My rule of thumb is enough slides to cover every essential element and not one more. This helps me stay focussed on the task and produce concise, value for time/effort (learners), courses.
I think that the answer to your first question goes to design and maybe a little psychology. If you’ve ever heard the cognitive load theory, you know that we humans have a limited capacity in terms of short term memory (roughly 7 +/- 2 pieces of info at one time). You can increase the capacity of the memory by decreasing the cognitive load. Pages of text require a lot of load to process, reducing the capacity of our short term memory. Pictures combined with text help decrease the load, and pictures with audio narration increase capacity even more according to the theory.
Maybe try to design your slides around these principles to help reduce the number of slides needed to teach a concept, thereby increasing audience retention?
This is one of those questions that are sometimes answered by asking another question like “how long is a piece of string”, but really the length of your course is dependant on a number of factors. I don’t think there is a hard and fast rule that says a course needs a specific number of slides.
Really it comes down to how much you need to communicate, and how you choose to present that information. That should probably help you with the number of slide question.
For the file size limit, I think Greg has some good suggestions here. Breaking up content into smaller chunks than one long/large course is not only good for file size limits, but also for learners.
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