YourClassroom.Com

Life long learning is a great thing, I still can’t get enough of it myself.

Now, elements of life long learning are established by legislation, called Continuing Education Hours for contractor licensing.  In order to renew a large menu of licenses, businesses need to document these life long learning experiences.  I hate it when someone tells me I have to do something when it just seems right to begin with.

Anyway, yourclassroom.com is coming to the rescue of those micro businesses who are struggling with the escalating prices of these requirements.  Loss time on the job, high cost at the local college, the burdensome grant requirements and then the record keeping and budgeting.

Businesses training businesses is a good way to go, now we need to put it all into a fully functional management system to reduce loss time and costs.

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

2 of our team members have been invited to speak at a West Linn Chamber of Commerce event next Tuesday, March 3rd.  Tom will be giving his popular “Things to know about your Business Message” talk and Mikel will be presenting information on “Managed Servers vs Local Servers”.

We’re broadcasting to a limited audience, apologies that we can’t open it up to the public.

To be broadcast from within YourClassroom.Com for those that can’t attend.

Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. You keep hearing about them and new sites are popping up over night. How do you use them? Which ones best fit your company’s needs? Social media experts will help you figure out which social networking sites and what tools can be put to work for your business.

Check the details!