messy real‑world environments where problems don’t buzz, swipe, or autocomplete.
If the goal posts for learners are always moved and we as designers follow to meet them where they are, what happens when where they are is no longer able to function in the real world because they’re so used to operating without friction or consequence from K-12 learning institutions? Can we support modern adults who have been rasied in this environment? Can they meet us where their employers need them to be? Smarter people than me have asked (and been unable to definitively answer) these questions; but as a designer who wants to create human, ethical, empathetic, and EFFECTIVE learning experiences, these are some troubled waters to navigate and I hope that we will be able to build the necessary resilience and curiosity into our learns that they’re willing to take a step closer to use and not always us taking steps closer to them.
Conclusion: Design for Growth, Not Convenience
Meeting learners where they are should not mean leaving them there. Instructional design must sometimes introduce constructive friction (spaces where attention is protected, memory is exercised, and learners practice adapting to realistic cognitive demands), otherwise, we are not designing learning; we are designing very polite distractions.
Technical knowledge used to last decades, then it lasted years, now in the age of AI it might barely last months. Reference documents might be superior to long-term learning strategies since they can be updated more quickly than fully developed knowledge courses, but learning resilience and adaptation is important, and new knowledge is ever built upon the existing, so we can’t afford to fall behind. No matter how quickly we may be able to turn around updates or create new modules for our learners, I worry that the needs will only ever outpace us going forwards and that long-term knowledge will be more difficult to obtain if people are always relying on micro-learnings and reference documents available from their phones.