Reading about the concept of chunking in teaching reminds me of many bits of advice I've seen about effective design of PowerPoint presentations.  Chunking is simply organizing bits of information logically so learners can take them in more easily.  Actually, chunking is something all humans do naturally as they automatically recognize patterns and groupings in new information.  My favorite example was in a psych book I was teaching 20 years ago:  world chess experts could recreate a chess board, putting all the pieces in the exact right spots after very short glances at the board.  Chess novices couldn't.  Duh.  But the real interesting part was that the experts were NO BETTER than the novices when the pieces were arranged in random spots unrelated to a real game of chess.  The experts could recreate an actual game layout because they were familiar with all the likely patterns of arrangement that could occur.  So what they took in was really along the lines of, oh, yeah, it's one of those line ups.  Pieces placed randomly on the board were just as hard for them to remember as a couple dozen seashells randomly arranged on the beach.  (That seashell thing I just made up as a comparison--it wasn't in the actual study in the textbook.)
So teachers should try to create recognizable patterns for students instead of confusing, random non-patterns.  This means screens/slides should focus on one main topic, include no extraneous bits, and follow a logical outline.  To me, it doesn't matter whether you're making a PowerPoint to present in person or a higher-tech screen capture to include in a video lecture for an online course.  The organizational guidelines are the same:  KISS! 

So thinking about assessment of objectives this week, I find myself on a familiar rant:  that it's pretty much only in formal education that we lose sight of how learning is going to be assessed.  For example, if I set out to teach someone how to bake a cake or drive a car, I know exactly what the "proof of the pudding" will be!  Even that figure of speech implies obvious ways to assess something!  But so often in formal education we see how much of the content we cover *before* we decide what all is included in the assessment.  In a sense this is only fair, since a history teacher shouldn't test over the Civil War is she didn't even get to it in the course.  But in another sense, this approach, though seemingly linear and logical to those immersed in the schools, is illogical, especially to anyone doing any "teaching" in the "real" world.  If you want my help with getting your snowblower started, the proof of the pudding is whether you can start it, not a knowledge test on whatever I happen to cover in our Saturday morning bull session!  So in my grad curriculum courses I've tended to really emphasize out-of-school examples to shake our thinking out of the "coverage" approach and toward the "what's the point" approach. 
Another, related, issue I really struggle with is how much of an expert am I supposed to be in an online course?  In online learning, there's not much room for direct instruction.  But I was trained and hired to be a content expert.  Switching from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side seems to have additional challenges in the online environment since there's no place to pull everyone back together and "correct" misconceptions or provide the "right answers."  Ed and I joke about our F2F students in philosophy of ed going through the motions of group work and other learning activities but assuming eventually the prof will stand up and give the right answers or "fill in the chart" for them.  Despite all our resistance to this and philosophical opposition to it, the system has really trained us and our students to eventually revert, even if only for a few minutes at the end of each class period, to a sage on the stage announcing the right answers after all the group work, etc. 
I took a philosophy of ed quiz recently, and I had a three-way tie with the philosophies that are most student-centered.  But on the other hand, I'm also proud of my hard work in grad school and in developing my courses.  I'm aware that in the end the success of a course is on my head, not my students' heads.  I'm aware that my transcripts are looked at before I'm assigned specific courses to teach.  I feel confident and passionate about my areas of expertise and expect to be able to decide which areas to hit hardest in each of my courses -- in other words, coverage!  Yet, on the totally other hand, I can't conceive of "lecturing" a lot of extraneous info when teaching someone to sail a boat.  Even though I've thoroughly researched the physics of sailing angles and the history of small boat sailing (see my 1997 online animations of sailing pointers:  http://www.huntington.edu/Education/Sailing-Lessons/), I don't think I'd feel those more heady things had to be in a "curriculum" of a how-to course on the basics of sailing.  So on that, I'm feeling a bit hypocritical, or at least somewhat conflicted.

Echoing Pink Floyd (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNLhxKpfCnA), is there anybody out there?  I'm getting a bit confused by all the options -- E.g., discussion forum in Canvas, BlogSpot, Today's Meet, YouTube.  I think I like one main list of links -- which is probably what our Module page is in Canvas.  I think of the LMS as pulling it all together in one place, although I've already found in a course I'm teaching that opening a PDF in Canvas isn't necessarily as good an experience as opening it in Acrobat (a bunch of pages were blank!). 
I like the colors and overall more attractive format of Today's Meet.  Sorry, but that does matter to me (and my motivation!).  LMS's tend to be very dull, IMHO.  Since I'm long winded (no, I tend to "nuance" my thoughts!), my very first attempt at Today's Meet was way too long!  Discussion forums and blogs probably work better for the kind of critical thinking I want my students to do, but I do see the point of encouraging (enforcing) pithiness.  I think our culture rewards it -- notice how the most pithy Tweets after a big news event get listed in the news articles as examples of how the world is reacting. 
I'm also particular about not wasting my time (well, I want to choose how to waste my time, not have a prof waste my time!).  So I like LMS features like the Module thing where everything's listed in one place for the week (or day in my former summer courses) with handy links out to the actual materials.  I totally agree with Smith (Chap. 2) that one needs to get clever in the course architecture to avoid a lot of editing in future iterations of the course.  When I started with online courses (in Moodle) I couldn't stand how there still needed to be a paper syllabus for students to print out.  Setting up the Moodle course was like starting entirely over and doing all the syllabus pieces in a different way.  It felt like telling someone to stack up a pile of wood in the garage and then saying, no stack it all under the picnic table!  Grr. 
But more positively, I think we're heading in the right direction.  We're seeing more and more options in the technologies so online/hybrid courses can pick and choose appropriate pedagogies for the specific course needs and learning objectives.  But until we get there, we'll still be limited by institutions with blanket policies (like every course has to have a synchronous class meeting each week), dull LMSs, and overworked instructors who are tempted to fall into ruts (like using just the discussion forum and nothing else in each module).  What would be cool is if there was a razzle dazzle instructional design team at each college, akin to some PR/marketing departments, that could come alongside instructors and suggest cool upgrades to the course design.  That's how the intersection of technology, pedagogy, and content could make each course come alive! 

I'm looking forward to taking my online teaching skills to a new level with Dave's BOLT101 workshop.  I like pushing the envelope in education, and I like integrating technology with the teaching/learning process.  Having whole online courses focused entirely on the discussion forum has always made me uneasy, since there are so many more opportunities with the technology to enrich the learning.  If learning is at all about a student's ability to assimilate knowledge by making it fit his/her learning styles and preferences, then we have provide more than one modality -- even if it is high tech.  Won't it be cool when the technology allows us to provide touch and smell capabilities along with the visual and auditory?