Crowds Waited on the Docks for the Next Chapter. Nobody Is Waiting for Your Module Four.

A Victorian publishing riot, a 1920s cafe experiment, and the real reason most online courses lose their audience before the certificate ever gets issued.

Literary legend has it that, in 1841, impatient readers crowded a New York wharf as a ship arrived from England carrying the latest news of Charles Dickens's story.

"Is Little Nell dead?"

They were readers, not sailors' families, and the ship was carrying the final instalment of Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens published The Old Curiosity Shop in weekly parts, and for months readers had followed a dying girl and her ageing grandfather through the English countryside with something close to obsession. The dockside story has been repeated for generations, although historians generally treat the scene itself as literary legend rather than securely documented fact.

We sometimes tell that story to course creators we work with because it answers a question most of them are too polite to ask out loud. Why does nobody wait on the docks for module four?

The Waiter Who Forgot the Bill

According to the story traditionally told about the origins of her research, the young psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik and the Gestalt theorist Kurt Lewin noticed something odd about cafe waiters in the 1920s. They appeared able to remember complicated orders while they were still open, only for the details to fade once the account was settled.

Zeigarnik later tested interrupted and completed tasks in the laboratory, asking people later what they remembered. The effect that carries her name became associated with the idea that unfinished tasks are remembered better than finished ones.

I think it is interesting to think about where that research stands today. A large 2025 meta-analysis found no general memory advantage for unfinished tasks. What survived more robustly was a related tendency to resume interrupted tasks, known as the Ovsiankina effect. In other words, the strongest modern evidence is not that an open loop is automatically remembered better, but that unfinished business can pull us toward completion.

Which is close to what serial storytelling does so well. Dickens understood how to leave enough unresolved at the end of an instalment to make readers want the next one.

Why the Module List Is Working Against You

Most online courses are structured as a list, and a list is a series of closed accounts. Module one finishes, and the bill is paid. Module two begins from zero, and the learner's brain, quite reasonably, stops thinking about module one the second they click away.

That structure is not a small design choice. We would argue that it is one of the most overlooked contributors to poor completion. A peer-reviewed analysis of 221 MOOCs found completion rates ranging from 0.7 to 52.1 per cent, with a median of just 12.6 per cent. People abandon courses for many reasons, but structure matters: if every module feels completely settled, there may be little built-in reason to wonder what happens next.

Compare that to what happens when a story is doing the same job. Readers did not finish The Old Curiosity Shop reluctantly, and nobody reaches for one more episode out of guilt. Psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock studied what they termed narrative transportation, the state of becoming absorbed in a story. Their research showed that transportation can affect how people process and respond to what follows. Attention becomes absorbed in the narrative, and resistance to the material can soften because someone caught up in a story is processing it differently from someone simply evaluating a list of information.

A course built as a list asks to be evaluated. A course built as a story asks to be finished.

What This Looks Like When You Actually Build It

We reworked a leadership programme recently that had, on paper, excellent content and a completion rate its owner was too embarrassed to say out loud. The original structure was the usual list. Module one, communication. Module two, delegation. Module three, difficult conversations. Closed, closed, closed.

We rebuilt it around a single unresolved situation instead. The first lesson dropped learners into the middle of a real, uncomfortable scenario: a manager about to walk into a conversation she dreads, with the actual resolution withheld until several lessons later. Every module that followed picked up a thread from that same unfinished situation rather than opening a new, self-contained topic. Learners weren't told what happened until they had earned enough context to understand why.

Nobody built a badge system. Nobody added a leaderboard. What changed was that the account was never fully settled until close to the end, and learners who had previously gone quiet started logging back in, simply to find out how the situation resolved.

That is the whole mechanism. Not gamified. Serialised.

Building the Open Loop

• End each module on a genuine question rather than a summary, something the next module answers rather than restates.
• Choose one unresolved thread, a scenario, a case, a decision still hanging in the balance, and let it run underneath the entire course rather than treating each module as its own closed unit.
• Withhold the payoff. If a learner already knows how something turns out, no account is left open, and nothing pulls them back.
• Release in instalments where you can, even if the whole course already exists behind the scenes. A course that unlocks weekly can create anticipation by giving the learner something specific still to come.
• Resist the urge to summarise everything in your welcome module. A syllabus that tells learners exactly what is coming closes every loop before it has a chance to open.

The Real Question

Karl Kapp's work on gamification makes a useful related point: effective learning design is not simply about adding points, badges and leaderboards. Challenge, story, interactivity, feedback and curiosity can all contribute to engagement. The point here is similar. An unresolved thread is not decoration; it gives the learner a reason to want to know what happens next.

The famous story of readers waiting for news of Little Nell has endured because it captures something recognisable about serial storytelling: people wanted to know how the story ended. Dickens did not need to hand out prizes for finishing chapters. He kept giving readers a reason to want the next instalment.

So before you build another module that opens and closes neatly inside itself, ask the only question that actually matters.

Does your course ever leave the bill unpaid? Or does every module let your learner walk away feeling like the account is settled, and there is nothing left to come back for? 

If your course is finished, polished, and still losing people by module three, the fix is rarely more content. It is usually structure. Book a discovery call and let's work out where your loops are closing too early.