Failing grades double and triple amid pandemic learning. Maybe better online content could help?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/montgomery-county-failing-grades/2020/12/03/913affd0-34fb-11eb-8d38-6aea1adb3839_story.html?tid=ss_tw

In the spring, while barely managing to get my own (privileged) kids ready for remote schooling, it seemed intuitively obvious that, on the whole, low-income students would suffer that most. And now, sadly, we're seeing some confirmation of this as the data comes in.

Of course, daunting systemic challenges are the real cause of this problem, and these don’t have easy solutions, to say the least. But one small improvement we could make would be to re-examine our approach to the content that we deliver to our students.

We have a huge body of education research, and tools and resources to help do this work. So, a few related suggestions, in no particular order. -- To be clear, this is a tweet-storm and I am no expert. If you have helpful resources please share them below. Thanks!

Didactic content (especially dense material) should be "chunked" to limit the cognitive load it presents for would-be learners:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_load

Add visualizations where possible: pictures beat text by a mile (h/t Dr. John Medina) and can increase the information that can be squeezed into learning chunks.
http://www.brainrules.net/vision 

A taller order: Have the content (or the teacher) be as entertaining as possible. See @david_perell on the topic of teaching and entertainment. https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1284657927274369024

South Korea's wildly successful online teachers aim to entertain.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-education-crazy-south-korea-top-teachers-become-multimillionaires/2014/12/29/1bf7e7ae-849b-11e4-abcf-5a3d7b3b20b8_story.html

Make liberal use of online video repositories like Khan Academy and Youtube. Students use these already, they're often quite good, and it's not always necessary to recreate lesson. The classroom can then be used for more active and interactive learning.