What is behind the concept of “knowledge in small packages”

An attempt has been made to analyze the electronic presentation of educational material as automated process. The reasons for the reduction of the length of video lectures for massive open online courses and other educational electronic resources as well as the requirement of reducing the time required for multimedia electronic educational resources and paragraphs of electronic tutor books are analyzed. It is shown that the reason for these requirements is not the resource duration, but rather the volume of the educational material that can be learned in one session. To determine the limits of this volume the amount of presented information, measured in terms of new concepts and related already learned concepts-links, was compared with the limited number of items processed in the human memory simultaneously. As a result, it is concluded that the requirement of reducing the length of lectures is necessary to limit the scope of the educational information presented. This circumstance has made it possible to formulate the concept of a task set and to make a proposal for automated training procedures. The paper is published in order to discuss this problem.