How many lectures do you need to include in your course?

This is a question we get asked continually: “How long should my course be?”

Many new online teachers believe they have to create a massive course curriculum to charge a premium price. The chart below shows the number of lectures shown by our top schools’ courses.

NOTE: Teachable schools denote each lesson in their online courses by lectures. A lecture is a structured unit of information made up of text, files, video, images, and/or quizzes. The curriculum in an online course is composed of a series of these lectures. [The Tourism Academy refers to these lectures as "lessons."]

Most of our top schools (73.2%) hold an average of 11 to 50 lectures per course. Moreover, that group is more or less evenly distributed above and below 25 lectures per course.

how many lessons per course

Do schools with longer courses make more money?

Not necessarily.

Over 90% of the revenue generated by Teachable’s top schools corresponds to those with fewer than 50 lectures per course on average, with 52% of the total revenue associated with schools showing fewer than 25 lectures per course. The best online teachers understand something about this industry–that the value of their courses is determined by their ability to compress years of experience into programs that will allow students to learn a skill within a short time frame.

number of lessons vs revenue online courses

Next, we looked at the difference in length between paid and free courses.

While paid courses have a similar distribution to the one we just saw (which makes sense considering that there are significantly more paid than free courses), the free courses are clearly shorter in length, with more than half of them (58.4%) containing 10 lectures or less.

number of lectures for online courses

Source: Teachable.com | 12 Powerful Secrets of Entrepreneurs who made $32.9 MILLION with Online Courses