Choosing how long to make your online course can feel like a fine balance between making
your students feel ripped off by providing too little [more], or making them feel bored
or overwhelmed by giving them too much.
In this video, we’re going to help you determine an online course length that is just right
for you, and most importantly, your students.
Let’s get into it.
Hello creators, I’m Ben Toalson from Podia, where we empower creators like you to make
a living doing what you love.
Answering the question of how long your online course should be, isn’t as simple as plugging
different variables into a formula, so rather than approach it mathematically, we’re going
to take you through 10 questions that will help you determine the right length.
These questions are broken up into 4 different categories:
1.
Student oriented questions - These questions are designed around your students
2.
Online course oriented questions - These are questions about online courses with the most
common answers 3.
Logistical constraints - These questions factor in certain limitations and how to manage them
4.
Maximizing engagement - These are questions that will help you keep your student engaged
and encouraged no matter the length of your course.
First, let’s cover the student oriented questions
These are the most important questions to start with because they focus on the most
important aspect of your online course, your students.
Just answering the questions in this category is going to take you most of the way there
in determining how long your online course should be.
So let’s dive in.
Question #1: Who is my student?
Answering this question is going to provide all kinds of clues, not just for how long
your course should be overall, but also how long individual videos and lessons should
be.
Think about who your course is meant to serve.
What might their daily lives look like?
How much time do they have and how is their extra time scheduled throughout their day?
If your target student is parents who work from home, it’s likely they have smaller
pockets of time throughout the day.
If your target student is retirees, they likely have longer stretches of free time they can
commit to.
And the time of day can make a difference as well.
If your target student tends to have more availability in the morning, they may have
an easier time focusing on longer chunks of course content, whereas students with more
available free time in the afternoon when focus is waning may benefit from shorter videos
and lessons.
Question #2: What end result are you trying to achieve?
A successful course is built around producing an end result for the student.
In this sense, the length doesn’t matter nearly as much as ensuring that you provide
the right amount of information to help your student bridge the gap from where they are
now and where they want to be.
If the result you’re trying to achieve for your student is a relatively short distance
from where they are now, don’t feel like you have to inflate the course to meet some
arbitrary length requirement.
Also, if you’re helping your student cover a greater distance, it’s okay for that to
be reflected in the length.
The principle here is that length follows purpose, not the other way around.
You want to purposefully include the modules and lessons that will help your student bridge
the gap.
No more, no less.
In this video, we show you how to outline your online course in a way that gets your
students results.
In that video, we explain how an online course is broken up into smaller pieces, and those
pieces are what the next question will address.
Question #3: Are you building a foundation or frame?
Each piece of content that goes into your course should serve a unique purpose and help
your student move closer to the desired end result.
The principle of “length follows purpose” applies the same way to the individual videos
and lessons.
Let them be as long or short as they need to be in order to fulfill their purpose.
During home construction, it takes longer to prepare and pour the foundation than it
does to build one of the wall frames.
Likewise, it usually takes longer to explain foundational concepts than it does to teach
ideas that are built on those concepts.
What that means is your video that introduces the course and covers the basic concepts might
be longer because that’s what it takes to help your students build a foundation.
But now that they understand those foundational concepts, your other videos could be shorter.
Now that we’ve answered these student oriented questions, we’re going to look at a couple
of the most common questions about online course length.
Question #4: How long should individual videos be?
While considering the length of your online course, you may wonder how long individual
lessons and videos should be.
I’ve linked an article from hubskills in the description, that shares a lot of great
research about the optimal length for online course videos.
Their conclusion is that 6-12 minutes is the sweet spot for providing sufficient information
without overwhelming or boring your student.
While it is good to know what works for most online courses, it’s okay to deviate from
norms when the goal of the content calls for it.
It’s okay to push the boundary of the 6-12 minute video length if, like in our last question,
you’re building a foundation for your students.
Maybe they need a 20-30 minute video to grasp the basic concepts so that the rest of your
videos can fall right in the 6-12 minute sweet spot.
Question #5: Should the length of your course match what you charge?
There’s no measured correlation between the length of an online course and how that
influences the student’s perception of the cost.
That said, people generally create those correlations for themselves.
Based on human psychology, there’s a chance that a short but expensive course could be
perceived as a rip-off and a long but cheap course could be perceived as a steal.
So should you take that into consideration?
No, and here’s why.
When people look for an online course, it’s because they’re trying to solve a problem.
What makes a course valuable is not how long it is, but how effective it is at providing
a result.
Let’s say you have a course that’s only 3 hours long from start to finish, but in
that course, you help graduate students pass a certification test that will help them earn
their degree and qualify them for a $250,000 per year salaried position.
If I felt confident that taking your course could get me that position, paying $5000 would
be a great investment.
You don’t prove how effective your online course is by making it unnecessarily long,
but by showing the results it’s getting for your students.
For the next set of questions, we’re going to talk about some potential logistical constraints,
and how they might influence the length of your online course.
Question #6: Do you have person budget constraints If you’re just starting out making an online
course, you’re likely working within some kind of constraint, whether that’s time,
money, or both.
Producing your own content can be very time consuming, and if you’ve set a launch date,
you may end up in a situation where you don’t have enough time to produce all the course
material you set out to make.
If you’ve hired someone to film and edit your course videos, you might discover that
the costs of producing your course fall outside of what you’ve budgeted.
Or, you could be running into constraints on both fronts, with not enough time to write
or film the course content, and not enough money to cover the full production costs.
First, let me encourage you to take some time before you start the process to create both
a money and time budget for your course.
You will be glad that you did and you might discover during that process that you’ve
got more course than you have time or money.
If that’s the case, consider solving a smaller problem, doing more of an introductory course,
or breaking your online course into separate parts and releasing them over time as a series.
Question #7: How engaging is your course production?
A common approach to managing financial constraints when making an online course is to simplify
your production.
Rather than a video with you talking into the camera, you might do a voice-over with
slides.
While that kind of course is less expensive to produce, it’s not as engaging as video,
which means your students will have a more difficult time staying focused.
If you do have to go the route of making less engaging course content, consider shortening
or condensing your course material, so that your students will stay engaged.
Although if you’re looking for a way to make your course content more engaging without
necessarily having to increase production value, our next category of questions might
hold the key.
In this final category of questions, we’re going to talk about ways you might be able
to maximize engagement and keep your online course as lengthy as it needs to be to help
your students succeed.
Question #8: Do you have supplemental materials?
One way to make your online courses more engaging is to provide supplements like worksheets,
templates, or exercises.
These can be tasks your students can complete between lessons, or something that they’ll
do while watching a course video.
In some cases, supplemental material might actually be a more effective teaching tool
than a video.
Either way, if you’re concerned that your course might be too long for your students
to stay engaged, providing different ways for them to engage throughout the course could
solve that problem.
Question #9: Could you break a longer video into two or three shorter ones?
If you’ve got video segments or lessons you worry are too lengthy, consider breaking
them up into shorter pieces.
Like we talked about earlier, 6-12 minutes is about the sweet spot.
Unless a specific concept requires a longer video, your students will almost always benefit
from having the information broken up into smaller, more digestible pieces.
Plus, it can make it easier for your students to fit your course into pockets of their schedule
in case they’re not able to block off longer segments of time.
Question #10: Can you provide small “wins” along the journey?
No matter how concise and engaging you make your online course, you’re still dealing
with humans who get tired, and bored, and discouraged.
Instead of letting this make you feel pressured to shorten your course, think of ways you
can counter that boredom and discouragement by offering small “wins.”
Some online course creators provide a certificate of completion at the end of their course,
but each step your student takes toward their goal is worth celebrating in some way.
You could send a short congratulatory email once they complete each module.
You could include a digital download at the end of each module that lists everything they’ve
learned and accomplished so far.
Or it could be something as simple as a custom gif of you giving them a thumbs up or virtual
high five.
You can check out this video if you want to learn how to make a custom gif.
A little encouragement can go a long way and can make even the longest online courses feel
like a breeze.
Those are our 10 questions to help you determine the best length for your online course.
I hope you come away from this video feeling more confident about your online course and
with plenty of ideas to help you make it great.
If you’ve made an online course, tell us about it in the comments and link to it so
other creators can check it out.
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Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time.