In our role as instructors, most of us deal with the problem of too much content. We have devoted our lives to a subject and content that we love, and we want our students to know about the things that we love.

We often embrace a “content coverage” model in designing our courses, in which we attempt to cover all of the material that we deem important or interesting in the area of our course. We see this in online environments in which modules become an organized dumping ground of interesting but unrelated files, videos, articles and assignments. The result is a course that increasingly balloons out of control each year as more and more content is added, resulting in a harried instructor and frustrated students. Students become "lost in the forest and miss the trees."

Forest for the Trees cartoon

Photo Credit: Paul Kinsella via CartoonStock
www.cartoonstock.com/cartoonview.asp?catref=pknn521

What can you do to keep your content monster tamed?

Simplify

Remember that having more stuff does not make a course more rigorous, nor does it mean that students will learn. By "simplify," we don’t mean reducing the depth of skills and knowledge delivered, but the length and method of explanation and transmission of the skills and knowledge. In short, if you can teach something perfectly well in 3 minutes, why waste 15 minutes of your learner's life explaining the exact same point? What is the right size of chunk? You are likely teaching adult non-traditional learners, so a good rule of thumb is: If it’s too big to fit into somebody’s lunch break, then the chances are that you are trying to cram way too much content into that particular chunk. You can cover your material in lots of lunch breaks, but providing those clear breaks in your content is essential.

Go Back to Your Learning Objectives

If the piece of content or information you are questioning does not directly help the learner obtain the learning outcome, then leave it out. This is about separating the "need to know" from the "nice to know." Focus on the learner and how their life will be different by the end of the course. What will they be able to do, know, and feel by the end of it? **This is why we made you think about objectives and vision.

Create Appendices

Create an "appendices" or "bonus" section in each course that houses all of the content that goes above and beyond the basic delivery of the learning outcomes. You have an article that you want to share but doesn't align? GREAT—park it here. You are providing your interested students a place to dig deeper without overwhelming your learners.

Cut the Text Down

Replacing your long-form text files into checklists, bullet point lists, and simple cheat sheets will be far more useful and consumable to your learners. By all means, keep the long form in the appendices section, but remember that all people want is the answer in its most direct form. Here is where some professors worry that you are "dumbing" the course down. The question has to be: What do you want students to spend their cognitive energy on—wading through mountains of text and comprehending little or directly getting what you want them to know so that they can do something with it? Remember these students are likely novices in your course. That means they are going to take much longer to digest the material.

TRY THIS TOOL
Course Workload Estimator

Rice University has a handy tool that can guide instructors in determining how long they can expect their students to have to invest to complete their course.
https://cte.rice.edu/workload