As you move through the first stage of backward design--developing learning objectives--one of your first tasks will be to divide the big, overarching learning goals of your course into segments, or chunks. You can't teach all the content of your course in one big chunk, just like you can't eat a whole cake in one bite. One of our jobs as online teachers is to cut our cake up into bite-sized pieces so our students can easily and efficiently chew and digest it.

The concept of chunking comes from multimedia design principles developed by Richard Mayer (2001). Chunking posits that learning is more effective when the material is broken into segments, or chunks, and when learners can move through the segments at their own pace.

Canvas Pages and Modules when used well, support the chunking principle. The key is using them well!

The Take-Away

The tools in Canvas can help you design well. Quick reference guides are available under the "Help" button in the left-hand menu. Before you begin creating items in your course, though, you'll need a plan to map out how you'll use the Canvas organizational tools, like Modules and Pages. It's far easier to plan first and then build than it is to rearrange all the pieces once they're in Canvas. For this reason, we will begin our course design by looking at the overarching goals and objectives for our whole course.

References

Mayer, Richard E. (2001). Multi-media Learning. Cambridge University Press.