Section · 6 guides
Deciding what a course is for, how much of it there should be, and what learners will actually do rather than watch.
Most digital courses are built content-first: someone knows a subject, records what they know, and arranges it into modules. The result is comprehensive, long, and finished by a small minority of the people who start it.
These guides work the other way round — from the outcome backwards. What should someone be able to do at the end, what is the shortest path there, and what has to be cut to make that path walkable by someone with a job.
Courses built from what the instructor knows are comprehensive. Courses built from an outcome are finishable.
Any metric can be gamed once people know what it rewards; this guide gives a workplace example of how time-tracking signals can be manipulated.
For broader evidence-based guidance on teaching and course design, the Carnegie Mellon Eberly Center publishes university teaching resources.
Read the guideLength is the single biggest predictor of completion, and it is the variable instructors are least willing to cut.
Read the guideMost stuck learners are not stuck on the current lesson. They are stuck on something assumed three lessons ago.
Read the guideVideo is the part instructors spend most of their time on and the part that contributes least to whether anyone can do anything afterwards.
Read the guideMost course quizzes measure whether someone was recently exposed to a sentence. That is not the same as measuring capability.
Read the guideEverything in a digital course dates, but not at the same rate. Structuring for that at the start is what makes updates affordable.
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