How long should videos be in an online course?

I haven't developed anything quite that extensive, but I do own a few on DVD.

Your idea of providing a cheat sheet for each video is a good one, it helps people stay engaged in the content.

As far as how long each topic should be, the smartass answer is exactly as long as you need to cover the topic properly, and not a second longer. On a more practical note, if you could sell the course on DVDs, 60-90 minutes per disc seems about right. That would likely cover multiple distinct topics.

For ease of future reference, you might want to structure your videos the ways movies do - the main feature, divided into scenes, along with any supplemental topics.

If you're putting the course online, this would be even more important, as people watching the course on their computer would likely have more distractions and more need to break thigs up into manageable chunks.

I hope this gives you some ideas...

Thanks John. I hadn't considered distributing them on DVD. I'll have to think about that more. I think the overhead could be a lot higher.

Anyway, I was thinking of structuring it like the online CFP class that I took. There are 6 classes so there will be 6 training paths. When you open the first one you'll have a summary page telling you what will be included in that path and what each segment will cover. Then down the side will be tabs for each segment. Once you've watched a segment you can click a "done" button which will grey out the segment tab so you know you've completed it. You can go back to it later if you want but this way you'll always know where you are.

I'm thinking it will probably end up with each segment being 5-10 minutes as that seems like a good timeframe to allow people to sit down and do a segment when they have a little spare time rather than doing something longer that might be interrupted.

Thanks again!