Reason #2: Rotating Content is chunked content - and learning how to present content in "chunked" form is one of the keys to successful online instruction.

By its very nature, Rotating Content has to be broken up, or chunked, into small pieces. More importantly, those small pieces can be linked to more extensive information available online. As students move through a site's webpages, they may not stop to read the entire page, but carefully chosen chunks of information can grab their attention, especially when the chunk of information is clearly presented on the page, either in a box, different font color, etc., so that it stands out from the other content on the page.

A good example of this is the Random Mathematician Biographies that Bill Ray (Dean of our OU-Tulsa campus) has developed for his statistics class in Human Relations. On his course homepage in Desire2Learn, he has a random mathematician show up, with an image, a name, and a link to an online biography. Here's the script in action:

The idea is to catch the students' attention in a spare moment, and allow them to visit the history of mathematics, especially statistics, from a more human point of view.

The "chunked" content approach also offers a great advantage for the author of the content. Dean Ray is a very busy man, but he was able to write one or two of these biographies each week, gradually building up the content over the course of the past several months. Because rotating content is written in these small chunks, it is possible to gradually accumulate the content over time, and seamlessly integrate the new content into the script, even while the script is already in use.