Are you presenting your content in bite-size chunks?

A common misstep in teaching online is presenting more content than a learner can digest. Studies show that the human brain can only process information in bits. This means that somewhere after slide 10 in your 60 slide power point, your students have stopped processing your content. How much is too much? Cognitive scientist George Miller put forth that the average number of new ideas, facts or issues the human can attend to in their brain is 7 plus or minus 2. After this, the working memory becomes overloaded and stops processing new information. So, what can you do now to chunk your content?

1. Separate the wheat from the chaff. Focus on the content that is important to your course. Take your "extra" resources and information and put them on a "page" in Moodle called Additional Resources. Don't over clutter your course trying to provide every last interesting nugget of information.
2. Organize your content into bite-size chunks. Group topics together in a logical way. Each chunk should take the learner no more than 20 minutes to go through.
3. Present your content in different formats. Use a combination of text, images, audio and video. Using multi-media can actually reduce the memory demands.