Don’t Make Compliance Training Too Long

By: Justin Ferriman • March 21, 2016
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elearning-duration-clockTaking an online course is a convenient way to learn a new skill.

However, sometimes elearning isn’t always viewed in a positive light.

Sometimes employees are required to take an online course for compliance reasons. These situations are tricky because the people taking these courses don’t necessarily want to take them.

Think about it – anytime you are told to do something you’re not really excited. In most cases you may be annoyed.

If you are responsible for creating the course then you need to present the necessary information in an effective manner to a very tough audience.

Sure, you could just use simple text and graphics, but why not try to make a better impact?

One of the easiest ways to lose your audience is if your course is too long.

Our attention spans are short. On top of that there are many distractions available to us when we open our computers or smartphones.

With this in mind you should break up your courses accordingly. If possible, try to make all compliance training 45 minutes or less in length. At the very most it can be an hour. Beyond this experience has shown me that you will lose your audience.

If your course has to be longer than an hour then you would be best served by breaking up the content into two separate modules. They should be equal in length if possible. Longer modules give the impression that they are “more important” when that may not be true.

With compliance training you know that there will be a (probably large) portion of the audience that doesn’t want to take the course. Use this knowledge to create your course accordingly – and that includes the total time.

The more concise you can make the content the more likely you can achieve your learning objectives.

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter