7 plus or minus 2

In the early days of the SUNY Learning Network we gathered huge amounts of survey data (every semester from 1998 to 2006) from 100% of our fully online asynchronous faculty and learners. We were able to get that response rate because we had total control of a proprietary LMS built in-house and could make everyone respond to the survey to get access to their courses.) This was thousands of online faculty and 10s of thousands of online learners and we asked lots of questions about the experience, satisfaction, perceptions of learning, course design elements including the number of modules, faculty and learner interaction, and more… and compared the results across both populations. 

This particular finding related to number of course modules and related satisfaction and perceived learning for both faculty and learners was reported in Swan, K., Shea, P., Fredericksen, E., Pickett, A.,  & Pelz, W. (2000). Course design factors influencing the success of online learning.  Proceedings of WebNet World Conference on the WWW and Internet (pp. 513–518). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).

The full finding is that the above 9 and below 5 modules satisfaction and perception of learning goes down – for both faculty and learners… this is a correlation not causation… nevertheless the magic number appears to be 7 plus or minus 2 for the optimal number of online course modules… of course there are other factors that influence satisfaction and perceptions of learning and this one result is not causal, as mentioned. But as online instructional designers it is an online course design element that appears to be important to discuss with new online faculty and to look at when reviewing online courses for improvements. In courses that are synchronous online, or hybrid, or short format courses, where dates and times are of primary importance to course delivery, the labeling of modules to correspond with weeks of the course below 5 and above 9, might indicate an exception.