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Selling e-learning: how to integrate it with other business processes?

How do you manage an e-learning project? Which and how many steps does it involve? And how can you integrate it into other business processes? Let's talk about it in this article!

 This is the flow of an e-learning project:

  • conception and design
  • sale (internal or external) and launch
  • deployment and monitoring
  • reporting and audit

Ideation and planning

Is this a course for internal employees or a catalog course to be sold on the market?

1. Course for internal employees

In the first case, ideally it is first of all necessary to insert it within one of the possible categories of courses, dictated by business needs or by the internal training plan. Typically, an employee course responds to a series of logics:

  • onboarding : course for new hires (pay slips, the internal intranet, company policies, company values ​​...)
  • compliance : mandatory training to comply with legal obligations (safety, 231, GDPR ...)
  • internal processes : IT or management procedures, production processes ..
  • language training
  • ... ..

In most of these cases, we probably start from the need or needs to be met, and then we involve the internal experts (the SME, Subject Matter Experts). If the course is developed internally, the SMEs are put in contact with colleagues, or the external supplier is involved.

The course design is normally the result of a collaboration between the expert who provides the content, the HR who identify the training objectives and the developer (internal or external) who puts everything together. Of course, the output will also depend on the time and budget available.

2. Catalog course to be sold on the market

In the second case, that of the sale of a course to third parties, obviously the ideation starts from the combination of two factors:

  • what are the skills we have internally? For example, are we experts in cybersecurity, security awareness and risk management? Do we already take classroom courses on these topics? Do we already have internal (or external loyal) teachers? Then it is better to focus on the production of these contents
  • what does the market require? Among the various topics that we can cover, which are the most requested and which are best suited to be implemented in e-learning?

To give an example, it is more appropriate to create a course on the general GDPR and aimed at the general corporate population than a super specialized course aimed only at a few top figures. In the first case, customers will probably have hundreds of users to register, while in the second few units, and it will not be easy to get back the investment of time and money to devote to production.

Of course, always remaining in our example, in the first case I will have much more competition. While in the second case, if I have 1000 customers who each have a trainee, then the accounts return equally ?

Sale and launch

"Selling" a course internally, in short, entails being able to adequately involve all company levels. First of all, management and executives "believe in" and demonstrate it concretely (so an e-mail communication, or on the company intranet, or a video ...) can be useful in which the project is launched and the importance of it is communicated. the company. Meetings can also be held, especially with production workers who normally do not have access to a computer or e-mail. The motivational levers can be different: reward levers (those who take the course will have access to other benefits or prizes), "punitive" levers (those who do not do the compulsory courses in theory could not even work, so the course must be done and that's it ), involvement levers (the course can follow gamification logic and achieve "badges" or points in the company ranking). A combination of different levers can also be used.

Of course, selling a course outside involves completely different activities.

A showcase site, preferably with e-commerce (especially if the courses are sold online), a lot of SEO work (articles on their courses and content, pills on YouTube, a blog ...), advertising (on Facebook, Linked In, Google Ads, Instagram - depending on the audience), a mailing list and a newsletter, a CRM to collect and organize customers and opportunities ... in short, all the activities that typically must be associated with the online sale and promotion of products and services.

It is clear that if you also have a customer base that buys you classroom courses, the best promotional activity is to push your online courses towards the same customers. Which by the way are those who will help you understand which are the most requested titles.

Deployment and monitoring

Of course, the use of the course will have to take place via an e-learning platform, and what better platform than Forma Lms , with its multi-client management and its numerous features oriented to use in the company?

We do not dwell here on the characteristics of Forma and on how to manage it.

On the other hand, monitoring is something that you can manage manually, using the numerous reporting functions of Forma, or of your platform, such as statistics by user, report, evaluation register…. Or you can manage it automatically, setting the automatic delivery of the report to predefined addresses (one of the features available in Forma) and taking advantage of one of our plugins (course alert).

Internally, a good practice is to communicate from the start a predefined duration for the course (2-3 months, for example). The same also applies to courses sold to third parties, but in that case it must be agreed with the customer.

Reporting and audit

At the end of the course, the final report will be your main tool for understanding

  • course redemption (how many have completed, and at what time)
  • average duration (how long did users take on average?)
  • learning: measured by the scores obtained in the tests, and by the number of attempts required. Also, by looking at the aggregate statistics, you can understand which topics need to be further explored. And get an idea of ​​how to improve the course from the content point of view.

Finally, it is good practice to conclude the course with a satisfaction questionnaire that covers all aspects, including organizational and process aspects: quality of tutoring, quality of the course, clarity, degree of depth ...

All this information will allow you to implement a continuous improvement of both your content and your training and organizational processes.

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