6 Reasons “Bigger” E-learning Isn’t Always Better

Mike Taylor
By Mike Taylor

There are a lot of training managers and course designers who get stuck in the “bigger is better” mind-set, building exhaustive courses with infinite, minute details that swallow learners whole. Many have the perception that course size and complexity translate to course quality. Heck, I’ve even fallen for it at times. It’s hard not to get sucked in.

My goal today is to challenge this notion and help turn the tide toward building shorter courses of quality rather than tomes of quantity. Here are six reasons to embrace a less-is-more approach in your e-learning projects:

Saves Time and Money

This one should be obvious. It’s faster and cheaper to build smaller courses than traditional “full-size” courses.

Responsiveness

Being able to get a course out quickly allows you to be more responsive to the emergent needs of your organization. A short course now is often better than a more extensive (and expensive!) course six months out.

Tap into Your Experts

As long as the content is relevant and helpful, short courses can be less “polished” than longer, more traditional e-learning courses. Plus, it’s easier to recruit SMEs to take on bite-size learning—which saves both of you time. The SME can avoid answering the same questions over and over, and you can forego the extra work and focus on other more valuable projects.

Promotes Better Learning

Shorter courses are easier for learners to digest. Studies have shown that people learn better and remember more when learning is spaced out over time. All things being equal, six 10-minute lessons are more effective for learning than a single one-hour lesson.

Personalization

By breaking larger topics down into smaller chunks, learners can bypass irrelevant topics and jump directly to what they need.

Multipurpose

Shorter courses are more flexible. For example, they work great as just-in-time performance support material, and they’re also easy to assemble as part of a larger course or as a complement to existing training material.

What do you think? Are you a fan of shorter courses, or not so much? What is your experience with these types of small projects? Please leave a comment below to share your thoughts. We’d love to hear from you!

Post by Mike Taylor

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11 Comments
Ashley Chiasson
almost 10 years ago07/07/14 at 3:46 am (UTC)
Great post, Mike! The points that spoke to me the most were 'promotes better learning' (because user attention span tends to tune out after awhile, so longer courses can be less conducive to learning than more palatable chunks) and 'multipurpose' (this was huge for my work within the military sector; reusability is key as it saves time and money). I wanted to say the 'tap into your experts' spoke to me, but there's one project I can't help but reflect on...the SME took me down a rabbit whole (facilitated by my project manager), and 8 months past the original delivery date (and many tears later) we had a complete project :P
Andy Houghton
almost 10 years ago07/07/14 at 5:06 am (UTC)

I think it’s more a case of ‘horses for courses’. I’m not sure that ‘shorter courses’ promote better learning. I think in your example you break the ‘course’ down into six ‘lessons’, and it might be that you’re saying that breaking the ‘course’ down makes for better learning. My understanding is that when we review material over a period of time it helps retention. This might be a little different from breaking things down. Also, if you’re doing anything in any depth, you need a good chunk of time to get into the topic. When I was doing an online Moodle course a while back I needed to dedicate Saturday mornings to doing the course work. There was no way I could have broken this down – the stop/start would have driven me round the bend. Having said that, we produce animated vid... Expand

justine swain
almost 10 years ago07/09/14 at 3:05 am (UTC)
I like to break the course content I am developing into small bite size pieces, with the aim of putting the control of the learning into the learners hands so to speak. The learner can approach their learning in whatever manner that suits their own individual learning style. so if I had a set of 6 ten minute modules. the learner can choose how they learn; spending a focused hour working through the content in one hit; or picking up a module here and there throughout their working day if they want. Short and sweet doesn't work for everyone As designers, is it that we need to get smarter with how we develop content? Shouldn't we be asking ourselves 'what does this content bring to the party'? If the answer is 'nothing much', then why are we including it?
Andy Houghton
almost 10 years ago07/09/14 at 6:16 am (UTC)
If you took a 200 slide PowerPoint and made it into a Word/text document, you’d put it into chapters, sections, topics, paragraphs and so on. You’d break it down so that readers could, see the ‘big picture’ of what the content’s all about, navigate their way through it and find sections easily. This isn’t mine, I think I got it from twitter: All power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Steve Flowers
almost 10 years ago07/09/14 at 6:38 am (UTC)

Seems to me there are a few ways to look at "smaller is better" (which it isn't always) - Right-sizing the solution for the problem. It's easy to go overboard with information making the assumption that one size fits all. From an economics (http://androidgogy.com/2013/01/06/showing-our-work-design-economics/) standpoint, it makes little sense to apply a $1000 solution to a .25 cent problem. - Spacing, as Andy points out above, is a great way to aid in time management and improve effectiveness of a training program. - Stepping to and stepping from. This is something I think we fail to address a lot of the time. We create a stepping stone and plop it down. But consideration isn't given to where someone is stepping to that stone from, nor where they will step after. We create an iso... Expand

Cary Glenn
almost 10 years ago07/10/14 at 8:02 am (UTC)
I find developing e-learning is like writing a short story. Every word, phrase, and image has to fight for its right to be there. We don't have the luxury of convoluted plot lines and rambling dialogue, think Alice Munro not George R. R. Martin. Instead of building large courses create more small courses that can be spaced apart, a collection of short stories instead of a novel is more effective for learning.
David Glow
almost 10 years ago07/12/14 at 3:46 am (UTC)
Overall "bigger" can be fine. Not all content is simple enough to be in a tweet, and if you evaporate all the water out of the Kool Aide, you no longer have what was intended. However, it has to be broken into bite sized chunks, and ideally, repeated/spaced. It is just how the brain works. Read Brain Rules by Medina and just realize that when you fight biology, chances are, you won't win.
Susan Horsey
almost 10 years ago07/14/14 at 7:16 pm (UTC)
This is a great post and conversation. I find it curious that most designers I know are advocates for "less is more", but it's still so easy to fall into that "bigger is better" trap. Why is that? I don't think there's a perfect course size, although I lean towards smaller courses. As many of you pointed out, it's more to do with relevance and engagement. A series of smaller, bite-sized courses be overwhelming if they are not all useful, just like a big course can overwhelm if it's packed full of too much information. I like Justine's question: "What does the content bring to the party?" "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." (Albert Einstein)
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