The Anatomy of a Training Course: Number of Lessons

We recently released a study "The Anatomy of a Training Course," where we broke down the data we have collected to serve as a benchmark as you build out your own training strategy. This post will be sharing our findings on the correlation between lesson count and completion rates.

Number of Lessons

We know -- it’s tempting to try to squeeze as much information as you can into one course. But don’t overdo it, or your students will quickly lose interest. 

In fact, we noticed a significant downward trend: the more lessons per course, the lower the completion rates. With just one lesson per course, there was a 91% completion rate. At four lessons per course, completion rates fell to 61%. And at eleven to fifteen lessons per course, only 32% of registrants finished their training.

This drop off should come as no surprise, as it correlates with findings from our previous study on customer training completion rates. In general, shorter courses were more likely to be completed. 

One can also assume that the more lessons per course, the longer it takes to complete training. And since customer training is not mandatory, there’s a much greater chance frustrated students will give up partway through. 

That being said, our data was inconclusive, as we saw a brief spike between sixteen and thirty lessons per course. This might be due to the variety of topics covered. Some content may simply require a more detailed breakdown for students to retain key information.

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