The Journal of Education Psychology defines chunking as the strategy of organizing items into familiar manageable units – making short-term memory more efficient based on the idea that short-term memory is limited. Chucking seems especially relevant to e-learning. In her article Chunking Information for Instructional Design, Connie Malamed said:
Chunking information is particularly important for online learning. Without an instructor to answer questions and to guide the learning process, eLearning content has to be organized in a logical and progressive way through chunking. Chunking doesn’t only work for your typical linear instruction, it also works for learning objects, for non-linear approaches to learning as well as discovery learning, because it groups together conceptually related information. Content that is conceptually related is meaningful, making it easier to understand.