I’ve had a busy November. I’ve been working on my second course for PluralSight. The course, which has not yet been released (I just finished it today!) is called Working with Excel on an iPad.
Every PluralSight course includes quiz questions, which help to test your understanding of the course material and the key concepts being taught. There should be 2 questions for every 15 minutes of video. Rather than work out in my head (or using my fingers) how many questions I need to create, I created a little spreadsheet to do it for me…
The course was split into 7 lessons and as you can see, the duration of each lesson varied. The figures in the screenshot above aren’t accurate – I’ve made them up to keep this example simple.
The formula in B9 is =SUM(B1:B7) and it simply adds up all the times to give the duration of the course.
The formula in B10 is =B9*1440 and this formula converts a time into minutes. It’s important to note that Excel may format the cell (B10) as Time. If this happens, change the format back to General so that it displays a numeric value.
The formula in B11 is =INT(B10/15)*2. I’ve used the INT function to generate the Integer element of B10. I’ve done this to avoid any “rounding up” issues.
For example, if the total course duration was 2 hours and 40 minutes…that is 160 minutes.
160 / 15 is 10.67 which Excel would round up to 11.
11 x 2 is 22 (meaning I’d need 22 questions)
But actually there are 10 x 15 minute blocks in 160 so actually I’d only need 20 questions