Tips for making a good theoretical course
Courses
Shorter courses are more digestible and have higher completion rates. We aim for courses to be completable within 1-2 hours. The following guidelines are in place to ensure that courses enable learners to apply their learning as quickly as possible.
A course should consist of 3 chapters.
A chapter should consist of 4 lessons, except Chapter 1 is 3.
Chapters
The first chapter should be concise, as it sets the tone for the course and is at the top of the funnel.
Chapter 1 should consist of 3 lessons with 8 - 12 exercises (recommended is 10).
Chapters 2 - 3 should consist of 3 or 4 lessons with 10 - 16 exercises (recommended 14).
Lessons
A typical DataCamp lesson comprises a video followed by 2-4 exercises.
Learning objectives are followed in each lesson.
The Ideal video is below 3-4 minutes, and its script contains less than 550 words.
Exercises
The title of an exercise needs to be concise and fit within a line in the interface.
All Exercises should have a title of 5 - 50 characters (recommended is 30) and be written in sentence case.
The exercise should be similar to the examples covered in the previous video, but should never be an exact copy and paste.
An exercise should never include a concept not covered in one of the previous videos (or prerequisite courses).
Theoretical exercises often include real-life narratives as a way to engage learners. You can find a good example of this in Communicating Data Insights.