You’ve decided to launch your online course. You have a high-level design charted out and are about to draft the actual content of the course. Now, this is where course creators get stuck. How much content is to be included in the course? How much is too little? How much is the overload of information? Do learners really need the volume of information you intend to provide?
The answers to these questions can determine the impact and success of your course.
If you take time out to analyze some top rated courses available online, you will find a pattern in them – the kind of content most well-designed courses have are very high level. None of them venture too deeply into the course subject, leaving the learner with just an outline of important concepts and topics.
More often, the subject matter expert (SME) would want a little more information added in the course. But the question really is, do learners really need to be served all the information on a platter? Do learners have the time to sit through a course packed with truck loads of information, making it rather difficult to retain anything that they’d be learning in the first place?
What are we trying to say here?
Rather than including all relevant information about a topic in the content, maybe the focus should be on providing only an overview of the main points? You could later append this content with notes or instructions to find more in-depth information on the topic.
This would allow you the bandwidth to create content that will actually have more value for the learner and not waste their time.
Think about it another way. Cramming your content with information can make it seem boring. The last thing you’d want to do is to drive away learners from trying out your course. If you can say what you intend to say in fewer words, then that’s exactly what you need to do. Don’t put in extra information just because you want to or think it’s appropriate.
