How long is a piece of string?

Sam Harold gets his ruler out to measure the perfect course length.

I speak to you all from my perspective as a professional, working under great designers and scriptwriters under the umbrella of elearning, and if there was a question I have heard more than any other it goes exactly like this:

“How long should my elearning be?”

I have also heard hundreds of variations of it. How many pages should it be, how many words, how many interactions, etc…

We are human. To measure is a defining characteristic of that humanness. We want to turn the concepts within our minds, into concrete immutable facts. Cold and brutal numbers and measurements are what our logical minds want to see.

But they are not the way we learn information.

Learning and development is a process that belongs to the child-like parts of our mind. As we grow older, and absorb more information, we can lose sight of that beneath the mountains of essential information we require, on a day-by-day, month-by-month basis. But beneath all of us, remains a child with an imaginative perspective and a desire to learn.

But to keep us out of a tangent, why do I present this revelation to you? The reasoning is simple. Children do not learn by the clock!

We may forget this due to the years of education that skill us up to the busy, time requirements of our modern industrial society, but keeping to a time is a skill, not learnt information!

For children to learn the knowledge they require to become mature, developed adults, they must go outside of the classroom and continue their learning in the world of their own control.

By asking ourselves how long learning should be, we are creating artificial barriers to the essential and immovable processes of learning. Self-direction and motivation.

The length of our learning material can not be determined from an external, top-down perspective. How long is a piece of string? Well it is cut to fit, so to speak. The length of learning is informed entirely from the breadth of its subject matter, and the depth of its content.

It would be miraculous if we could ascertain a universal constant to these subjects, and whilst there no doubt exists some scarily accurate estimates (just ask AI for its opinion!), the purpose of these estimates can only be to guide, for it is the nature of an outlier to exist beyond that which is considered normal.

If we want to pursue excellence, it requires us to let go of the tracks and navigate our scriptwriting the way children approach learning. With self-direction, and motivation.

If we find ourselves reaching the limits of our chosen subjects, the time it takes us to reach that destination should bear no mark against the merit of its content! It is the excellence of engineering to achieve a desired result in fewer steps.

The best way to achieve this is to put the limitation of time upon ourselves.

Ask not, how long your elearning should be, ask instead, how long you have to prepare it!

By approaching our script writing from this perspective, we find ourselves better able to rationalise and judge what is and is not sufficient. What can be taken, and what can be expanded?

We know we have achieved perfection, not when we have nothing to add, but nothing to take away.

As specialists, our inner worlds are littered with knowledge and expertise. To capture that experience within a condensed period of time is a marvel.

Like a superhero, your knowledge comes to the rescue and enriches us with wisdom. But it is no substitute for the lifetimes spent on such endeavours!

We should focus our efforts as eLearning designers on providing the foundational steps to ‘skill up’ the next generation of specialists. Whether you are the developer or the teacher, let the learning size itself and leave becoming an expert to the students who will take your knowledege and build on it, regardless of its length.