For years, one of my activities has been organising in-person courses and a couple of years ago I found myself talking to some people, professionals, who would have liked to take specific courses but didn't do it because doing so was too difficult: schedules often did not suit them, or the course locations were too far away. So I decided to do a market survey and verify that there was an unsatisfied need for training on the part of those who, for one reason or another, do not have the possibility to follow a classroom course.
Nowadays, perhaps more than ever, training is essential because it helps you keep up with change and remain competitive in your field.
Following this investigation I asked myself how I could satisfy that training need. It was like this that it occurred to me to record my courses, starting from the basic one. I then created my own platform using Moodle and rented a cloud server, and that was when I realised the solution was far less simple than it had seemed.
The problem was not so much the setting of Moodle or some other e-Learning platform that I tried, but defining the right server performance in order to allow correct use by at least 4-5 users at the same time.
It turned out that, all things considered, I would have to invest at least 400-500€ per month for a decent server, to this I would have to add the costs of recording lessons and managing the course, and server maintenance costs. When I added those costs together, it became clear that to make GIS e-learning courses even minimally profitable I would have had to charge at least €500 per course. At that price my margin would have been about €20 per course. To be taxed!
I asked myself a question: would you pay 500€ for a non-presence but recorded course? The answer I gave to myself was no, also because, looking at the training offers of the various platforms to which the professional associations refer for training credits, it appeared that mine would have been prices that were largely out of the market.
Disheartened, I closed the server and for a few months I gave up this possible line of business by carrying out training only in person. Then I discovered online e-Learning platforms like Udemy and a world opened up to me!
In August 2018 I published the GIS BASE course that I had prepared for my platform and within a few months I managed to amortize the costs of registering the course. Among other things, the reviews of registered users meant that I was assigned a score of 4.5 points out of 5 available. Practically the highest score for GIS training currently available in Italy on Udemy!
During the lockdown period I finally had the time to record the INTERMEDIATE GIS course which I initially made private and accessible only to those who were already enrolled in the BASIC course to reward them for the trust they had shown in me; subsequently I also published the ADVANCED GIS course thus completing my online training offer. The courses are performing so well in terms of student reviews that Udemy has decided to include them in Business courses for companies.
The system works, as I had hoped, because it is integrated with the my blog and my YouTube channel where there is free in-depth content.
Why did I write this article?
I wrote this article because in recent weeks a couple of people challenged me, saying that the price of my Udemy courses is so low that it harms the market for in-person courses. I would like them to understand that the management costs of an e-learning platform are very high and increase with the number of users (for my courses I have almost reached 1000 members in total!) and I have tested it first hand. These costs, combined with platform management and taxation, mean that if you are not an e-learning giant like Udemy, but a small business owner or an independent professional, it is practically impossible to invest in your own platform and earn from it sustainably. A personal platform also has a further negative side in my opinion: technical problems. If the platform is yours and has a technical problem, you must resolve it yourself (other costs) and reimburse all or part of the cost of the course (depends on the problem and how correct you are).
To these purely economic reasoning, we must add the fact that users of e-Learning platforms would almost never purchase a course in person (they are the ones with the unsatisfied need I was talking about!).
So you who only do in-person training can rest assured that your target market hardly intersects with that of the users of e-Learning courses.
Disparity of costs between the in-person course (in the classroom or via video conference) and the online course
If, after reading all this, that I previously wrote is not yet available to you. clear why my classroom lessons (virtual or physical) cost much more than the same e-Learning courses, then I will be more explicit.
When you purchase my teaching for a course of X hours you are not only purchasing the transmission of skills but also my time for the duration of the course. I could have dedicated that time to other activities. both work and non-work. For e-Learning courses, since they are registered, obviously things are very different.
Last but not laest: Buddyfit, the Udemy of the activity physics that a certain Zlatan Ibrahimovic has as Global Brand Ambassador...do you say anything?