For an upcoming website redesign project I have been reading "Letting Go of the Words - Writing Web Content that Works, by Janice (Ginny) Redish.

One of the first statistics that stuck out to me was this.  In a 2006 study, Nielsen and Loranger found that people spend an average of 27 seconds on each web page.

Think about it, only 27 seconds.  Wow, that does not seem like very long, but think about it in todays terms of the internet.  If you are like me you get very impatient if a web page takes 10 seconds to load.

Lets apply that to e-learning.

A discussion or email.  Should a discussion post be short enough to be read in 27 seconds, or perhaps 27 seconds is all a student would spend on an entire thread?

Content pages and instructions - I have not figured out how many lines of text 27 seconds is, but I do no that from my days of audio voice over work that we figured that a page of text double spaced was about 2 minutes per page.  I find in my own class that students are not reading the instructions. They keep asking me questions that are in the syllabus.  Now the graduate students seem to have this all figured out, but the undergraduate students (at least many of them) do not read, or pay attention.  

Another study shows that most people scan web pages, and do not read them.  If that is the case, having text contained in small paragraphs of two or three sentences with good headings or topics might be a good way to approach this.

I guess what I am saying is based on what I am reading I am not sure I know the best way to apply this to e-learning just yet.  

I would appreciate your ideas on this?  What do you think?

Please post your ideas and thoughts.