Bulk Buy eLearning Courses Vs eLearning On Demand
ROI on the bulk buy license can look pretty appealing, right? Spend £10,000 on a library of 50 eLearning courses for a 200 strong workforce and it could cost as little as £1 per course enrollment! But Learning and Development (L&D) professionals aren’t dumb: They don’t actually expect this to happen. When they calculate the real cost of buying eLearning, usage rates are often very low, and it actually ends up costing more like £100 per course enrollment.
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. 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 are pioneering and incredibly useful in driving better purchasing decisions. 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 Learning and Development departments take up pay-per-use pricing options without ditching the Learning Management System they already have. Learning and Development managers choose the course publishers they like then buy batches of “enrollment units” that can be redeemed for any of the courses their preferred publishers offer. Every time a learner enrolls in a course one unit is automatically redeemed. When units starts to run low, automatic alerts remind the L&D department to top-up.
We believe that charging “per enrollment” 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 is Talent and Learning Coordinator at financial services business, Maitland. “Like all large businesses, Maitland experiences seasonal trends in training”, explains Charlotte. “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-enrollment 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 enrollment), which was often much higher than expected. The per-enrollment model means we know how much each course enrollment costs and we get exactly what we pay for”.
Is Enrollment Based Pricing Always Cheaper?
No. Most Learning and Development managers find it's cheaper, but if courses actually are being consumed in the numbers predicted by the bulk buy license seller, then the bulk buy model will probably work out cheaper.
Enrollment based pricing makes most sense in the voluntary side of eLearning. When eLearning supports mandatory compliance requirements, and everyone in the company is required to complete the learning, the model may not offer the best pricing.
