YourClassroom.Com

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

Many businesses such as Landscapers and Nurserymen need to take Continuing Education Courses to keep theircertification current.  Soon, a number of long time landscape contractors and nursery owners will be posting classes that can be used for that purpose.

Anyone out there who has a need for this kind of service can now contact www.yourclassroom.com to request highly qualified instructors who can cover most anything from Accounting to ZooKeeper.

We will be calling it the School for Professional Development and Continuing Education.

The folks at yourclassroom.com have been working for 30 years to encourage business involvement in classroom instruction.  This has been a very difficult task, merging the culture of business with the culture of K-12 education.

The yourclassroom.com learning management system was developed in the classroom with real teachers, real students, and real community based experts.

We need to get highly qualified professionals who really know their stuff into the classroom to enhance learning.

We are involved in conversations with a handful of Adoption Education organizations in hopes of establishing a partnership with the goal of improving access to materials and professionals for the adoption community as a whole.  There are a lot of organizations that you can go to for information, but there is very little coordination between them and very few offer remote teachings and support.  This makes an already difficult and stressful endeavor even more of a burden for the families and professionals with a less developed adoption community around them.

More to come soon.  Hopefully, we have some things officially under way later this month and can offer good news to anyone looking for “more”.

Mike

P.S.  For anyone curious why we are involved in this community, I’m a new adoptive father.

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!