Distraction Zone

One of the biggest challenges for an online instructor is keeping students’ minds from wandering. To help with that, I will share a few strategies to keep your audience focused and engaged.

First, avoid making lessons too long. I find long lessons tiring for both the instructor and the student. So, what’s the ideal length? I aim for around 5 minutes per lesson. While this isn’t a strict rule, it’s a helpful guideline. Depending on the content, some lessons might need to be longer or shorter, but try to stick close to that average. If I have to explain a technique that takes 30 minutes, I break it into six 5-minute lessons or something similar.

In a traditional classroom, you can manage a student’s attention directly. In online learning, that control is lost, so it’s important to keep lessons concise, clear, and focused—teaching one step at a time.

Another benefit of shorter lessons is that it makes it easier for students to find specific topics in your course. If they need to revisit a technique, they can quickly locate it in a shorter lesson. Now, imagine searching for one technique buried in a 30-minute video— much more difficult!

To give you a real-world example, here’s a table from one of my Google Ads units, showing lesson titles and their lengths. You’ll see that some lessons go beyond 5 minutes, but that’s fine. The goal is to keep it balanced and manageable.

Chapter 02 - Create your first campaign

? Create your first campaign (6:20)

? Set campaign name, network, and dates (9:23)

? Select locations (8:43)

? Location options - Target audience (4:52)

? Location options - Exclude locations (3:21)

(Example of Google Ads Course).

I could record all these steps in a single lesson, and it would last about 32 minutes. However, a few negative points could arise. One of them summarizes all the techniques under one title, and another downside is poor indexing of the techniques taught.

I'd like to explain: A few months after completing the course, a student may want to review the technique taught in the lesson about excluding locations from a campaign. I can highlight this technique by breaking the lessons into short segments, and the title becomes very clear.

However, if all the techniques in this chapter were recorded in a single lesson, and the title was "How to Create Your First Campaign," it would be much harder for the student to identify that this particular technique is in that lesson.

So, the more the techniques are separated into distinct lessons, the easier they will be to find. Not to mention the mental fatigue caused by long lessons. At this point, you might even ask me:

- “Andre, but YouTube tutorial videos are typically 15 to 25 minutes long, and I watch them just fine!”

You're right; on YouTube, we can maintain good concentration for a longer time. Why is it more tiring during a course?

The explanation is simple: you go to YouTube to solve a specific problem. You watch, learn, and you're done. You leave YouTube and apply what you've learned.

YouTube is like a short sprint to solve a specific issue. An online course, on the other hand, is a marathon of knowledge transfer. The preparation and pace of the race are quite different.?