 Before we begin, I have an assignment for you. Find your favorite book. Take out all the paragraph indentations, chapter headings, title pages, and the table of contents. Have you done that? Good. Now, I'd like you to sit down, start reading, and don't stop until the end. Go on. I'll wait. Chances are you'd lose interest. Even if you kept reading, you'd more than likely forget half of what you read, because there was no place for your brain to take a break and process information. Good e-learning modules give their learners the same breaks. Mayor's segmenting principle tells us that providing breaks and segmenting content improves learning because it gives the audience time to process and store information. Long-term knowledge retention can be improved by breaking content into bite-sized segments. This includes giving your learners control by including stop, play, pause, and replay buttons somewhere on the screen. It also includes adding a one- to two-second pause in the narration between paragraphs or wherever it's needed to improve pacing. Additionally, you should break large chunks of text up onto different pages. Let's take a break and see how this process works. Say you have a client who needs to teach his employees how to follow the steps in a process. He's using a common stacking toy to demonstrate how important it is to do each step in the correct order. Assembly instructions. These are the steps. Now, you could have your narrator read these in order and show a picture of what it's supposed to look like. But your learners would have a difficult time replicating the process correctly. Now watch as we break each step apart into its own segment and give the learners time to follow along. Assembly instructions. Unpack the stacking cups. Place the blue cup on the bottom. Place the green cup on top of the blue cup. Place the red cup on top of the green cup. Finish by placing the yellow cup on the top. They have a much better chance of succeeding in learning the process because we've given them enough time to absorb the information. We've also added a scrub bar so the learner can stop, start, and replay any of the interactions. When you create your e-learning modules, put yourself in the place of the learner and remember your favorite book. Pauses, short amounts of text and narration, and control buttons are just as important in e-learning as chapters and paragraphs are in books. The segmenting principle reminds us that in e-learning modules, we all need a break.