Online-Learning can provide you with expertise in custom online course development, online course delivery and online course management. Since 1995, we have been developing and delivering courses online. And we have been working in distance education and traditional education for over 25 years. Over the last eight years, we have refined our online course development and online course delivery models in order to be able to run a successful online education business. Now we are making our expertise available to you, so that you can avoid some of the common pitfalls that are associated with online course development, delivery and management.

Custom Online Course Development
One of the biggest problems you will face when putting your courses online will be balancing the cost of development with the need for interactivity and engagement in the online courses. Anyone, associated with online education, distance learning or eLearning, will tell you that one of the common complaints about online courses is their lack of interactivity. A 2001 Forrester's study states that 56% of students who take online courses feel the courses lack interactivity [quote]. Unfortunately it is somewhat unclear what is meant by the word interactivity. It could apply to course material-to-student interaction, student-to-student interaction or instructor-to-student interaction. In our case, we have taken steps to address all of these areas of interactivity.

For starters, we employ an online course delivery model that provides for outstanding instructor-to-student and student-to-student interaction. You can read more about it below. As for course material-to-student interactivity, we have recently developed a course authoring tool that allows us to add more course material-to-student interactivity while holding the line on online course development costs. The authoring tool works in conjunction with Microsoft Word. It allows you to embed a wide range of multimedia components in your online courses. Our Graphic Design course employs text, graphics, hyperlinks, and flash animations.

What this means is that you get more interactive materials without having to invest in more elaborate development tools and without having to train your people on those tools. Most people who are planning to develop a course, have visions of every page being immersed in audio, video and animation. Until they get the development estimate. Then text and graphics start looking might fine.

Our new authoring tool allows us to embed a reasonable degree of interactivity into the course quite easily. For example, using our Word-based tool, a quiz can be added by simply styling the text. It also means you can leverage lots of existing Word and Power Point content. These simple things dramatically reduce your course development costs. And our materials are independent of our management system. That means, if you already own a management system, our materials can be easily linked to that system.

Now you can take advantage of the tools and processes that we use to develop our own courses in your online learning or eLearning courses. For more information about our online course development tools and process, please visit Custom Online Course Development.

Custom Online Course Delivery
Another one of the problems that you will have to address in planning your online course is the staggering dropout rates that have become associated with the eLearning industry. Industry experts quote eLearning dropout rates as high as 80%. They point to the lack of interaction as one of the reasons that dropout rates are so high.

Our course delivery model addresses this problem extremely well. Over the last eight years, we have developed a course delivery model that has resulted in relatively low dropout rates. Our course dropout rates range anywhere between 15 and 25%. Given that first-year university dropout rates hover around 37%, we feel we have found a model that holds great promise for the future of eLearning.

Our delivery model combines self-paced interactive materials and hand-marked assignments with one-to-one instructor mentoring, scheduled audio or text chats and detailed assignment feedback to offer a more personal learning experience. The model allows the student to work largely at their own pace, but also provides them an expert to "lean on" when they have questions, to "motivate" them when they get distracted with life, and to "mark" their assignments and provide them with feedback so that they can learn from their mistakes.

You can benefit from our experience by employing this kind of model in your online training. For more information about our online course delivery model, please visit Custom Online Course Delivery.

Custom Online Course Management
Finally, another issue you will want to address is how you plan to manage or administrate your online course. Over the years, we have developed a low-cost Learning Management System (LMS). The system provides interfaces for students, instructors and administrators. As an option to anyone who works with us, we have the capability and expertise to set up the back-end management system. For more information on our online course management solution, please visit Custom Online Course Management.

For more information
If you'd like to discuss this opportunity further,
please call us at 1-613-592-9751
or email us at busdev@online-learning.com.