There is a version of every eLearning course that is 40% shorter and 60% more effective. It exists inside the course you have already built. The challenge is finding it — and having the conviction to cut what you find.
I have never audited a course that could not be meaningfully shortened. Not once. In 100+ projects, the pattern is consistent: roughly a third of all content serves the designer's comfort, the subject matter expert's ego, or the stakeholder's anxiety rather than the learner's performance. This content costs real time to build, costs real time to complete, and contributes nothing to the behaviour change the training was supposed to produce.
Why We Build More Than We Need
Several forces conspire to inflate eLearning content beyond what is useful.
The completeness instinct. Instructional designers and SMEs share a deep anxiety about leaving something out. What if a learner needs to know this? What if someone asks a question we didn't answer? The result is courses that cover everything rather than courses that teach what matters. Completeness and effectiveness are not the same thing. A complete encyclopedia is not a learning intervention.
The justification problem. When a training programme costs money to produce, there is pressure to show value through volume. A 45-minute course feels more justified than a 20-minute one, even if the 20-minute version achieves the same outcome. This is a psychological comfort, not a pedagogical rationale.
The SME knowledge dump. Subject matter experts know more than they need to share. This is not a criticism — deep expertise is exactly why you involve them. But expertise without instructional design creates content organised around how the expert understands the subject, not around what the learner needs to be able to do. The result is comprehensive, technically accurate, and frequently irrelevant to the actual performance gap.
The Audit Framework
When I review a course for content efficiency, I apply a simple test to every screen: what would a learner be unable to do if this screen did not exist?
If the answer is "nothing" — the screen can go. If the answer is "they would miss important background context," the follow-up question is: does the learner need that context to perform the target behaviour, or does it just make the designer feel better about the course?
Context and background serve a purpose when they help a learner understand why they should care about what follows. They do not serve a purpose when they are simply information that exists adjacent to the actual learning objective.
Specific screens that almost always fail this test include: welcome screens with no instructional purpose, module overview screens that simply list what the learner is about to learn, screens that repeat content from a previous screen in slightly different words, reference screens that present dense text the learner will never remember and could more usefully find in a job aid, and closing reflection screens that ask learners to summarise what they learned without actually testing or applying it.
The Cognitive Load Case
There is a scientific reason to cut content aggressively, beyond just respect for learner time. Cognitive load theory, developed by John Sweller in the 1980s, proposes that working memory has a limited capacity. When instructional content exceeds that capacity — when there is more information being presented than the brain can actively process — learning degrades rather than improves.
This is counterintuitive. More content feels like more learning. In reality, more content often means less learning. Every piece of information that is not directly relevant to the target performance consumes working memory that could have been devoted to processing and encoding what matters. Extraneous content is not neutral. It is actively harmful to learning outcomes.
Cutting content is not shortchanging learners. It is protecting their cognitive resources for the things that matter.
What to Do With What You Cut
The content that does not belong in your course does not always belong nowhere. Often, it belongs in a performance support tool — a job aid, a reference guide, a searchable knowledge base — that learners can access at point-of-need rather than trying to memorise in advance.
This is an important design shift. Training is for building the capability to perform. Performance support is for helping already-capable performers execute correctly in specific situations. Conflating the two produces courses that are too long for effective learning and too incomplete for reliable reference.
When you audit a course and find content that learners do not need to internalise but might need to access occasionally, do not try to teach it. Extract it. Put it in a job aid. Link to it from the course if needed. Free your learning experience to do what only learning experiences can do: build durable capability through practice and feedback.