A Strategy for Chunking Online Course Content

Here is a detailed process for applying the concept of chunking to your online content. Some steps include tips for maximizing effectiveness. A list of best practices appears lower on this page.

Step 1: Prioritize your content

What's going on

• Apply at the course level
• Helps limit content
• Helps focus content on one central concept or topic at a time
• Helps instructor and students see the big picture and how each chunk fits into that big picture
• Helps establish organization of content

Steps to succeed

• Review your official course outcomes
• Decide what activities and assignments students will do to prove their competency in the official course outcomes
• Review your course textbook or other materials to align "lecture" material with the course outcomes and to make sure any necessary scaffolding of knowledge is built into the lesson sequence

Step 2: Simplify and sort your content

What's going on

• Apply at the lesson level (see Chunking Lessons tab above)
• Break it down into sub-topics
• This is the step most directly seen as chunking
• This helps establish the overall organization at the lesson level

Steps to succeed

• Decide which content is necessary for each graded course activity in your lesson. For example, if you have a discussion topic that relies on students knowing topics A and B, then you will know that topics A and B can be connected and that the discussion assignment can follow. Likewise, if a written assignment is related to topic C, this content and the written assignment can be connected. Your lesson may start to take shape as follows:
  1. Students read text and watch videos for topics A and B
  2. Students post their initial post in the discussion forum (due by Wednesday)
  3. Students continue to read topic C
  4. Students work on written assignment (due by Saturday)
• Following from the step above, determine which content will appear on a given page and how many pages you will have in your lesson. Pages can be separate web pages or they can be contained in a single web page with built-in dividers. In the case above, Topic A and B could be on a single web page, while topic C might be better presented on a separate page. Connecting content that students absorb with activities that students perform
• Decide what self-assessments and other activities will occur in-between topics.
• Create and organize the necessary files and items in the LMS
• Wherever possible, establish a consistent organization to replicate in all (or most) of your lessons. Establishing a pattern will help students understand how to approach the content each week and will help students meet your expectations.

Step 3: Organize, format, and present your content

What's going on

• Apply at the screen level
  • for instructions  see Chunking Instructions tab above
  • and learning content
• Chunking, UX (user experience), UDL, and accessibility all intersect in this step
• This is NOT where an online course build begins. This step begins midway through the process (after tending thoroughly to the steps above) and tends to last for several weeks.

Steps to succeed

• Use Styles, including headings, to organize the page. The use of headings is a keystone of accessible design and also a hallmark of UDL and good UX.
• Use bulleted and/or numbered lists where possible. When created properly, these lists are accessible and also organize information visually, so it's a true win-win. Moreover, the white space that accompanies lists creates spatial relations the brain can use as landmarks.
• Use images and visuals to help explain complex information
• Keep paragraphs short. About 2 to 3 sentences may be long enough. Here is more information on writing for the web. For even more info, see this page on usability and writing for the web.
• Use special formatting (bold, italics, etc.) where necessary, but sparingly

Best Practices for Effective Chunking

• Develop a logic for chunking. Explain that logic to students: they don't see the whole picture the way you do. Provide a "map" to students. The best map in an online class is often a virtual tour of the class made using a screen capture video recorder.
• Be consistent lesson to lesson. Establish a pattern that helps students navigate your lessons and meet your expectations.
• Scaffold information. Use overviews, highlight key takeaways, include summaries, and other techniques to create coherence and reinforce learning from lesson to lesson.
• Leverage the power of micro-learning. Focus on discrete topics in each chunk of your lesson for the most impactful learning.
• Let it sink in. Use quizzes, reflections, self-assessments, and discussions to facilitate learning. Treat these as formative moments in which students can safely explore. Save the summative evaluations for after they have had a chance to learn something.

Keep in mind

You can't completely control the path students take through yours course content. It's not a F2F course where you dole out a sequence of activities during your class session. So build with the best of intentions and with strategies that will create meaningful and engaging learning experiences, and trust students will make the most of it. There are tools, such as adaptive release in Blackboard, and strategies such as inline quizzes, like those one can make using H5P, or assigning staggered deadlines throughout the week, such as one deadline for beginning a discussion and a different deadline for a quiz, that can be used judiciously to assist in scaffolding and chunking of content. But it is not a good idea to rely on these tools to ration the contents of your lesson: It will almost certainly be more trouble than it's worth, and will likely backfire.

Lesson Level Chunking

With the scope of your course determined, let's turn our attention to planning the content of each lesson. Instructors sometimes organize their lesson content by the type of content, such as

• readings
• videos
• quizzes
• discussions
• assignments

The reading or lecture portion for a lesson might take a student a few hours to complete. Students who try to tackle all of the reading at once (especially those who do not use active techniques such as outlining, highlighting, ro note-taking) will likely remember only a small amount of the learning content. Moreover, they may not even focus on the concepts that the instructor feels are important to the course. There are many strategies to help students focus on key content as they read, such as

• pre-quizzes
• overviews that highlight key concepts
• exercises that elicit expectations ahead of reading
• study guides

But these techniques only go so far. Dividing long sections of reading and other lecture materials and including learning activities between those materials is straightforward method of chunking learning content.

Divide and Conquer

Divide the weekly reading and lecture content into manageable chunks. Make each chunk focus on one central topic. Consider how a textbook has reflection or review activities periodically throughout a chapter. These serve to give students a break from ingesting new content, knowing that working memory has its limits. Moreover, when students actively engage in these activities, they purposefully move knowledge from working memory to long-term memory.

How to do it

If you are writing your own lecture content for an online course, break it up into manageable chunks. For unfamiliar content, if students spend 10 to 15 minutes reading at once, their working memory may already be at its limit. At this point, you might include reflection questions or an activity.

Then continue with the next section of your text and include another activity at the end of the topic.

Change it Up

When possible, vary instructional delivery mode. If you find an online video that covers a specific topic better than the textbook does, direct students to watch the video and skip that section of the text.

How to do it

If you are writing your own lecture materials online, simply embed your video where it belongs in your learning content. Surround the video with context explaining its purpose and topic. You may also want to preface the video with some of the techniques list above.

Follow the video with another H5P exercise, or whatever is appropriate. If the video

Align Content and Graded Activities Chronologically

This strategy is especially useful for lessons in which fundamental understanding precedes deeper investigation. For example, in a sociology class, an instructor introduces her students to a notion of "family" that is different from the Western idea of family. It is important that students thoroughly consider what this means before moving on to more intricate issues related to the definition of family. In this class, students view a video that introduces them to this new view of family. Then they participate in an online discussion. The deadline for their first discussion post is Wednesday. This means that everyone must have seen the video and coalesced some thoughts by the middle of the week. Then, in the latter half of the week, students read a second piece of content: a reading that poses thought-provoking dilemmas about family issues in this African culture whose definition of family differs from our own. Students' fundamental understanding of the different notion of family is necessary to approach this reading with a critical eye. Finally, students write a paper based on the reading. This paper is due at the end of the week. In this course, the instructor has sequenced and scaffolded learning content and activities in multiple ways (on screen and lesson levels).

How to do it

1. If your lessons are scaffolded, be sure to chunk and sequence your content so that students engage with preliminary concepts first -- and in isolation of the more advanced concepts.
2. Then include a self-assessment, discussion, or other activity that helps students solidify these concepts.
3. Use inter-week deadlines to encourage students to follow this sequence. Alternately, use adaptive release to ensure students do not move to advanced concepts before they demonstrate understanding of fundamental concepts.
4. When dividing lesson content and hiding activities using adaptive release, it is especially important to include a weekly overview that informs students of the entire workload. Remember when using adaptive release that students won't be able to see some activities until these are released through completion of some criterion.

Consistency is Key

No matter the techniques you use to scaffold, chunk, and sequence your learning content and activities, remember to establish consistent patterns. Follow as much of the same pattern as possible from lesson to lesson. Let students focus on learning and not on trying to figure out how to approach the content.

Screen Level Chunking for Instructions

Screen Level Chunking for Instructions

Chunking is not only about making multiple pages or files. It also encompasses using formatting to organize content on the screen for optimized absorption. Before applying these concepts to our online courses, let's a take a look at an example from the world of cooking to get an idea of how chunking can clarify details and make content easier to understand.

While it doesn't take long to figure out the first example is a list of ingredients, the second example is obviously a list of ingredients at first scan (without ever reading a word). More importantly, when we proceed to cook this dish (Korean Extra Crispy Fried Chicken w Sweet Spicy Glaze, courtesy of Foodista), the second example will be infinitely easier to use in real applications.

On to the Instructions

The same goes for the instructions for the recipe. In fact, this recipe could be further organized by chunking the items related to the batter (and their instructions), the items related to the sauce (and their instructions), and by starting the recipe off with a short overview that explains there are multiple processes and briefly tells the user in what order to begin each process. (Have you ever started a recipe without reading it through only to find out you need to start over, or give time for the dough to rise, etc?) The original recipe has only five steps in the instructions. Each step is a paragraph. While it does consolidate steps, it also lacks clarity. For example, is it clear how many separate components are being assembled in order to make the finished dish? Below is a version of the recipe separated into multiple processes.

Applying Screen Level Chunking to Online Courses

The decision to present the instructions in a series of separate processes may fall in the Lesson Level Chunking domain. But once that decision is made, presenting the information in a layout that reveals the content's organization is a Screen Level step (not that this is our main takeaway!). At the screen level, this recipe now has a series of headings: one for each process. And each process has a number list of steps. This recipe is not identical to a lesson plan, but it actually does resemble something like the Lesson Activities file used in each lesson of our accessible course template.

Application: Accessible course template

The accessible course template includes sections for different learning activities: reading, discussion, group work, assignments, quizzes, and so on. But this is just a starting point! The intent of the template is not to force your lesson content into our pattern. Quite the contrary. As you work with an instructional designer, we will help you customize the layout and sequence of activities to reflect your course content. Click below to open a gallery of three images showing pages Online Learning has customized for different courses.

• Customized table to align online readings and videos, plus a custom style to set apart supplemental resources
• Custom blockquote style to draw attention to the source material.
• Video (bottom of frame visible at top of image), followed by an expandable "Spoiler Alert". Students can click to reveal hints.

Application: Assignments

In Blackboard, you may want to explain an assignment -- it's requirements, the topic, etc. -- within the Lessons Activities page, and then include instructions on submitting the assignment where you use the Assignment tool. (The Assignment tool is just a place for students to submit files for graded assignments.) It is helpful to include the submission instructions where the paper is turned in so students have that information in front of them when they are ready to submit. Here is an example of how that may look. Notice the clarity in the instructions due to the formatting.

Application: Instructions for papers, projects, or discussions

If you have ever been frustrated because you told students exactly what you wanted them to do on a paper (or whatever assignment) and could not understand how they could possibly turn in something so... so... NOT what you told them to do... the struggle is real! We understand the balance between telling students what to turn in and making sure students understand what you want. Sometimes some editing for simplicity and clarity can go a long way. Often, screen level chunking and formatting of information can relay your instructions more effectively. Consider these examples:

In the example above, built-in formatting features of the Haystack version of our accessible template, such as the orange colored number buttons and the gray background bubble around text areas, work in tandem with good information chunking to create an accessible and also visually informative set of instructions. Starting steps with action verbs and judiciously applying bold font also emphasizes key aspects of the instructions.

In the example above, the steps of the assignment have been broken down into the material students should review, the questions they should address, and the shape their response should take. This is a great example of chunking on the screen level due to the layout and formatting elements. It also demonstrates lesson level chunking in that this instructor has located the necessary blog post (content students need to review) in context with the assignment that is related to that content.

Screen Level Chunking for Learning Content

Embrace the fact that online "readers" actually scan and skim. Build your content pages to strategically capitalize on this behavior. Long blocks of sentences are a sure-fire way to convince students not to read your content. On the other hand, following the guidelines below will help you write content that moves readers through the text naturally.

1 Use Headings

• Headings create visual landmarks
• They are also accessible page navigation elements
• They automatically add white space

How to add headings:

1. Type the text you want to use as a header on its own line
2. Highlight that text (and no blank spaces or lines above or below)
3. Click the drop down menu in the editor toolbar and select the appropriate level of heading
4. Be sure to order levels just like in a good outline:
   1. Nest levels hierarchically
   2. and do not skip levels (ie: do not go from Level 2 heading to Level 4 heading because it "looks" the way you want it to) as this causes accessibility errors

2 Use Lists

• Lists visually organize information
• Lists also summarize information when the use of complete (and, especially, lengthy) sentences is avoided
• Lists are accessible page elements when created using HTML
• They automatically add white space

How to make a list:

1. Type the words or phrases for your list on separate lines
2. Highlight all lines of the list text and no lines above or below
3. Click the button for the desired type of list (numbered/ordered or bulleted) in the editor toolbar
4. Sub-lists can be created by following the steps above and including all steps of the sub-list(s) as well, then
   1. highlight the lines that belong to a sub-list
   2. click the increase indent button in the editor toolbar
   3. modify list style or numbering style as desired by clicking the down arrow to the right of the list style button

3 Use Short Paragraphs

There is no magic number, though some guidance suggests limiting paragraphs to 3 or 4 sentences. Obviously, this will depend on the length of sentences. In academia, we might expect our readers to persist through longer chunks of text. But the medium (online vs. print) is going to influence behavior. To help in reducing the length of your paragraphs, consider whether some of the content can be presented in list form (above). Also consider breaking up stretches of text by including images where appropriate (below). Read more tips on writing for an online audience here

4 Use Images where Appropriate

• Used judiciously, images can enhance content by clarifying concepts and establishing context
• Images add immediate visual landmarks and white space

Use images to illustrate abstract concepts

When a text-only description can barely convey the necessary information, supplement your text with an image that makes things clear. Examples include using an image to explain a story problem, lab experiment, case study, and so on.

Keep in mind that images cannot be used in place of text unless a text alternative is included.

Use images to convey context

An image before a reading passage can cue the reader in to the tone of the coming passage. For example, an image of a dark alley draped with police tape used before a case study involving a murder scene can put readers into a frame of mind that helps them make the most of the reading. In this way, images can activate schema, set up expectations (which are then tested as the reader continues -- a wonderful, subtle way to increase interaction with the text), and in other ways contextualize the learning content.

Keep in mind that images can convey atmosphere or tone, but should not be used to convey course content. All course content needs to be presented in an accessible manner and images without full text alternatives may not be accessible.

How to use Images in Online Pages

Click here for more information on making your images accessible and inserting images into your online course

5 White Space

Actually, adding white space happens naturally when you use the techniques above. In fact, adding white space manually, such as by pressing the <ENTER> key several times, is a bad practice that causes user experience issues and accessibility issues. So while you do not need to explicitly try to add white space, you may be interested in seeing it in action and learning more about its benefits. The links below include some great information!

• Benefits of white space on websites

Discussions of white space with great visual examples

• Whitespace in Web Design: What It Is and Why You Should Use It
• Why whitespace matters