4 e-Learning Myths Busted!

Delivering web-based training has never been easier or more cost-effective that it is now. 

The costs associated with developing and hosting a website are lower than ever and with content management platforms like WordPress available for installation with the click of a button, setting up a website on your own is silly simple.

However, as we watch so many parts of our lives move online, from banking to our professions, even our social interactions, it’s easy to take on some mistaken assumptions about setting up a successful online training program.

Today, we want to debunk the top 4 myths we hear time and time again from our valued WP Courseware customers regarding the creation and management of web-based training courses.

1. You Need to Charge for Your Course Content to Make Money

We’ve put countless hours into our own online training courses, so we know first-hand the temptation to want to see immediate gratification for our hard work. Producing a good course is time-consuming and it’s no wonder why so many of our customers jump to a subscription model or a one-off charge for their programs.

And some courses should cost money to enroll in! 

However, if you have a product or service to offer on the back end, giving away a training course can be one of the best ways to build a loyal following of raving fans who will buy from you time and time again.

Let’s say you’re selling a premium email copywriting course. What better way to distill your list of prospects into a high-converting sales machine than to offer a free introductory course on headlines, subheadlines, copywriting, and list building?

Once you’ve delivered the goods in a free course, who do you think your prospective clients are going to turn to when they want to learn more in the form of an expensive advanced course?

Yep…YOU!

2. Your Training Should Include Multimedia Content to Be Engaging

Using video and audio can be a great way to enhance your training and for some niches, say software training such as Lynda.com offers, it’s the only way to go.

However, that doesn’t mean that written content and good “old fashioned” PDFs don’t work. In fact, most of the ongoing professional development that we engage in we consume in the form of, GASP, written words!

Why? 

Because it’s effortless and can be done on our own time. It doesn’t require an internet connection so we can brush up on new skills while sitting down anywhere on a mobile device.

Don’t be afraid of delivering in the form of written content, illustrations, diagrams, or mind maps if your content works best that way. 

We’re bombarded every day by YouTube videos and Facebook photos. Sometimes it’s refreshing to use the old noggin and read!

3. All Offline Learning Content Can Be Delivered Online

While it’s true that most training content that’s traditionally been delivered in a live format can be adapted to the web quite easily, sometimes packaged web-based delivery just isn’t the best fit.

We have quite a few clients using WP Courseware who are in the field of psychotherapy or self-development. While a web-based course is great for them when they want to offer help on broad topics such as “goal setting”, much of their work requires a more personalized approach and they need to offer one-on-one services or consulting, even if it’s via Skype sessions online.

4. e-Learning Courses Can Be Scaled to an Unlimited Number of Students

This was one mistaken assumption we were burned by when we developed our first online training course. We assumed that by offering a web-based video training program, we could attract and educate an unlimited number of enrollments and subsequently enjoy a nice income stream.

Wrong!

Ensuring that your students or trainees really pick up what you’re teaching requires you to be available to answer individual questions and address unique needs and concerns.

With that first course we developed we decided to build a community forum within the course so that students could help one another out and we thought we’d be able to scale up big time.

However, even with community interaction between students it’s YOUR responsibility to ensure that, whether you’re charging or not, people walk away understanding the correct way of doing things.

It’s not the responsibility of your star student who’s always in the forum or your outsourced VA.

It’s you!

Whether you’ve purchased WP Courseware or are just beginning to think of building your first training course with us, we appreciate your support and hope that we can continue to be the best choice for delivering training content with WordPress.