Time is money, especially when it comes to educating a group of people. Time is even more money when that group meets in person vs. online. Consider how e-learning can save your budget.

Image: David Castillo Dominici

It’s easy to overlook all of the hidden costs of in-person instructor-led training. There’s real time and cost involved in putting actual bums on actual seats. Just start to jot down the costs of getting people into a room together, and it’s easy to see how the prices quickly shoot up.

Training material costs

• Space rental and overhead
• Day rates
• Instructor travel (airfare, taxis, hotel, tips)
• Learner travel (airfare, taxis, hotel, tips)
• Printing
• Collating
• Binding
• Storage
• Food (breakfast, snacks, lunch, drinks)
• Presentation equipment

I can keep going, but you get the point, right? The instant you start gathering people into a room together, it costs a lot of money.

One of the strongest business cases for e-learning is for lowering training costs. That’s why so many companies turn to e-learning, especially when they have ongoing programs, a large number of people to train or have a geographically dispersed workforce. That was the rationale behind a government-led project Talance completed for a division of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. It’s cheaper to bring people from across the state together online.

Time involved in training

It’s easy to see how the kinds of things you can buy at your local Staples drain the coffers. One item that’s often neglected from “should we move to e-learning” calculations is the cost of time. Instructor-led training simply takes longer than e-learning.

“My company has found that on-ground courses that move to eLearning take about half the ‘seat time’ in their eLearning format,” Judy Unrein says in her article Overcoming Objections to eLearning in Learning Solutions magazine.

Unrein, who is an instructional designer for Nike and who has an M.Ed. in Instructional Design from the University of Massachusetts in Boston, goes on to say that one cause is because an online course is more streamlined. All of the “nice to know” filler information that instructors share in classrooms has been removed by the time it goes online.

Minimizing financial risk

Live trainings are also critically scheduled, and the margin of error is much narrower. For example, one of our clients, a department of a New York-based college, recently had an in-person event where the instructor didn’t show up. He simply forgot, and there was a room of people clearing their throats waiting for the star to show. They rescheduled for the following week, duplicating all the costs of the lost event.

Problems can happen online too, but when mistakes of this magnitude happen in person, the financial drain is much higher.

While every program is different, the savings of an e-learning program vs. instructor-led training can be significant. Every program considering moving training online should carefully research hidden costs of bringing a room of people together.

We have an online course that consists mainly of students who know each other. The rest participate minimally and do not seem engaged. How do I level the playing field and make the new students feel welcomed?

Darren

People learn better in teams

It’s always tough to be the new kid, whether it’s your first day at an elementary school or an online course. It’s understandable that a smaller group of people is finding it difficult to relate to a bigger group that already knows one another.

Engaging learners is always a challenge, but it’s critically important in an online training format. Here are a couple strategies that will help learners join the group and get to know the other participants.

Have learners introduce themselves

The first step is to make sure you’re having introducing students to one another. I often make the first exercise in an online course a personal introduction, where people have to answer a few questions about themselves, where they come from, their goals for the course, and usually something irreverent like where they’d like to go on vacation, which can spark conversation.

I’ll often make this a two-part exercise, in which students have to respond to one or more other student’s postings, which helps get them talking with each other.

It also helps to have learners post pictures of themselves, write a bio, or share social media, so the others can start to make a connection with them outside of the class structure.

Create opportunities for partnering

Creating groups is a helpful tactic to have students talk throughout the course. Think about pairing the way you would seating at a dinner party: match up the quiet folks with the chatty ones.

Also structure partner exercises, like role-plays, where you pair up the new people with the others.
This overview of creating and facilitating online role-plays from Australian Flexible Learning Framework provides a good overview. Here’s how role-plays work, according to them:

• participants are allocated roles to act out within a scenario
• participants solve problems that are introduced within the course of the roleplay
• participants and facilitators take part in a debriefing stage, either online or in a face-to-face situation.

The site gives sample exercises targeted to different groups of learners and also gives instructional design tips for integrating role-plays into your courses.

Have a look at this discussion that carefully breaks down a role-play in an online course from the Articulate forums. In this situation, a participant is asked to do a role-play with someone in their office,
but the idea can be adapted to a purely online format.

Check out more articles on making your online course better.

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You may have piles of experience presenting to live groups but are fuzzy on how to make the transition online. Particularly confusing is the difference between an online course and a webinar. While both formats let you present information to people from afar, they’re not the same, nor are they mutually exclusive.

If you’re considering opening up your training to include an online element, this matrix might help you find the best tool for the job.