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Chunking and Sequencing Activities and Assessments in Your Course

We want to introduce best practices for organizing activities and assessments within a module and within the course. We will discuss chunking and sequencing, first. Then, proceed further down the page for guidance on time estimates, due dates and feedback practices and their effects:

• Chunking
• Sequencing

Chunking Your Content

Dr. John Medina provides some useful advice on how to organize a lecture. He suggests in his book “Brain Rules” that one break up lectures into 10-minute segments in order to keep audience attention and to use “hooks”, which are relevant transitions with emotional triggers, to link the 10-minute segments together. (The 10-minute video segment requires that you enable Flash to run it).

Medina’s research points to a critical step when designing instructional material: one must clearly organize and chunk the information into manageable pieces for students to digest. As you design your learning activities, we encourage you to break the learning materials into smaller, digestible chunks of information. Shelton and Saltsman (2008) offer this definition:

“Content chunking is an instructional design process, rather than a theory. It uses modular design in the delivery of online content. Each “chunk” of material is broken into smaller, understandable lessons or vignettes for the students to absorb. An example of chunking would be to break apart a lecture (that would amount to five written pages for example) covering several topics into smaller pieces (perhaps one or two pages each). The entire lecture, if left un-chunked, would be a tedious  Webpage to scroll through, and more importantly, too much information to absorb in one session. Instead, the concept of content chunking would break the lecture into perhaps five or six smaller concepts. When a lecture is broken into topics or ideas and put on separate pages, research shows students are more likely to understand the content” (p. 49).

Identify a slide presentation, or written content you have used in the past to lecture on specific concepts, and break the information into smaller segments. Note Smith’s guidance (2008, p.79):

“There are natural breaks in virtually all presentations. A transition in topics, change of focus, or difference in hierarchy levels are all cues that indicate natural breaks. In general, you can find these breaks every 10-12 slides; we call these chunks. This is not a hard and fast rule, and segments vary in length. You may find your content naturally falls into a different pattern of lengths. Take one presentation, and find these breaks (electronically or on paper). These will serve as content for your chunks.”

Sequencing Your Content

Another consideration while building your online course is the order in which content and activities appear, known as sequencing.

“A proper sequence provides the learners with a pattern of relationship so that each activity will have a definite purpose. The more meaningful the content, the easier it is to learn and, consequently, the more effective the instruction” (Clark, 2010).

For each module, you will need to consider the best order or sequence of content and activities for students to meet the learning objectives.