The sales pitch sounds appealing, “We will provide all your eLearning material – you only pay a small fee per user”, but what they don’t say is “We are using your business to market our brand to your customers. Please leave your asset value and office keys at the door!”
Recently former Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said “a lot of people, including me, think [online learning] is the next place where the Internet will surprise people in how it can improve things—especially in combination with face-to-face learning. With the escalating costs of education, an advance here would be very timely.”
Judging from what Australian RTOs are telling JWG, aside from learning outcome issues, we all agree. Here at JWG we have started marketing our own LMS and without fail when I am introducing it to customers the question is asked “What content can you provide with it?”. While our VET LMS is SCORM compliant and integrated into VETtrak with hooks into many other standards complaint training management systems, we currently do not provide content – however this will change based on market pressure early in the New Year.
This article is designed to be a guide of how to buy content for your LMS and not give away your clients, your IP or your business asset value.
The Internet has used two models to grow super business – resellers and affiliates. eLearning services are shaping up to follow the same path. A reseller takes a product from a third party and sells it as their own. The original owner receives a commission for the sales but has NO brand exposure. The reseller may have multiple suppliers and chop and change as required.
An affiliate is someone who sells on behalf of someone else; this is the Amazon model where everyone knows that Amazon is selling the book and the affiliate is making a commission. While it is so easy to become an affiliate everyone knows what the margin is and often they go direct the next time.
Dos and Don’ts
1 Don’t put text books online: I have been told that of the many options for eLearning being offered, one of the major ones is simply thousands of text pages from text books put online. This is NOT the answer. Building engaging and culturally relevant content is the answer, simply putting text online will reduce learning outcomes dramatically and devalue your RTO.
2 Don’t promote your competition: Would you actively promote a competing RTO on your website and in your office? Training services whether delivered online or face to face are a similar product – sub contracting out these services and giving visibility to the contractor can be a giant mistake. I have witnessed some very savvy marketers doing just that in the past few months.
- Don’t expose their brand on your website
- Don’t promote their business in the web addresses you use
- Do check the page source code to ensure details are hidden there too
- Do have a water tight contract, with penalties, that prohibits the supplier from promoting to your clients.
3 Spread yourself around: Don’t centralise your eLearning buying in one place but instead deliberately buy from several places. As a sector, RTOs should band together to ensure no one content supplier gets critical mass; allowing this would amount to a takeover of a vital part of the RTO future.
4 Host your own content / buy your own LMS: At JWG we have released our own LMS, which apart from being integrated into VETtrak, is also SCORM compliant. SCORM is a well recognised content hosting format. Whatever LMS you buy ensure it is SCORM compliant and insist content you licence is SCORM and on your servers – then your client’s records and your asset value are secure.
In my dozen years watching business models develop on the Internet, I have seen what is happening now in the Online RTO world happening many times before as a precursor to aggregation and in many cases a degradation of service and delivery.
Early in the New Year, JWGecko will be actively encouraging RTOs to band together to produce high quality content for the Australian market and then amortise the costs across their business and providing safe syndication services that will be designed to enhance rather than degrade your learning outcomes. So if you’re looking for online content that is reliable, you can start with that Microsoft Power BI training course.