A topic that has really come to light for us lately is the improved availability opportunity for an organization by adding eLearning to their portfolio of offerings. It’s not a ground breaking thought, but I view it a little differently now because a new term (for me) is now attached: “sales revenues”
“So what”, right? For a business or organization which has not been providing online training to it’s customers, this becomes an incredibly potent new revenue stream. You are now able to provide 80% of the value of your trainings at 20% of the cost to deliver. (no don’t quote me on those percentages since it’s topic dependent!) Anyone with experience in providing training will agree that you can’t replace “live” and the value that comes with it. Then again, for 80-90% of what you are doing…knowledge transfer… who cares? Charge less since the customer isn’t getting the full experience.
How about an example? I’ll use one of our classes:
Monitoring Networks and Systems with Open Source Tools
Length – 8 weeks (1 live 1 hr presentation per week)
Student Cost – $1000
Production Cost – $700 (paying the trainer for live time, plus class management, plus the tool)
Self-Directed Monitoring Networks and Systems with Open Source Tools
Length – 8 weeks (Instructor available for live Q&A for 30 mins every other week)
(Video recordings of the 8 live presentations available for viewing)
Student Cost – $700
Production Cost – $300 (paying for the live time, plus class management, plus the tool)
At a $300 difference in cost to the students, there is an entirely new audience that might purchase this class. In addition, after initial setup, it’s much less expensive to run the class and has much higher profit margins. Depending on ‘live time, plus class management’ means for your operations, those numbers can look even better for the business. Yes, I’m completely ignoring the costs for initial setup, but the only real difference is recording the live video sessions from an existing class and manipulating them in to the correct form for the self-directed class. (4-8 hrs of work tops for most situations)
So, in summary, adding eLearning to your portfolio can potentially…..
- Create new revenue streams
- Improve availability to your customers
- Decrease production costs
- Deliver consistent trainings to a customer’s workforce (what about new hires AFTER you gave the training?)
- Create a sense of community around a topic, enabling your customers to support each other (chat, discussion boards, etc) where appropriate
