Planning a video course: modules, length, retention

By James Jones, founder of Granary Digital · Updated 5 November 2026

A video course is a series of promises kept in a sensible order. If you plan the promise, the modules and the lessons on paper first, the filming becomes the easy part, and most of the reasons learners drop out are already dealt with. This page is for experts, educators and small businesses making a first paid or free course.

Start with one promise

Write one sentence that begins "After this course you will be able to…" and ends with something a learner can check. "Understand lighting" fails. "Light an interview so it looks the same on every shoot day" passes. If you cannot finish the sentence with a single verb, the course is not yet one course.

Then write the person it is for and what they already know. A beginner course for people who have never held a camera and a refresher for working crew are different products, even when the topic is the same.

Work back to modules

Take the promise and ask what a learner must be able to do on the way. Each answer is a module. A first course usually needs four to eight modules. Fewer and it is a single long lesson; more and you have two courses.

Each module should end in a milestone: something the learner can do, make or show. Each lesson inside the module then teaches one task. This is the same rule as in our guide to training videos people actually finish: one task per video, titled by the task, as long as that task takes.

Here is a worked example, invented for illustration, of a course called "Film your own training videos".

Six modules of four lessons at four minutes each come to 96 minutes of finished video. A learner can see the whole shape from the table, and so can you when you cost the shoot.

How long should a lesson be?

Shorter than you think. The best evidence we know of comes from a 2014 study by researchers working with edX, which analysed 6.9 million video-watching sessions across four edX courses with about 128,000 students.

• Length was the strongest predictor of engagement. Median engagement time was at most six minutes, however long the video was.
• Videos under three minutes held attention best: 75% of viewing sessions lasted more than three-quarters of the video.
• Showing the instructor's face helped in one of the courses, where students attempted 46% of problems after talking-head videos against 33% after other videos. In the other course the two groups were level.
• Informal filming beat a high-budget studio recording in the one pair of courses compared, with students engaging nearly twice as long on informal videos of 6 to 12 minutes. The authors say the instructors' skill may account for some of that.
• Courses planned for the online format did better than repurposed lectures.

The authors recommend splitting content into chunks of under about six minutes, showing the instructor's face between slides, and filming informally. Take it with care. The study is from edX university courses, is retrospective and measures watch time and problem attempts, not learning. But it fits what we see: a lesson is as long as the task, and a screen demonstration may need more than six minutes where a talking head does not.

What keeps people watching

Length matters, and so do five habits that you can plan.

1. Open with the task. The first ten seconds say what the learner will be able to do by the end of this lesson.
2. Give them something to do. A short exercise at the end of each module turns watching into practice. Our Phoenix Formula audio course comes with a short PDF workbook each week for the same reason.
3. Set a rhythm. Releasing a lesson a week gives people a reason to come back. The cost is that someone who wants everything now cannot have it. Choose on purpose.
4. Show progress. A visible module list and a milestone at the end of each module tells the learner how far they have come.
5. Cut, don't pad. A script that runs short is a better lesson than one stretched to a target length.

A lesson template that scales

Once you have a lesson list, give every lesson the same shape. It makes the scripts quicker to write and the course feel consistent.

1. Promise (10 seconds). Say what the learner will be able to do by the end.
2. Show (most of the lesson). Demonstrate or explain the one task, in the order the learner will do it.
3. Recap (10 seconds). Repeat the steps in one sentence.
4. Next step. Point to the exercise or the next lesson, and say how long it should take.

Write the lesson title as the task, such as "Set your camera height", not as a topic, such as "Camera". Titles written as tasks are easier to scan in a module list, and they are what learners search for when they come back to find a single step.

Choose the format

You do not have to film a talking head. The three options each have a place:

• Talking head builds trust and suits explanation and demonstration.
• Screen recording suits software and step-by-step tasks.
• Audio only suits courses people consume while walking, driving or cooking. We made our own creativity course in this form, and what we learnt making The Phoenix Formula is the full story.

For video on a small budget, talking-head course set-ups on a budget covers the kit.

Test demand before you build

A course takes weeks to make, so find out whether anyone wants it first. Put up a simple page that says what the course is, who it is for and when it opens, with a form to join a waiting list and a free download in return. We test our own courses this way, ahead of production. If nobody joins, you have saved yourself the shoot.

Plan the shoot from the lesson list

Once you have the list, the shoot plan is arithmetic. A presenter is good for about four focused hours however long the day. On a pre-lit stage with a presenter reading from an autocue, about eight short pieces in a day is realistic, and about four if the lighting changes between them. That is a planning estimate, not a promise. How many videos can you film in a day shows where the time goes.

Our example course has 24 lessons, so three days at eight a day, one for each pair of modules. Group by set-up, not by order: film every lesson in the same outfit and the same light together, then edit them into sequence.

Write the scripts before you book. Scripts for video should be written for the ear, in short sentences, and writing for the ear shows how. Get them signed off so you are not rewriting on the floor.

Common mistakes

• Starting from the topic instead of the promise.
• Lessons that teach two things, which hides both.
• A course that runs to forty hours because every idea earned a lesson.
• Filming in three different outfits over three days.
• Building the whole course before testing whether anyone wants it.
• Poor sound. Learners forgive a plain picture sooner than a noisy room.

If you would rather have the whole shoot planned, filmed and edited for you, our content studio days plan a batch of lessons around your scripts.

Sources

• Philip J. Guo, Juho Kim and Rob Rubin, How Video Production Affects Student Engagement: An Empirical Study of MOOC Videos (ACM Learning at Scale 2014), read 5 November 2026

Related guides

• Audio course production: what we learnt making The Phoenix Formula
• Talking-head course set-ups on a budget
• All guides and tools

The picture at the top of this page is an illustration, not a photograph of a client or a real job.