Full Answer
All the stakeholders need to sign up to a four-day programme, or the single day in the classroom is not worth doing. If you call it a one-day training course, people will allow for one day, and that is not enough.
Here’s an abbreviated look at many studies’ conclusions: Fifteen to 30 minutes is the “sweet spot”. Courses should be as long as needed, even if they’re 90 minutes. Shorter is always better. People can’t concentrate.
Fifteen to 30 minutes is the “sweet spot”. Courses should be as long as needed, even if they’re 90 minutes. Shorter is always better.
The length of a course (as shown in the Course content section of the course landing page) is calculated using the criteria below: Curriculum Item. Time. Article Lectures. One minute for every 240 words. Video Lectures. The duration of the video. Video & Mashup Lectures.
The length of a training course can actually have a huge impact on the success of a learning objective. If it’s too long, you can easily lose your audience. If it’s too short, you run the risk of not landing your message or even covering everything you need to teach.
Interactivity and engagement is an important part of successful training sessions. People retain much more from a lesson they participated in, compared to those they simply listened to or watched passively.
Putting your learners in control of their learning experience will help to better engage them as active participants. Such trainings will hold their attention longer and be easier to recall after the training is complete. But not every lesson has clear opportunities for interaction.
Remember that while the course can’t go on forever, your main objective is to train the audience. So be careful of your cuts, and when your training session gets too long, break it down into more meaningful and manageable training modules.
Well produced learning opportunities are much more likely to make a positive impact on your learners. But high -production quality can come at a steep price. The created user experience can have a substantial impact on a learner’s willingness to remain engaged in the course material.
You don’t need to sacrifice content for the sake of a brief training session. In fact, trying to cram too much content into a short session can cause more harm than good. This is especially true for e-learning courses. Remember that while the course can’t go on forever, your main objective is to train the audience.
Written by Paul Matthews on 10 July 2017. After requests, lots of discussion, and eventual sign off, you have developed and delivered a one day training course. It was brilliant, even if you say so yourself! The managers were happy that the course was addressing what they saw as training needs, and the delegates were happy with ...
The training course was developed and sold to all stakeholders, including the delegates and their managers, as a one-day course. So that is the time they have allowed for it. But there is so much more for the delegates to do to get any benefit from their day in the training room.
Building the course – between 30 minutes and 1.5 hours per page depending on the complexity of the course and the tool used to build it. Obviously, if you use a rapid e-Learning tool like Articulate, you will not need to dedicate as much time to building courses as you would if you use Flash or HTML5.
While there is no exact formula that would help to make these estimates, most instructional designers believe that 50 slides or content screens equal 1 hour of eLearning, and a 10,000-word script is also equal to 1 hour of eLearning.
In addition to the development tasks outlined above when creating a project plan, instructional designers should allocate time for needs analysis, QA testing, SME and stakeholder reviews, and pilot testing of the course.
Assessments design and development – this again depends on the number of questions and the tool you use to build your quizzes, but just to be safe, I suggest allocating about 30 minutes per question.
Here are some of them: Graphic and visual aids selection and editing – depending on the number of images that need to be located and edited, this task takes about 30 minutes per graphic. If you have at least one visual element on every screen, you can estimate about 25 hours for graphics.
But development of a 1-hour elearning course can range between 49 hours for the low end of the range of a “basic” course to 716 hours for the high end of the range of an “advanced” course.
An average 1 hour instructor led course will take 43 hours to develop.
Level 1 – Basic: This is a simple elearning program, similar to an automated PowerPoint. Sometimes referred to as “click and read.” A quiz or similar assessment may be present.
For example, on average, one minute of a Level 2 program will require 197 minutes (or just over 3.25 hours) of development time.
Ideally, the inclusion of interactivity, and how much, should be instructional design decisions. You want to think about how to best ensure that the material engages viewers so learning transfer can happen.
As a rule of thumb, in an hour of training, I aim to cover 2-3 “big” topics including presentation, reflection (discussion or interaction), and application. The advantage of thinking about scope is that you can take a training request that comes in as a list of topics and put together a rough estimate of how many hours the total project will take.
I refer to the eLearning levels as 1 for low interactivity, 2 for moderate interactivity, and 3 for high interactivity, like it is done in the Chapman report.
In my experience, an hour of ILT training material consists of about 20-40 slides depending on the amount of presentation, discussion, and activities. Virtual ILT tends to have more slides (or more animation on the slides) so that something visual is happening about every 10-15 seconds. In this respect, it is more comparable to eLearning Level 1.
The best way to get an accurate estimate on the time it takes to complete a course is to do real-life testing and have a few participants from various demographic/technological backgrounds complete the course, and time them, then calculate the average.
When any learner takes the e-module, he should be informed that approximate some hours or minutes will required to complete this module. There is no industry standard for this. The designers' fair judgement should be used to state in how much time the module will take to be completed.
If you have audio, then consider about 100-120 words per minute for normal human speech. At least the same can be estimated for quizzes as well as some additional estimated time, usually another 1:30 or so per question. I don't know if my methods count as "industry standard" though. The 100-120 number comes from my voiceover experience. Hopefully this helps you somewhat.
You can create courses of any length - it all depends on what the business problem is that has caused the training to be a requirement, (if indeed it IS a requirement...), and whether (for example...) a student revisits content.