What a year!
A year we will all remember, full of ups and downs, wins and losses, happy days and tragic ones.
In fact, it’s hard to find a word to sum up 2020.
One word that could certainly be used is adapting.
It seems all businesses, regardless of size or industry, has had to adapt in one way or another.
While many businesses have been forced to shut their doors, either temporarily or permanently, and millions are out of work, others are seeing growth that they never could have predicted, or intentionally driven.
The worldwide e-learning market is projected to be worth $325 Billion in 2025.
They say luck is when preparation meets opportunity, and I normally agree with that. However this year that seems to be a bit backwards.
It seems that luck in 2020 means when adaptation meets opportunity.
Take Zoom for instance. There is no way they could have foreseen what 2020 would bring, how a pandemic would impact their business. Therefore they were not prepared for the sudden and exponential growth they would experience.
What they had to do, and quickly, was to adapt to the sudden surge of new users, hackers, security breaches, load on their systems and all of the other things that sudden exponential growth brings.
And adapt they did.
And with that adaptation came success. And luck.
Others were not so lucky. Many businesses, in large part local service based businesses, were limited in ways that left them no room to adapt. Some didn’t have the physical space to comply with new occupancy requirements. Others didn’t have the staff. Still others simply didn’t have the capital.
One area that has flourished, and has been overlooked to a certain extent, is online courses.
With a large part of the country, and world, stuck at home, more people than ever are doing things to advance, or change, their careers by taking courses online.
And to support this quick growth there are multitudes of platforms that will allow anyone to build and share a course online.
The newest batch of course creators has to choose between a fully hosted course platform such as Teachable, Thinkific or New Zenler and independent course platforms that are hosted on their own sites using a LMS (learning management system) like LearnDash.
There are a lot of considerations when deciding where to host a course, and making decisions like this can seem overwhelming.
While it is always challenging to pivot, it’s certainly easier when you have an idea of what you are doing!
The US e-learning market could grow by $12.81 billion between 2020 and 2024.
For new course creators, and those who have never created an online course before, the sheer number of choices can be staggering.
If you are a course creator, and you are overwhelmed with having to decide where to host your course and how to offer it, we’ve put together something that I think will help.
Here is a list of questions to ask yourself when deciding where to host your course:
- Are you comfortable with technology?
- Is it important to you to own your own content?
- Do you want flexibility with your systems or are you able to fit your needs within what’s offered?
- Can you absorb price increases if they happen?
- Do you have outside email services, a website, other systems already in place?
As you look through these questions, answer them honestly. They will help guide you in deciding if you want a self hosted course or if you’d prefer to host your course on an all in one platform.
Tomorrow we will take a look at what questions to ask if you are considering an all in one platform and how you can sift through all the noise to find the platform that is right for you.
