Best Practices?

Hi, Don.

I'm seeing some nice conversations here and here regarding course length.  To summarize, it looks like Gerry and Gabe are making the following specific recommendations:

• There is no hard limit on the number of slides, but for usability, it is recommended that you stick with something more manageable (somewhere around 30 slides), even breaking it up into multiple presentations.  The length of your presentation has a causal relationship with the endurance of the learner.  


• Flash has a maximum number of frames of 16,000.  At 30 fps, that translates to 8:53, at 20 fps, that translates to 13:20, and at 15 fps, that translates to 17:00.  These slide lengths are far higher than recommended best practices of 30-60 seconds per slide (for reasons of both usability and network load).


• There have been reports of folks who've experienced slow expanding menus when using levels in long presentations.  This is likely content-specific.


• You'll find a helpful article here from eLearn Magazine on how long an e-learning course should be.

I personally have no experience with extremely lengthy courses, so I'm hoping some of the other experts will weigh in on this topic.

Good Luck!