How "big" should your course be?

Deciding how big your course should be is oddly difficult.

First of all, how do you even “size” a course?

I guess you could talk about the number of lessons:

“It’ll be roughly 20 lessons spread across four or five modules.”

Or the overall length of the content:

“It’ll probably be around three hours of video in total.”

Or you could talk about the duration:

“This feels like a four-week course to me.”

All valid ways to get a sense of the likely “heft” of your course.

(You can even combine them: “This is a four-week course, with around 3 hours of content, broken up into about 20 lessons”.)

But I don’t believe you can decide on the best size for your course until you know how much work you want people to do.

By that I mean the time and effort you expect people to spend studying your materials and doing the homework.

Naturally, the amount of work required depends on the goal or result your course will help people achieve.

So if I said to you that creating a kick-ass writing portfolio is about 30 hours of work spread over three months, that would give you a good sense of the size of the task, right?

Or if I said you can create a window box herb garden in about two hours over a single weekend, that would be useful too.

You can’t size your course until you’ve sized the result.

So what about your course? How much work will it ask people to do to get the result? And over what period?

If you said “It’s X hours work spread over Y weeks” what would you put for X and Y?

Once you’ve done that, then you can think about the number of lessons and all the rest.

See you soon,

Glen