Field of Dreams?

So you want to sell online courses. Put your ideas online in an LMS course, and people will eventually find it. I mean there’s Google, right? And you’re such a great subject matter expert that people will line up and pay to drink from the fountain of your knowledge. What could possibly go wrong?

The future of learning is in digital courses. More and more individuals, schools, businesses, and organizations are purchasing online courses on everything from management skills to personal fitness. If you’re an expert in your field, you can make money selling training courses online to interested students. All you need is a little bit of information on creating the right content, putting it in the proper format, and making sure that it’s compatible with today’s standards for web-based learning technology.

Are you thinking of selling courses online? You’ve come to the right place. At courseindex.com we help people like you to get up and running with everything they need to get their learning content formatted properly and loaded into a Learning Management System (LMS). But that’s only half the battle. We can also offer good advice on how to make people aware of your course (marketing) and strategies for making them click ‘Buy’ (selling). Bringing online courses to market is our specialty.  

The benefits of online learning are so often touted that they have almost become a mantra: instant access 24/7, location-independent, self-paced, bigger choice of subjects, lower cost, keep working while you learn, you can concentrate better in your pyjamas, etc. We frequently state some of those positive aspects on this very platform. They make online learning seem like an alluring lifestyle choice, offering the opportunity to learn whilst on a train, at the beach, at home, even potentially while walking the dog.

Almost a third of the global population is on lockdown due to Covid 19, which is a staggering number. While this has led to the fears of severe recession across all industries all over the globe, there is one particular industry sector that seems to have been profiting from this situation.

If you work with an LMS and need to get reports to senior management, you might have discovered that getting data out of the LMS is like pulling teeth. It’s there, but organising it as you need to can be very challenging.

To sell courses online, you will need a Learning Management System (LMS) to put your courses in. If you are not familiar with the term, here’s a brief explanation of what an LMS is.

Creating courses online involves getting subject matter expertise into a course that takes learners on a logical and well-organised journey from ignorance to knowledge. That is a fundamental requirement for an online course to have any impact at all. But what about the delivery system – how do you package the learning content as a product that reaches learners?

Here’s a future scenario for online learning:

There are no or few institutions of higher education because there is no need to attend them. We build our own learning paths, our learning activities logged from multiple sources by something akin to xAPI and stored in a repository under our names.

Just after our recent post about (s)low xAPI adoption in the L&D community, Rustici Software have published some behind-the-scenes figures on xAPI use in their own eLearning content delivery and testing service, SCORM Cloud. The fact that SCORM Cloud offers a built-in LRS (Learning Record Store) might be skewing the figures somewhat since it offers a turnkey LRS solution in an L&D world that hasn’t yet really joined up the xAPI/LRS implementation dots yet.

Back in 2015 we published an article on elearningindustry.com about Rustici Software’s Experience API, aka xAPI, aka Tin Can API. It was one of many such articles in the wake of xAPI’s launch in 2013, and gave an explanation of how this new learning data tool worked and the great variety of systems it could theoretically gather and aggregate learning data from.

Courseindex.com provide a suite of services around Moodle. Here we explain what we do and how it is of value to people and organisations who are entering the eLearning space.

Forbes is angling for a bite of the Continuing Professional Education market with learn.forbes.com, its new eLearning platform launched June 6. Aspiring professionals, the bedrock of Forbes’ readership, can now choose from 60-plus self-paced online courses focused on leadership, entrepreneurship, business, IT, sales and cybersecurity.

Online university EdX was started in 2012 by Harvard and MIT. It’s a not-for-profit MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) platform providing free online courses to advance careers and improve lives. It is now a leading provider of stripped-down, no-fluff, laser-focused postgraduate qualifications from top universities designed with today’s job market in mind. And employers love it because it provides them with candidates with up-to-date, relevant, job-specific skills.

It’s understandable for a Westerner to assume that Chinese is terrifyingly difficult to learn. With its impenetrable written characters and unfamiliar sounds, at first sight it can seem like a complex machine that only highly skilled experts are capable of understanding and using.

But when you take a little time to scratch the surface and pick up its principles one step at a time, not only is it quite similar to English but also refreshingly logical and simple. For example, here is an introduction to Chinese characters from the British Council:

For those who don’t know it, Britain’s Open University is something of a national treasure. Its abiding image is of bearded professors with questionable fashion sense delivering maths and computer science lectures on grainy black-and-white TV sets in the early hours of the morning when airtime is cheap. Established in 1969, the OU delivers degree and postgraduate courses to mainly remote students, though it does have a campus in the city of Milton Keynes.

What do private detectives actually do? Well, they don’t spend all their time solving murders. The police tend to deal with that. In reality what private detectives do is work that the police won’t or can’t do, don’t have time and resources for, have failed at, or are not required to do. PIs are also often employed by people who for various reasons do not want the police to be involved. And they are not all men.

If you have ever taken an eLearning course, do you remember the essentials of it now? Did it get the knowledge into your head in an engaging way that helped you to retain it? If the answer is yes, you were lucky enough to have taken a course created by a good instructional designer. Instructional Design is the practice of creating learning experiences which make the acquisition of knowledge efficient, effective and appealing.