As training professionals, you have probably worked with content that
was relatively simple as well as with content that was more complex. For
example, if you are teaching a class on editing text in Microsoft Word, you
need to teach a four-step procedure. First, learners must use the mouse to
select the text they want to edit. Second, they click on the scissors icon
to cut the text from its present location. Next, learners place their cursors at
the insertion point and click on the paste icon. This software procedure is
quite linear and relatively simple. It is made easier by having only a few steps
and by using onscreen icons that call up familiar metaphors such as scissors
Figure 10.2. Screens from Lightning Lesson.
From Moreno and Mayer, 1999a.
CH010.indd 208 6/18/11 1:45:02 PM
Chapter 10: Applying the Segmenting and Pretraining Principles 209
for cutting. How ever, in many cases, your content is more complex than this
example. Even an introductory Excel class offers greater degrees of complexity.
As you can see in Figure 10.3, constructing a formula in Excel can be quite
complex for someone new to spreadsheets and to Excel. One of the key concepts
involves the construction of a formula that uses the correct formatting
conventions to achieve the desired calculation. For someone new to Excel, we
would rate this as a more complex task than the word processing editing task