My courses are in this area, I have courses on hypnosis, meditation, depression, PTSD, CBT, etc. My bestselling courses are my longer courses (7+hours), but I have shorter courses which sell okay and are good to cross promote to those in the longer courses. I just make courses as long as it takes to teach what I want to cover for the course, I also think about what people may be searching for and wanting to learn. There maybe an audience for people who want to learn advanced hypnotic language patterns for example which wouldn't likely be a long course, but there are far more people likely to want to learn how to do rapid hypnotic inductions which also isn't a long course.
So I think it depends what people would like to achieve by the end of the course, as you mention, some things can be taught independently. I can teach all of my courses independently and cross promote them, there is no need for students to have taken any of my other courses before the course they start with. For me it comes down to whether the course feels like a complete package and contains everything they need to know.
So for example, if someone wants to learn CBT then what would they expect if that is what they have said they want to learn? For me, what I would expect would take longer than a couple of hours to teach. If someone wants to learn how to do rapid inductions what would they expect? For me, I would expect to understand how rapid inductions work and how to do a number of inductions, which I wouldn't expect to take more than a few hours to be taught. I could just create a 'hypnotherapy' course for example which is 150+ hours long with what I would teach on a hypnotherapy diploma which would includes various therapeutic approaches, hypnotic approaches, safeguarding, etc, there are people who would love this, but that misses the people who just want to know one thing, who have a passing interest in hypnosis and just want to give this hypnosis thing a go on their friends, and that one thing may be in the course, but there are so many hours of content they may never find that one thing they are really after, for example, rapid inductions maybe 15 hours in, and all they really want to do is know how to click their fingers and have the person become hypnotised. So I think it is a balance.
I approached it when I joined Udemy in 2014 as; what are the modules I teach on my diploma, how can I adapt these to make them self-contained, what modules can be broken down further because people may well just be interested in one 90-240 minute part of the whole course - like rapid inductions or treating depression or CBT etc, these end up as different levels of training but are self-contained courses which anyone could take. A course on depression for example can be taught in a way that is educational and helpful to the person looking for personal knowledge, while also being educational about how to treat depression for counsellors, psychotherapists, hypnotherapists etc who are looking for continued professional development.
I know this has ended up a longer answer, but I just wanted to try to share my thinking about this behind the course and lengths of courses I have created and whether I have broken courses up or not.
All the best
Dan
