Say you are a media owner, editor or content developer with a strong niche and a captive audience. One way to monetize your expertise is online training.

Online learning, or e-learning has grown into a $200 billion industry, with most e-learning being concentrated in healthcare, education, ICT and retail studies. But if you look around you can find e-learning resources on everything from starting a business to making sourdough bread.

e-learning is not just about making money, it’s also about sharing knowledge both within and outside your own organization.

SAMIP held a webinar that featured speakers who are running online training initiatives, including Fray College founder Paula Fray, former brand and product marketing manager at GetSmarter Claire du Preez, Smart Film School founder Robb Montgomery, and Hashtag Our Stories’ Yusuf Omar.

The lessons learned from this webinar include:

Why you should and why you shouldn’t get into online training

Before you jump into launching an online training initiative you need to know why you should and why you should not set one up.

Claire says that there are three reasons why media organizations should not get into online training. Firstly, online training initiatives can be time consuming and expensive to create, maintain and sell with the pay-off from them taking time to show. Secondly, they can be brand damaging if not done properly. And most importantly it’s not worth your while if online training does not fit your existing business.

But for those who believe that online training fits their business model, Claire believes that the following reasons are why you should get into online training.

Firstly, there is huge demand for online training, especially with people from junior to senior level looking for ways to upskill themselves in their busy lives. Online training also offers you a source of passive income once you have it set up and correctly priced. Online training is also a great marketing tool and allows you to position yourself as a thought-leader on specific topics and niches.

Teach what you know

Paula Fray advises media workers to start looking for content by first assessing your skills and finding your strengths and weaknesses.

“Teach what you know rather than trying to learn something and teaching that.”

Paula goes on to say that your training content needs to demonstrate real-world impact for it to be valuable to your target audience. The best strategy is to look for the demand in skills in the industry you are targeting to train (i.e. mobile journalism, data journalism, podcasting) and then marry your current skillset with that demand in order to craft a compelling offering.

Designing your course

When putting together a lesson plan the best advice from the speakers was to pay attention to pedagogical theory, which are theories on how people learn, and use those best practices to develop a formal plan.

“The key is to make sure that your participants’ user experience is a good one because that experience is your brand experience,” says Claire.

A great pedagogy practice to use in lesson development is the ADDIE Model for instructional design which is used for designing and developing education and training programs. The acronym ADDIE stands for: Analyze Design Develop Implement and Evaluate.

Most importantly focus on the outcomes of the course for participants and transitioning from one section to the next. Paula explained how Fray College has experimented with gamification to encourage course completion for their students.

Where to host your course

Online training platforms are a dime a dozen and each come their own strengths and weaknesses.

Platforms like Thinkific, teachable and podia are best used for hosting courses; platforms like Kajabi and Karta provide an all-inclusive business for online training; platforms like Skill Share and Udemy have a built-in audience which you can more easily but are challenging for newcomers who have to compete against a lot similar offerings; and if you are looking for more bespoke solutions you can look at LifterLMS and moodle that give you more leeway in customizing the learning experience.

Know the business and pricing models

Online training has several business and pricing models which can be employed. In the beginning you can develop a co-branded product which would entail partnering with a well-known brand to develop and also market your course. Curated content from experts in a particular field is another business model you can explore. Or you can experiment with a standalone training or white-labelled solutions.

Pricing strategies for your course include: once-off fees that users can pay to access the course content forever; fixed-term pricing which allows participants to pay for course content that they can access for a particular period; memberships and subscriptions are another way to price courses and these are best for recurring revenue; and if you opt for a co-branded course offering you can look at splitting the revenue between you and your course partners.

Be your own hype man

Building a course and then waiting for people to find it organically is one of the biggest pitfalls you can fall into according to Claire. You’ll need a go-to market strategy to create awareness for your course and attract participants to it.

Hashtag Our Stories’ Yusuf Omar says that for people to know about your course offering you need to be your own hype man and take every opportunity to promote yourself and your work especially your online training product.

Robb Montgomery advised that you should build off each online training you develop as they may lead to more opportunities.

Ultimately online training offers media workers and organizations more opportunities to increase their unique selling propositions as well as to potentially add more revenue streams to their businesses.