Custom eLearning Courses Vs Off The Shelf: Why The Dilemma?
Custom eLearning courses or off-the-shelf courses? A choice that often perplexes L&D Managers. As L&D Managers wrestle with the cost-benefit analysis associated with each choice, they rely on their previous implementations and the associated data to decide on their next implementation. They also seek the advice of either in-house Instructional Design strategists or of an external vendor.
Instructional Design strategists, for their part, assess the trade-offs involved in terms of time, effort, and skills required to implement each strategy before proposing the optimal solution. An unfit choice often results in ineffective training, increased costs, and a delayed implementation that results in failure!
Those who are new to eLearning find it hard to decide. Those who have worked for years in the training sector or may have implemented a lot of classroom training, face these questions as well.
If they make an incorrect decision without understanding the pros and cons of each mode (OTS and custom eLearning courses) they may end up with disappointed learners, as well as no tangible gain from the training implementation.
What’s The General Preference?
Many Learning Managers prefer to purchase OTS courses over custom eLearning courses to save costs. OTS courses are readily available and can be easily deployed. OTS learning is suitable when you need ‘on-the-go’ training for general topics such as negotiation skills, working with MS Word, and so on. OTS is a type of general prescription medicine that may alleviate the fever of a person in immediate need.
However, we just need to look around us to realize how much we love to personalize. Right from setting the ringtone, wallpaper, and application shortcuts on our brand new mobile phone to ordering the ‘make your own sundae’ at our preferred café, we prefer things the way we want them.
Our world today is all about personal preferences. In such a personalized environment, the way we impart learning should break away from the conventional ‘one-training-fits-all’ approach. Custom eLearning courses are designed and developed with a specific audience in mind, and catering solely to the business and training mandate of the organization. The growing popularity of custom eLearning courses bears testimony to this.
However, custom eLearning courses are not just about personalization, but much more. They do offer better value in more than one ways. We will explore this further down the article.
Differences
Evaluating the choices across various key parameters can help you arrive at the right decision. Here’s a summary of the key differences:
- The structure of the learning in the OTS courses is such that it is in a ready-to-deploy format. Custom eLearning courses, on the other hand, need to be tailor-made to suit specific requirements.
- In the OTS courses, the content is generic. For example, working with MS Word, or some soft skill topics such as communication skills. OTS courses also are built on safety, compliance, law, and regulations.
- In custom eLearning courses, the topics that are chosen are induction, company products, code of conduct, specific skill sets required to work on a software or a project, and so on.
- The budget for an OTS course is limited, whereas the budget for custom eLearning courses is high.
Advantages Of Each Mode: OTS vs Custom eLearning Courses
Off-The-Shelf Courses
- The advantage of OTS courses is that they are comparatively cheaper and can be immediately deployed.
Custom eLearning Courses
- Custom eLearning courses are comparatively costlier; however, the costs are offset in the long run due to better ROI. Customers get exactly what they paid for.
- Customers own the courses and this makes it easier for them to make changes.
- The biggest advantage is that custom eLearning courses are aligned to the company brand and that makes them more relevant to the learners.
Disadvantages Of Each Mode: OTS vs Custom eLearning Courses
OTS Courses
- Some content can be irrelevant, inappropriate, or already known.
- Learners may not complete the course.
Custom eLearning Courses
- Consensus building among the stakeholders may impact the development timelines.
Conclusion
Custom eLearning courses score over OTS courses, as you can customize various aspects of the course through customizing the individual interactivities, CEO and management messages, knowledge check activities, the summative or final assessments, and host of other things which are not available in OTS courses.
With custom eLearning courses, the possibilities are many and that is why at Tesseract Learning, our Instructional Design strategists engage with Learning and Development managers to develop the perfect custom eLearning courses.
To learn more about how we are helping with impressive custom eLearning courses, do reach out to me by clicking my name to contact me or leave a comment below with your feedback and suggestion.