It depends.
Okay, okay, I know that’s a cop-out answer, but it’s true. It does depend on many factors.
One rule of thumb is that no single session of a self-paced course should exceed 30 minutes. More than that, and you’ll lose many people’s interest, patience, and focus.
But it’s a lot more complex than that.
A good rule of thumb is that no self-paced course should contain more than 30 minutes of content.
Even though we say no more than 30 minutes, 20 should always be your goal. It’s a magical (made-up) number. Before we get too deep into timing, to level set, it’s important to understand what we mean by a self-paced course. That’s because many things could technically be considered self-paced courses, but are not.
What Is a Self-Paced Course
You may know it as a self-paced course, online course, digital course, eLearning, or something else entirely. But they’re typically all classified similarly. It’s an online course that lets you click through, read, or listen asynchronously.
Another defining feature of a self-paced course is that it is more than a click-through experience. It may include videos, activities that have you do something, and evaluation questions. Software simulation e-learning lets you learn new software by doing, but at your own pace.
Self-paced courses are not as small as single-objective (micro-learning) content. They include modules that can cover several overarching topics. For instance, one self-paced course project we built for an organization showed employees how to do the following:
- Introduce employees to the reasons they use the software and how it will help them work more effectively.
- How to create a new referral, save it, upload documents, and submit the referral.
- Resume a saved referral and access referrals from other employees and locations.
Each module covers a different topic, breaking the content into thoughtful tasks that help employees understand the start and end of each task. When we work through our process for creating effective e-learning, we typically set no more than five performance objectives (not learning objectives) unless they’re extremely short.
Self-paced courses are also known as digital learning or e-learning.
A self-paced course also helps employees achieve a certain level of expertise. That doesn’t mean they become experts, but it could be a certain level of skills that helps them do their jobs. It does more than help employees perform a single task within a system. A training video might be more helpful and could be considered microlearning.
A self-paced course might help employees learn the essentials to complete their jobs. Or, if a specific role requires expertise, multiple self-paced courses may build different skill levels.
That’s a lot of stuff a self-paced course is. It’s hard to imagine being less than 30 minutes because it can do all that. It doesn’t cover all those things in one course, or if it does, each one is likely very short.
So, now that you know what a self-paced course is, it’s also helpful to define more precisely what it isn’t.
What A Self-Paced Course Isn’t
You may already have guessed, or perhaps you used common sense: a video alone isn’t a self-paced course. Yes, you can go at your own pace: speed it up, slow it down, pause, or whatever. Sure, a video could cover several objectives, but that’s not a good practice, as it will make the video too long. That still doesn’t make it a self-paced course, though.
It’s also not a Udemy course with many videos squished together that you can watch at your own pace. Yes, you could technically call it a self-paced course, and we have built courses that are individual videos in a format that allows someone to watch them one after another.
Typically, this allows employees to easily consume every video in one place and track their progress. This strategy is not necessarily great, but it’s not always bad. It’s also not a great example of a self-paced course, even though it technically is.
Even Udemy doesn’t call its training a self-paced course or e-learning. It refers to it as a course or an online video course. The same thing with LinkedIn Learning: They’re online video courses. They are not considered self-paced courses or eLearning because they have no interaction. Maybe there’s a test or an activity you can do, but there are no drag-and-drop activities, and you also can’t have someone perform an activity like you can in a software simulation.
It’s a course but not eLearning.
Self-paced courses are also not something you sit back and absorb. You likely click a lot to perform activities in software, or perhaps drag items around the screen. Yes, you probably need to click Next, even though that’s not interactive. But it’s not something you passively experience, leaning back in your chair watching video after video.
A self-paced course isn’t a passive learning activity. You shouldn’t be able to sit back and watch.
A self-paced course also doesn’t make someone an expert. Unless the topic is so simple that it can be mastered in less than 30 minutes. Typically, a self-paced course has one primary goal related to the business or department. Within that, some objectives help people achieve the ultimate goal of performing their jobs better.
While a video isn’t a self-paced course, a self-paced course can include one or a few videos. Sometimes, a video focused on a single goal can be used in a course to teach a single task while developing a broader skill. But the video itself is never a self-paced course—or at least it shouldn’t be.
Now that you know what a self-paced course is and isn’t, I can discuss how long it should/shouldn’t be.
How Long Should a Self-Paced Course Be?
As noted at the beginning of this post, no course should exceed 30 minutes. If your content exceeds 30 minutes, you’re not breaking it up sufficiently. No matter how relevant the content is, it’s difficult for anyone to focus for more than 30 minutes when learning.
If the content exceeds 30 minutes, it should be broken into topics that form a curriculum. We can watch The Lord of the Rings for three hours, but a self-paced course is a different beast. No one needs to concentrate on or understand complex ideas in a movie. Yes, there can be complex storylines, but that’s still not comparable to learning; it’s entertainment. When you’re learning something, it’s necessary to concentrate and connect complex dots.
The level of concentration and cognitive effort required to learn something new cannot be compared to that needed for entertainment. After 30 minutes, our brain starts to tune out, and we forget; shortly after, we’re likely to experience train brain. Then there’s the fact that the more you try to pack in, the less effective anything is.
Like we always say, nothing is important if anything is important when learning.
No matter how smart someone is, there are limitations to how much working memory we have. As instructional designers, we always have to contend with cognitive load, which limits how much we can process at any given time. Information needs time to sink in.
The self-paced course’s “goldilocks length” is 15-25 minutes, with a 15-20 minute goal.
While 30 minutes is the upper limit we recommend, that’s not the “goldilocks length” for a self-paced course. The ideal length is 15-25 minutes, with a goal of 15-20 minutes.
So, that means the main content and most important learning should happen within 20 minutes. However, there might be a short video introducing the content’s importance and WIFM (what’s in it for me), along with a brief recap and additional resources at the end.
If you properly focus a self-paced course on content and performance objectives, it’s not difficult to achieve. Some of our training resources, especially the course outline template, help with that focus.
When you identify the right goal to focus on, it’s much easier to make the content shorter. It’s all about identifying the primary course goal and then breaking it into 1-5 performance objectives to achieve them. Then, ensure all content maps back to those objectives.
Easy, right?
Okay, it’s not easy, which is why we stake our whole value on creating more valuable and efficient training for company technology. It all boils down to what employees need to do.
If you still need help shortening your self-paced courses, we have some tips for you!
Ways To Make a Self-Paced Course Shorter
If you’re having difficulty making your self-paced courses less than 20 minutes, these tips will help you achieve that goal more easily. We could say it’s easy, but it’s not. Mastering the art of simplicity and content consolidation takes a long time.
It’s impossible to take what you get from a subject matter expert (SME) and make it pretty. You’ll have too much content, and the self-paced course will be overwhelming. That’s not the SME’s fault, either. They are experts in their field and have way more knowledge than most people need.
As an instructional designer, you work with them and their content, distilling it to the essentials. You must also maintain a good working relationship and balance content and performance goals.
These tips will help you accomplish this monumental task when creating training.
- Make sure you even need a self-paced course. Performance support, videos, or other training methods are sometimes better options. Sometimes, no training is required, and the performance issue is beyond the scope of training.
- Keep your performance objectives to no more than five.
- Define the ultimate goal of what employees need to be able to do after taking the course. Anything that doesn’t help accomplish that is extra and not needed.
- Relate every learning objective to the larger goal of the course.
- If there are too many objectives or pieces of content, break them down into either more courses or a blend of courses and performance support, and combine multiple courses into a curriculum. Every course will be different in how it needs to be broken up, but there’s always a way. This is an opportunity for you to encourage recall and spaced learning.
- Spend more time on analysis and design than on the rest of the process. Don’t skip the A or D in ADDIE. If you do, your content will DIE.
- Use our ADDIE process to work through content more effectively.
- Use our blog post on creating a good self-paced e-learning course, which outlines our course outline template.
- Ensure every piece of content is essential. That analysis should even go down to the sentence level. If the content isn’t contributing directly to the objectives, cut it.
- Chunk the content better and, if possible, split it into multiple courses that can be taken at different times.
Hopefully, these ideas provide potential ways to shorten your self-paced course. It’s essential for everyone’s sanity that you aren’t overwhelming employees.
A little extra work on your part can save employees thousands of hours.
Spending extra time developing a self-paced course could save employees hundreds or thousands of hours across your organization. We worked through a process that helped us cut training from an hour down to 30 minutes, saving the organization hundreds of hours (and thousands of dollars) every year.
Wrap Up
Now that you’re an expert on self-paced courses, their development, and the strategies behind them, our job is done.
Just kidding!
Just as we could never make someone an expert with one blog post (or five), no single course could (or should) make someone an expert. But you now have a better idea about the maximum length of a self-paced course. There’s never an exact correct answer to any question, but there is a good rule of thumb to observe.
That’s why, while we may have been a bit vague at times, you still have some good guidance. There’s no good reason a self-paced course should exceed 30 minutes.
While our upper limit is 30 minutes, we also reviewed an ideal course length. Make sure your content is no longer than 15-20 minutes. While a course isn’t likely to be shorter than 15 minutes, we regularly create content that’s 17-20 minutes long. It’s ideal to keep it there, and you can achieve that with some effort.
You also have helpful pointers for creating shorter, more digestible content. While our list isn’t exhaustive, it points you to additional resources that are more comprehensive. We also have many resources that help you create better training. That will always be a great go-to for templates, checklists, and other documents.
Remember, you’re not alone when creating training in your organization. There are many great resources for making more concise training content, and we’re always here to help; just ask.
If you have a project coming up that requires technical training for employees to get up to speed on a corporate IT system, we’re experts in that realm. We’d love to discuss your project and learn more, so schedule a free consultation.
Our expertise is in creating custom software simulations using a variety of solutions, which we will work with you to determine. It all comes down to helping your employees work better with company technology.