How To Save Money While Implementing eLearning
However, since it allows learners to develop and achieve skills and abilities, it requires experienced professionals, as well as advanced technology to achieve its full potential. This mostly means that creating efficacious eLearning does not come cheap. There is a way you can implement eLearning in a cost-effective manner (which will be discussed in this article), but in order to do that, you need to first learn what constitutes the costs of eLearning. Let’s have a look.
Costs Involved In eLearning
1. Content Creation
The cost of creating content is often underestimated. Organizations need to hire Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) as well as Instructional Designers to extract content from authentic sources, and then design and develop it in the form of eLearning courses, respectively. Both require time and well as significant money.
2. Technology
eLearning is technology. One of the most significant costs associated with eLearning is the initial setting-up costs. Better features cost more, and the more advanced the eLearning system, the higher the costs. Quality authoring tools, Learning Management Systems (LMSs), storage as well as expert support and chat options are the modern technologies that have become common in eLearning programs, and this adds to the bill of adding contemporary technology to your eLearning program.
3. Inexperience And Mistakes
Organizations implementing eLearning for the first time in their employee development program often don’t know what they’re doing. As a result, they often incur significant costs during development. And once that is done, usually, the initial eLearning courses have a number of errors. Although this helps them improve in the future, it still does add up to the initial costs of eLearning.
4. Maintenance
Because the knowledge required to train and upskill employees keeps on changing and so do eLearning trends, the content, as well as the design of the eLearning courses, it needs to be kept up to date and relevant to meet the needs of the learners and keep them interested. This adds to the cost of maintenance.
Now that we have established the costs involved in eLearning, what can corporate organizations do to implement eLearning cost-effectively? Well, if you can’t do something yourself, it’s time to call in the experts.
How Outsourcing eLearning Is A Cost-Effective Solution
Outsourcing your eLearning project means that you’ll be hiring an eLearning agency or solution provider to build and implement your eLearning program for you. As to why it is a good idea that’ll save money, here’s why:
1. It Is What They Do
eLearning agencies and solution providers specialize in creating eLearning programs and courses for corporate organizations, which means that they have a team of eLearning professionals with a varied skillset. Building such a team by themselves would be too expensive for an organization. However, the team at an eLearning agency will develop an eLearning program that is tailored to suit the organization’s needs, preferences as well as budget.
2. They Take Less Time To Do It
As mentioned before, an organization that tries to implement eLearning for the first time by building in-house usually makes mistakes, which costs time. However, as the teams at eLearning agencies do this for a living, day in and day out, they have great teamwork as well as expertise, which allows them to produce high-quality solutions much faster than the average internal learning team. This saves time, and thus money.
3. They Help You Stay Up-To-Date
If you’ve hired the right eLearning agency, you’ll always stay up-to-date on the best practices as well as the emerging technologies and trends in eLearning. As they are obliged to know and tell you about these in order to stay in business, you can always tap into their minds for fresh perspectives or a deeper understanding of the functionality and capabilities of new technology. This will prevent your eLearning program from ever getting outdated or obsolete. This will save on maintenance costs.
The decision to outsource your eLearning is cost-effective while being strategic and tactical at the same time. Done correctly, it can bring plenty of value to an organization by putting it in expert hands.
Originally published at cblpro.com.
