How long should my online learning session be?

As with anything involving the human brain, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer.

However at the recent VELG National VET Conference I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Deniese Cox, who runs TeachingOnline.com.au (check out her free videos – they are awesome).

I also thoroughly enjoyed Deniese’s NVC conference workshop “10 Quick-Fire Findings from Research.”

One thing in particular stood out for me in this session, and that was the research she conducted on the duration of live online sessions (E.g. an online session facilitated over Zoom).

I was trying to find research on this earlier in the year for one Accellier’s free PD sessions and at the time I could not find much.

There’s a bit of good research into video duration for online courses, however questions around optimising interactive live session durations remained unanswered for me.

The Research

To be clear, Deniese did not set out to define precise online lesson lengths, but to understand better what goes on for students through the passage of time in a live session.

Deniese started by setting the scene for her research – that the 103 participants were in optimal settings to reduce cognitive load. This included:

• Intrinsic and germane cognitive load reduced with good teaching and learning practices
• Extrinsic or extraneous cognitive load reduced by ensuring learners were in optimal learning environments

In simple terms; the teaching and session structure were excellent and the learners were not overly distracted by their environment or tech issues.

Deniese’s research looked at short, medium and long live online sessions to compare the results. These were:

• 1 hour sessions
• 2.5 hour sessions
• All day sessions (4.5 hours of learning over 6 hours – 90 min blocks with 45 min breaks).

The research measured three key areas:

1. Mental Effort
2. Ease of Focus
3. Recall after one day

Let’s look at the results.

One Hour Live Online Sessions

In one hour sessions, students:

• exerted only a little mental effort, with a slight increase toward the 60 minute mark;
• found it easy to focus, finding it a little harder toward the end; and
• were able to recall most of what was learnt the next day.

Two and a Half Hours Live Online Sessions

In the two and a half hour sessions, students:

• had to exert significant and increasing mental effort especially after 90 minutes;
• ease of focus dropped significantly after 120 minutes; and
• had difficulty recalling the content that was taught after the 90 minute mark (and look, only 30% recall at the end).

Full Day Live Online Sessions

In the full day sessions, students:

• had to exert significant and increasing mental effort towards the end of the second 90 minute block, and a huge amount of effort for the entirety of the third session;
• ease of focus dropped significantly after during the second session and dramatically in the third session; and
• had very poor recall of the content of especially the final session (at best, it looks to be less than 50% recall and dropping quickly to below 30%).

I found the full-day session findings particularly interesting. The first conclusion we might draw from this might be to ask  “is that final 90 minute session even worth it!?”

A better question to ask might be “how could we better utilise the last session in a day of online learning?”

Well Deniese explored this question with remarkable results…

Enriching Learning in the Final 90 Minute Session

Instead of delivering any new content in that last session of a full day of learning, Dr. Cox had the educators help learners to narrate, shape and expand notes from earlier in the day. Further, they had facilitated question and discussion time and the questions the learners were asking were so rich. The learning outcomes in this model were exceptionally high.

My favourite moment in the session was when Deniese said:

Conclusions

Again, there’s no one-size-fits all. However Dr. Cox’s research has given us a much better insight into what happens for learners when they participate in your online sessions.

The data from the research shows that under optimal conditions, less than two hours is a good duration.

We also learnt that for full-day online learning events that the time in the final session is better used for reviewing, narrating and expanding notes as well as facilitated questions and discussions.

If you want to see more of Dr. Deniese Cox’s research, check out her work at TeachingOnline.com.au.