How To Create An Accurate Budget For Your Next LMS
When you decide to purchase a new piece of software, you need to budget for it accurately. Buying software is obviously going to cost money, but what ROI (Return on Investment) are you going to get from the new system? You need to make sure the software is going to be of massive benefit to your company and give you a higher return than you are paying.
Let’s take a look at some of the factors you may want to consider when drawing up a budget for your new LMS, to see how much return you will be able to get on a system, so you know what LMS options you can afford.
1. How Will It Affect Your Admin Team’s Time?
Making a move to eLearning means your courses will be easier to manage than traditional classroom-based sessions because once everything is uploaded to your LMS, it pretty much handles itself.
Once your course content is uploaded into your LMS, and your courses are listed online, there are far less management and manual tasks that need to be undertaken compared to other types of training. Course sales can be processed through your website, and course details can be automatically sent to your students, so you have very little to worry about once things get going.
This will mean even if you start to offer lots of more courses, or swap some of the courses you are running now to eLearning ones; your admin team won’t be overrun with lots of manual tasks to complete as the LMS will take on a lot of them itself. This will mean your Training Administration team will have more time to complete other tasks and won’t suddenly be overloaded.
2. How Will It Affect Your Instructor’s Time?
Purchasing an LMS gives you the chance to run a lot more courses than you did before, but without having to put any increased strain or tasks on your instructors. Chances are your instructors will not be involved in the day-to-day running of your eLearning courses, though they may help create content for the courses, or help grade assessments at the end of courses.
Again, this means you will be able to run a lot more courses without putting any additional strain on your instructors.
3. How Many Additional Courses Can You Offer?
The great thing about eLearning is you will be able to offer far more courses than you can currently, as right now you may be limited by factors like venues, have free instructors, and the number of hours in the day! With eLearning, because everything is based online, you won’t have to worry about any of these things. Also, because students complete the work in their own time, at their own pace, you don’t need to worry about scheduling all your classes to work with each other.
This means you can offer as many courses as you can create the content for, which gives you more chances for profit than having a limited amount of classroom-based sessions.
4. How Many More Students Can You Serve?
Similar to the number of courses you can offer, with eLearning you can serve as many students as purchase a place on your courses, as you will no longer be limited by things like the number of seats in your venue.
eLearning also means you can offer training to students you may not have been able to reach before, such as those who live far away from your training centers, or who wouldn’t be able to attend full-time courses in person due to other commitments.
This will again open you up to a much larger chance of profits as you can have as many students on your eLearning courses as you wish!
5. Will You Need To Hire More Staff?
Offering lots of courses for your students could traditionally mean having to hire lots of new staff to manage the extra workload. However, as we mentioned above, eLearning courses will allow you to expand your offering by a large number of classes without creating a lot of additional work, meaning you should be able to add this extra arm to your training offering without making any further hires.
This will save you lots of money because hiring staff can be an expensive business! Not only will you have extra salaries to account for, but you’ll also spend lots of time and money in the recruitment process.
eLearning will allow your training offering to grow without having to hire lots of new people to support it!
