One of the best features of taking an online course is that you can work on it when it best fits into your busy schedule. DAI Institute has a Learning Management System (LMS) behind the scenes that keeps track of all the courses you are taking as well as your progress through an individual course.

Here is a quick overview of how this works in the LMS.

When you log in to DAI Institute, you will be taken to the “My Courses” page. This shows all your active courses and your percentage of completion.

Once you have completed the first unit of your course, you need to click the green “Complete Lesson” button below the unit.

When you click that button, you will see this green box and the “Next Lesson” button just above the unit. Click that button to go to the next unit in your course.

As you continue to follow these steps for your entire course, the LMS will be tracking where you leave off and make sure your progress has been marked. Finally, when you return to work on your course, you will see in the table of contents exactly where you left off.

So, as you are looking over the courses on DAI Institute, and you find one you’ve been looking for, let’s just say, Servant Leadership – Video, and as you read the summary you see that it’s 10+ hours and 117 lessons! Is this course going to take me months or years to complete? Well, the short answer is, no.

All the courses on DAI Institute are self-directed. Meaning that you can learn and work at your own pace. As adults we learn much more effectively by having this flexibility.

One of the most important aspects of any learning outcome is retention. You could work through all 10+ hours of the Servant Leadership course in one sitting, but we’re pretty confident that you won’t retain much content from the course. On the other hand, if you take a couple of weeks to work through that same 10+ hours of content, you will retain and be able to put into practice so much more. Pace yourself and take time to digest and think about what you have been learning before you continue through the course.

Our courses are designed with exercises and interactivity to engage and help the adult learner retain the content. In some courses, we will even ask you to do an exercise and then find another person to discuss your ideas with. What we don’t want is for these courses to be a passive ‘sit back and watch’ type of experience.

DAI Institute courses are designed to keep track of your progress – you can learn more about how that works in the blog post “Pick Up Where You Left Off” – so you can take a break whenever you need to. This lets you pick it back up where you left off when you return to your course.

So, back to the original question – how long does a course take? Well, the answer is: you get to decide. Each course is a unique experience for every unique individual.