Before is start my explanation on my observation i would like to make it clear here that majority of the course instructors are well trained on the topic they speak and may be far more experienced than a random You Tuber who has good teaching skills. However,this article isn't about that,its more about the way the courses are structured.
So,In this Quarantine, as I was interested in learning something new, I decided to start learning Python. As for the very beginning I searched on YouTube for the videos and found stuff like, "learn the basics in this one video", or "Become a python developer after this video".
Being new into the coding space,I was already skeptical about the possibility of it and when I saw the duration of the videos, I totally lost interest in it. It was damn 7 hour long video!. When I called up friends and asked for a workaround, some suggested courses as they would be more informative and wouldn't be that long for a basics. and I realized that I have a free trial month of LinkedIn learning.( it is available for every LinkedIn user, you can try learning there in this Quarantine)and then I saw the same duration of content, in the courses.
But now, I also see the top search result labelled "Popular" and was eager to know why its popular despite being so long. It had lot of people enrolled and had good reviews and it was also around 3 hours long.
Yet my curiosity made me click it and it started with around a three minutes video of introduction and every valuable information that needs to be conveyed was a separate video under each playlist of videos called chapters. And every video inside was around 7 to 8 minutes long. And i started learning for straight 2 hours. And wanted to know how was it possible to do so.
Psychology of it
The courses have been designed in the way of the Pomodoro technique.So what is Pomodoro technique?It is the way of making sure you don't focus deeply on a task for more than 25 minutes continuously.This concept is very similar to what you call time boxing in time management.
This method was introduced by Francesco Cirillo owner of Cirillo Consulting and Author of "The Pomodoro Technique: The Life-Changing Time-Management System" when he wanted to get more done as a university student.
When you take short breaks that way,you won't experience a fatigue while learning and the information you receive tends to stay better than the other way round.This is the same case on any course based platform.Like the most rated or best seller udemy courses. And 25 minutes is not the hard and fast rule.It may go up to 30 minutes but 25 minutes is the ideal one or most effective one.
I hope you found some value in it.