How long should a course be?

Several years ago I stopped creating e-learning courses and switched to creating portals (and more recently apps) that serve up short media resources (checklists, video, infographics etc.). Instead of spending two days on a course, or forty minutes with e-learning, the typical portal user might spend ten.
And the question is sometimes asked 'But can you really compare 10 minutes on a website with two days on a course?' And the answer - perhaps surprisingly - is yes.
 
My first corporate job was for a multinational telecoms company. We were asked to look into blending a week-long training course for field engineers, on the topic of PABX installation (A PABX is a big piece of telephony kit and is complicated to install). Engineers would be trained on a new product and then typically wait several months before actually having to install one. They couldn't possibly be recalling much of the training course - so what were they doing?

We found out what they were doing: working together they had created an excel sheet containing the installation steps. When they had to do an install, they followed the sheet. So could a single checklist prove more effective than an entire week's worth of training? Yes. Indeed, that is precisely the solution that they had designed for themselves.
The graph above illustrates the phenomenon. It's all about point of need - the closer that you can get to the point of need, the less learning is required - and the leverage is really extraordinary: get close enough to the point of application and two sentences can be more potent than two weeks of training. This has something to do with the way the human mind works (affective context), and is why Google Now is so interesting: having access to the internet is merely a precondition for making precisely the information you need available. The latter is far more significant a development.

But this is not primarily an online pitch - though it does explain the special significance of online - it explains why the learner's ideal solution is to have someone standing right next to them, helping them as they go.

So the message to corporates is this (and I agree with Charles Jennings on this one): stop worrying about learning. Start thinking about performance support.

Sadly this distinction is too subtle for most organisations to grasp. Fortunately, their employees are figuring it out for themselves.