Before you can proceed to create your corporate elearning course, you may want to know how long it should be. When you are working on a program that will be used in business, you want to be able to calculate how much time the activity will take employees away from their daily tasks. You need to be able to come up with a training program that will allow employees to participate without compromising business processes.
Estimating the length of your course does not involve a standard formula. That is why it is difficult to determine. You want to make the course long enough that it can impart substantial information and training but at the same time, you want to avoid boring the participants so they stop paying attention. Sometimes, when a lecture or seminar is too long, your mind will begin to wander and that could affect your retention of whatever is being taught. You want to avoid that as much as possible because it will compromise the effectiveness of the elearning course.
You need to be able to achieve a balance that will take into consideration the learner’s attention span and ability to absorb. While there is no clear formula, there are factors that you can look into to help you measure the length of your course.
- Content. First of all, you want to take a look at the content that should be included in the course. You want to include all of the important data and not miss out on anything. The content will help you determine the number of screens that should be created. When you have the number of screens, you can estimate the amount of time that the employee will take to go through all of them.
- Method of delivery. Another factor that will affect the length of your course is the method of delivery – at least, for the content. A plain text is faster to read as opposed to having someone speak the content through a video or listen to it through audio. While this is true, we cannot create an elearning course that is purely plain text. Some lessons require demonstration and that can only be effectively taught through a video. That means you need to allot more time for that part of the lesson.
- Activities. Another factor that will affect the length of the training course is the activities that you will be incorporating into it. If you want to make the course interactive, you need to input games and activities that will encourage learners to participate. However, you need to check out the complexity of each one. Some learners could take more time than the others to complete it. By pointing out the areas in the elearning course that will have interactive elements, you can determine if they will make the learning progress slower than it has to. The slower the learners go through each activity, the longer it will take for them to finish the lesson.
- Learners. The last factor that you need to look into are your learners. Are they as tech-savvy as the course would require them to be? If the navigation and activities require a certain technical knowledge, it might take non-tech learners a bit longer to get used to the elearning course. The background knowledge of the learners will also come into play. If the course is about a subject that is entirely new to the employees, you might need to do a lot of explanation throughout the course. For instance, training new recruits would be a lot longer compared to merely updating the information that current employees would need.
By considering these factors in your elearning course, you should be able to determine the amount of time that it will take for learners to complete your course. If it turns out to be too long, you might want to split the course into two parts.
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