Designing Your Course

Chunking Your Content

Introduction

Many Learning Management Systems (LMS), like Canvas, are designed to help you create manageable pieces of learning or "chunking" content. Within Canvas, we will leverage modules to help organize by units, chapters, topics, or weeks. By chunking content, you not only help the learner digest information in smaller pieces and alleviate cognitive load, but you also allow for a learning experience that is more in line with the busy student lifestyle.

Chunking content also meets the mobile design considerations, universal design standards, and quality matters guidelines that we at CPE align with.

Guidelines

Here are some general guidelines you can follow to help you chunk your content.

Presentation Slides

We use Microsoft PowerPoint as a template, to ensure accessibility compliance, so with any presentation format, these guidelines would apply:

Breaking a topic into multiple short videos is highly preferred
3-7 minute videos are the "sweet spot" for the average attention span
You should not speak to a single PPT slide for more than :30 to :60 seconds
Consider that 100 words is roughly 1 minute, so your presentation should not be any more thank 7-14 slides which is about 7 minutes
For each slide, you should not have more than 3-5 bullets
Bullets shouldn't have more than 7-10 words
Use more images (ensure copyright is followed)

Other Rules of Thumb

Discussions within Canvas take the average learner about 5-10 minutes to complete, unless you create more of an activity based discussion
Quizzes take learners an average of 15 minutes for 10-questions
A reading takes an average learner about 10 minutes per page (this may not hold true for blog posts, but you can guess your timings if necessary)