Abstract:

Content chunking or segmenting into smaller pieces to ensure easy assimilation by the learners is considered crucial in online course design. In the context of engineering education, the process to translate the traditional course into an online course has become a niche area because of COVID situation. This process is complicated by the fact that content can be segregated into facts, concepts, principles, processes, and procedures or combinations of any of these types. This study explores the influence of content type on the process of chunking or segmenting. An exploratory sequential research design was used. Grounded theory research was used to generate the themes of strategies used by teachers. Later survey research was used to check the pervasiveness of these identified strategies. The findings show that there are 5 types of strategies used by the teachers for chunking or segmenting the content. Also not all combinations of these strategies are preferred for all content types. The findings have immediate application in the field of content development for online courses and will help engineering educators with a set of prescriptions that will make the process of content chunking or segmenting easier.

Keywords:

Content, chunking, segmenting, online education, online course design.