I saw this first when Udacity began. I think all their initial courses were chopped up this way. As I recall, Andrew Ng claimed it made the instruction more i

I saw this first when Udacity began. I think all their initial courses were chopped up this way. As I recall, Andrew Ng claimed it made the instruction more interactive, since you couldn't just sit for a long stretch of time before coding up what you just learned or being quizzed on it. Frankly, I find it very annoying. I watch videos in a nonlinear way already, often jumping backward to earlier topics to review them as I learn the next one. This is made a lot harder when the background for the next topic is not on the same video. I suspect chopping videos into bite sizes was also done with an eye to making it harder for the user NOT to use proprietary GUI and playback software provided by the video distributor (e.g. Udacity) to navigate all those small videos and quizzes. Curiously, such gateway software has not arisen to control access to MOOCs as yet. (Such software is used extensively by Universities to control access to their instructional materials.)