Learning modules length

I haven't even tried to read War and Peace because looks more like a heavy-duty door stop than a book. I'm sure it's a great book. I wonder how many other people like myself have never picked it up because of its length...and what we're all missing out on.

Most distance education courses use learning modules as a way to organize the mass of information and activities that compose a course into manageable sections. To a certain extent, this keeps both students and faculty from experiencing War and Peace syndrome (yes, I just made that up). After all, if a student dreads their classwork because it's overwhelming, their likelihood of truly engaging in it can certainly decrease.

Learning modules are an effective way of turning an epic novel of a course into a serial publication. But how long should those individual units be to cull the most student engagement and information retention? A review of this article:

Pomales-Garcia, C. and Yili Liu. (2006). Web-Based Idstance Learning Technology: The Impacts of Web Module Length and Format. The American Journal of Distance Education, 20(3), 163-179.

provided some interesting insights. According to Pomales-Garcia and Liu, module length has little, if anything, to do with performance--what it impacts is student perception of difficulty.

The researchers' article also demonstrated the a number of other things about module length and content presentation, such as:

• Shorter modules are perceived as less difficult than longer modules
• Modules that contain video are perceived as less difficult than ones including only audio or text
• Shorter modules and modules that include videos are considered more visually attractive and exciting.
• Perception of module length is affected by length of the module, not the presence of video, audio, or text
• No performance differences based on module length, but longer modules were considered less aesthetic and attractive
• Video and audio modules were perceived to last longer than their length. Text modules were not.
• Quitting, pausing, or completing a Web module in one session has more to do with module length than format.
• For long modules, text modules are perceived shorter than video/audio modules of the same content.
• The more media in a module, the greater the student  satisfaction with it

Interesting stuff...
Posted by kmwilli3 ( Aug 10 2007, 11:02:06 AM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]