Problem: Long Online Courses, Solution: Shorter Modules

Have you ever had to sit through a two, three or even four hour online course?

Well, you are not alone. Long online courses are quite the norm. It is customary for educational institutions and corporations to request that learners sit through a lengthy course in order to quickly complete a learning objective. However, after about 30 minutes or so of paying careful attention to the course material, the average person begins to wonder off. We can’t help it this is really just the way the brain works. So, as we click from one screen to the next, we continue to pay some attention to the content but get easily distracted by other thoughts as time passes. At the end of the course how much was retained? It’s hard to say.

I recommend that online learning content be broken up into carefully developed independent modules that are about 30 minutes long.

Dr. Carl Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who directs a science education initiative at the University of British Columbia noted that the human brain “can hold a maximum of about seven different items in its short-term working memory and can process no more than about four ideas at once.”

So you must be wondering, just how does a three hour course become chunks of thirty minute modules? This can be challenging but the key is to have clearly defined learning objectives and to let the learning objectives dictate the content of each module. The goal is to have one or two learning objectives covered in each module.

Book recommendation:
How people learn: brain, mind, experience, and school
By John Bransford, Ann L. Brown, National Research Council (U.S.)
Committee on Developments in the Science of Learning, Rodney R. Cocking, National Research Council (U.S.) Committee on Learning Research and Educational Practice