Whether it’s about learning French, improving your cooking skills, or the latest advances in cybersecurity, taking a course these days quite often means that you don’t even need to leave the house. And for the platform you choose
Gone are the days of arranging your life around the process of learning a new skill, trying to balance the demands of your day-to-day life with the rigid structure of your local course providers. Nowadays, online courses give you the option to fit learning around your daily schedule.
So whether you are a busy new parent trying to learn how to code while also attending to a newborn baby, or a night shift worker who finds it difficult to fit anything in around your topsy-turvy lifestyle, there are now options available to you that bend to suit your needs – not the other way around. Even courses for medical staff, i.e. ACLS, have found their way online.
The Rise of the Online Learning Industry
The rise of online courses has been huge to say the least. It’s possible that the financial crisis and economic recession that hit the Western world in 2008 was a key catalyst, with lower spending budgets prompting people to look for cheaper alternatives to the rather pricy higher learning courses that were the standard prior.
Multimedia production technology has, of course, seen huge advances in the time since, to the point where we have everything we need to build rich audio, video, text and image-based content in the palms of our hands. And with the rapid advances in this tech comes the inability for traditional academia to keep up, so that if you want to learn anything related to the management of digital media, you’re far more likely to derive actionable value directly from a current practitioner than if you take university courses.
But that’s just the demand side. When it comes to supply, the business of online courses offers some key advantages. One of the most compelling reasons to get involved with the sale of digital products is the cost of distribution associated with them. Selling online courses incurs remarkably low overhead when compared to selling physical goods, or hosting physical classes. With no need for premises to host your classes in, often the biggest cost is quite simply the platform you choose to host your courses in the first place. Your advertising costs can add up, but if you run your campaigns right, they’ll always be ROI-positive.
There is the option to host your online course yourself, but in pretty much every situation, it is easier to use a service dedicated to hosting digital content and services in particular. They have the tech infrastructure expertise and knowledge to make the whole experience as easy as possible for those who wish to dodge the bullet of dealing with every single aspect on online course-hosting yourself.
This is an especially good idea for those new to course-building, taking the hard work out of your hands, and letting you concentrate on the important aspects of actually building a useful and compelling course yourself.
Exposure Beyond Compare
Another great aspect of creating online courses, compared to in-person ones, is the sheer reach attainable by online digital goods. Whereas you are limited to people who live and work nearby when selling offline courses, the digital versions can be sold to pretty much anyone, anywhere on the planet.
If they have an internet connection, they are a potential customer, which means if your course gains some notoriety, you can end up making huge profits from something that takes far less ongoing effort than hosting your own locally run course.
One area that should be considered when creating your own online course is how easy it may be for one patron to simply make copies of your material and distribute it themselves online for free. Those who wish to distribute courses on their own platform will need to take this issue extremely seriously, as the modern age of computing lends itself rather well to copying and redistributing documents with ease. This is another reason why it is a good idea to use an already established platform dedicated to the creation of online courses, as they have some safeguards built-in to deal with this exact problem.
It is also worth considering the need to constantly update your course, making sure there is always new and useful additions to your service that would make it worthwhile for new customers to come to you, rather than going elsewhere to get a less comprehensive or out-of-date version of your product. If you do decide to go the DIY route when creating your courses, there are still ways to find and stop people from plagiarizing your work, but in all honesty, it’s probably better to let the experts deal with your hosting in the first place.
Sell Those Digital Units
With such obvious associated with making your course online-only, there has never been a better time to get your particular set of skills and knowledge out there for others to learn from themselves.
From easy ways to host your courses, to the sheer scale of the available customer base, starting up your online course has gone from being a difficult and time-consuming pipe-dream, to one of simplicity and huge potential. Don’t put it off any longer. Get teaching.
