How many Lessons per Course?

Oct 16, 2020

Fran Lee
By Fran Lee

1 - How many Lessons do you offer in a typical e-learning Courses?
(Similar to what some brick and mortar schools may offer... like a 13 week or 26 week with one 50 minute class per week)

2 - How long is each Lesson typically?

3 - Do you break each Lesson down into a number of individual Tutorials?

4 - Do you present each Lesson in one non stop session... like one video per Lesson? Or is each Lesson broken down into a collection of individual Tutorials... each only a few minutes long so the student can watch a Tutorial, pause for an exercise or to take a break, or whatever?

Thanks for any help.

 

1 Reply
Judy Nollet
over 3 years ago10/19/20 at 1:52 pm (UTC)

Hi, Fran,

The short answer: It depends.

The longer answer: A course should be long enough to meet its objectives.

That means the process should start with a needs analysis. After all, it's possible that an eLearning course is not the right solution to the business need. Or it may only be part of a solution that also includes job aids, which might mean fewer details are needed in the course.

If it's determined that an eLearning course is appropriate, then look at the objectives and the content. There are a few questions to ask:

  • How can the content be presented to achieve the objectives? 
  • Are there IT limitations to consider? (For example, will there be sufficient bandwidth for videos?)
  • Are there limitations to what the LMS can handle? (For example, is there a size limit for SCORM packages? Can the LMS combine multiple courses into one curriculum? Can it make the user complete those courses in a given order?)

There's a trend toward micro-learning (i.e., providing content in short bursts). If every bit of content is a separate course though, a user might have to do a lot of course launching to complete a given curriculum. The trick is finding a good balance that makes sense from an instructional-design standpoint.

With any Articulate course, you can publish it to allow the learner to exit the course before finishing and then resume where they left off. So you could design a longer course that's broken into multiple sections. However, depending on the LMS publishing requirements, a really long course might exceed the limit for what info can be saved when exiting early. 

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