off-the-shelf
It’s time to re-evaluate the cost of the e-learning we buy. Ken Wood, director,
Course-Source.net
Return on investment (ROI) on the bulk buy licence can look pretty appealing, right? Spend £10,000 on a library of 50 courses for a 200 strong workforce and it could cost as little as £1 per course enrolment! But L&D professionals aren’t dumb: they don’t actually expect this to happen. Real usage rates are often very low, and it actually ends up costing more like £100 per course enrolment. Traditionally publishers have been forced to take a sledgehammer approach to pricing because they had no control over what happened after their courses were sold and uploaded to the customer’s Learning Management System (LMS). Putting courses in the cloud changes all of that. Now we have the technology to track usage in real time. The metrics that we have in front of us is priceless. We can look at usage patterns not just across one workforce but across entire industries. We can see which courses are popular, how long courses take to complete, pinpoint weak areas where courses are under-performing, monitor completion rates and spot new trends faster.
At Course-Source we use tracking technology and usage data to offer a system
that lets L&D departments take up Pay-Per-Use pricing options without ditching the LMS they already have. L&D managers choose the course publishers they like then buy batches of “enrolment credits” that can be redeemed for any of the courses their preferred publishers offer. Every time a learner enrols in a course one credit is automatically redeemed. When credit starts to run low, automatic alerts remind the L&D department to top-up. We believe that charging “per enrolment” offers best value for today’s training
manager, but the whole area of learning analytics is opening up new opportunities for all of us.
Clicking with the customer Charlotte Gibbs, Maitland Gibbs says: “Like all large businesses, Maitland experiences seasonal trends in training. At some points of the year people are just too busy to do the courses they want. Other times, like during annual reviews for instance, demand for course access goes up considerably. Using the per-enrolment model allows us to cope with the ebb and flow of corporate learning. “With the traditional license model, we would have to wait until the end of the license to find out how much it actually cost per learning interaction (course enrolment), which was often much higher than expected. The per-enrolment model means we know how much each course enrolment costs, and we get exactly what we pay for.”
Winning vendors need to learn at the speed of broadband David Patterson, LearningLight
Amazon didn’t become a trusted e-commerce platform overnight, and as the e-learning industry’s buyers and sellers take to the internet, LearningLight’s David
Traditionally publishers have been forced to take a sledgehammer approach to pricing because they had no control over what happened after their courses were sold and uploaded to the customer’s Learning Management System (LMS).
Patterson maintains that the biggest winners will be the ones that listen and learn fastest.
Certainly there is a need and an appetite for change in the sector: we’re already seeing a move away from the old “single supplier” model, in which all a client’s needs are serviced by a single content provider. There needs to be more choice for buyer organisations and the days of the big license deals appear to be numbered. But some of the early pay per course players have done e-learning a disservice
by offering “Wowcher” type consumer deals that claim big “discounts” off artificially high prices. There’s a real danger that this seeps into the B2B market too.
The possible secondary effect of this downward pressure on prices is a risk of losing the creativity and innovation which have driven the industry forward in recent years. Pricing needs to be transparent so that buyers understand the true cost / value of the content they purchase. Platforms like ThinkZoom, Brainshark and Curatr are interesting developments
in how off-the-shelf (OTS) e-learning from many differing vendors can now be curated and contextualised by organisations or their learning partners. There’s an increasing trend toward self-creation of content in the US and
the UK, while the B2E (business to employee) market – where employees are empowered to manage their own workplace learning – is also taking off. A tangible shift is happening in the way skills development is funded in the UK: as colleges’ budgets are cut. There is a greater emphasis on employer-led skills programmes leading to a real danger that this will create a skills gap between those large corporates and private sector organisations that have established training programmes in place, and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) who do not. In turn this risks real implications for UK skills and productivity. This will drive demand for OTS e-learning courses from colleges and training providers as these materials can be used to form contextualised courses as part of a new drive towards blended learning supporting apprenticeships and workplace skills development.
There is undoubtedly a need for the L&D sector to expand its customer base beyond the large corporates and public sector clients, and reach out to an SME market still largely underserved. But to meet the needs of the buyers of e-learning three dynamics need to be present: 1: Pricing needs genuine transparency – customers need to understand the real price of their content if they are to value it.
2: Value and performance of learning content needs to lead the sector – not price: otherwise quality will suffer.
There is undoubtedly a need for the L&D sector to expand its customer base beyond the large corporates and public sector clients, and reach out to an SME market still largely underserved.
e.learning age june 2015
3) Provenance of materials is key – social and contextualised content is much more valuable than standardised solutions.
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