The way an online course is designed has a big impact on how engaged students will be with the material and whether they will complete the course. In this LMScast Joshua Millage and Chris Badgett discuss how to use the Fibonacci sequence for instructional design to set the pace for your course.

Keeping students engaged and motivated can be a challenge for teachers, and your course completion rate could suffer if the cadence of your content does not match with students’ interest levels and how they naturally learn. If you deliver your content too slowly, students could become bored and lose interest. But if you deliver too much content all at once, students could become overwhelmed.

Students are the most interested and motivated right after they’ve decided to take a course, and that motivation settles down as the course goes on and students are consuming your content. The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers where the next number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two numbers. Starting with 1, the sequence is 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. This sequence occurs frequently in nature, such as in the spirals of a snail’s shell and the arrangement of seeds on a sunflower. 

Using the Fibonacci sequence for instructional design will match well with the way students naturally learn and their interest levels. And you can build the sequence into your course by dripping content in this type of pattern, with more content delivered at the beginning of the course and then slowly spacing the content out a bit more as the course goes on.

LifterLMS is a learning management system plugin for WordPress that has built-in functionality to handle drip content and engagement. You can use the system to space out your content, automatically email students to encourage engagement, and award badges and certificates for lesson or section completion. You can try a demo of LifterLMS at demo.LifterLMS.com to see for yourself what it can do for you.

048: How to Use the Fibonacci Sequence for Instructional Design

LMScast is a podcast for innovators like you in the WordPress LMS e-learning community. LMScast is produced by Chris Badgett, part of the team behind the #1 WordPress LMS plugin called LifterLMS. Each episode brings you valuable insights with one goal: to help you generate more income and impact through a learning management system built on WordPress. LMScast is for you the entrepreneur, the teacher, the expert, or the online marketer.