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How “big” should your online course be?

It’s a surprisingly tough question to answer

Glen Long
2 min readNov 24, 2022
Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

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.

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Glen Long
Glen Long

Written by Glen Long

Surprisingly hype-free course creation mentor and trainer. Publishes The Art of Course Creation newsletter and runs the Build Your Best Course online program.

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