The format of face-to-face education encourages “big-block” course design. Faculty are assigned one to three classes per week, each between 50 minutes and three hours long, and those become the atom units of planning. They devote most classes to delivering learning content as lectures and a few exams measuring how much of that content students caught. This big-block thinking was then carried over into online course design, with course designers creating long online lectures as video or text followed by a couple of hours of reading.
