A crucial concept, and yet one of the simplest to implement once you get down to business with your learning system. Teachers with the best intentions can get caught up in their own excitement and idealism about the course, overlooking the limited human capacities of their learners’ memory. The teachers will then hold the learners up to standards placed too high up, and the learning system will let everybody down. And all due to careless chunking of the material.

It’s easy for anyone to lose track of what is in their head versus what they are putting out there for everyone else to see—sometimes what you say or write will convey less than you mean to because you’ve gone over it in your head so many times, or vice versa. Extra elaboration, unnecessary details, frills and bows derail and distract instead of enhance. Solution: remember that less is more.