Online Courses Are a Great Way to Extend Your Time
Everyone knows what an online course is, but so few businesses use them to their advantage. Anything that requires you to show someone how to do something or that requires someone to have a base level of knowledge. Where the process of training needs to be repeated, an online course could be an excellent choice.
Online Learning is part of everyday life. People are familiar with it and almost everyone has at some stage gone to YouTube to watch a video on how to do something. So it makes perfect sense that we learn like to learn on demand, via video. On most occasions we can appreciate being able to rewind, replay or go back over the content that we have just seen. I find this particularly useful in the modern era of online universities. It’s much easier to learn at one’s own pace than trying to write at breakneck speed. To keep up with a lecturer or getting stuck on a word you don’t know the meaning of and missing other crucial parts of the lesson.
Online learning is a powerful tool when used in business. If you think about the average employee onboarding process. There is usually a lot left to chance or whatever happens to be shown on the day. We have probably all started a job somewhere and the first thing you get is a walk around intro followed by “there is your workspace”. Even if an induction is well conducted, it can often mean that it takes up significant time of other employees. The owner in spending time training the new staff member. Now I don’t propose that face to face inductions are done away with, certainly not. What I do propose is that the onboarding process is enhanced with some pre-work.
Another area for online learning is the training of staff and strategic partners on products, services and processes. External selling partners and sales channels sell better when they know your product. Your process and your value proposition. So why not help them to help you? This can be especially valuable when the training needs to be conducted at multiple sites. This can reduce travel time and staff costs significantly.
Once again, I do not suggest that this is a replacement for face to face training, particularly in the case of scenario based training and other tacit knowledge skills that cannot be written down so easily. You could use the online learning as a post ‘live training’ event as a drip feed element to re-enforce and re-engage. The learners who were face to face at the training event. I recently spoke to a franchisee of a paint store that said his sales territory gained. An additional 10% of market share because his staff had the best product knowledge of any other paint store in the region (or the franchise).
So how do I get this done for clients and their businesses?
Thinkific
Thinkific is an online course platform that gives you a site builder and course platform structure that is easy to use and allows you to build and run your course on it. You can run free or paid courses and hand out certificates of completion as well as a raft of other features. The value of this is to allow you to spend time on the content rather than on building the platform. You can use the charge out billing function to recover costs or even to make a profitable online course. The certificates are handy for compliance purposes if you need need proof that they have completed the course or as a measure of KPIs.
I highly recommend taking a look and perhaps speaking to me about how you can implement knowledge management in your business to leverage your time.
All the best and happy learning.
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