There are pros and cons to using self-paced courses vs. instructor-led training (in-person and webinars), but in this article, we’re going to focus on 6 different reasons why your business should be offering self-paced courses to train your customers and employees.

Table of Contents

1. Make training affordable
2. Scale training
3. Report on performance and attendance
4. Simplify earning credits and certifications
5. Eliminate training redundancies and mishaps
6. Sell on-demand training

1. Make Professional Development and Continuing Education affordable

By combining curriculum from in-person training and webinars into courses, you can educate and train your customers affordably. Since self-paced courses only have to be created once, and then updated as needed they’re very efficient and can be sold at a lower cost than webinars or in-person training. If your courses cost more than $50, you can always offer subscriptions to make more expensive courses easily purchasable.

Compared to in-person or webinar training, even the most exciting courses can be more boring for users to take. That said, since the majority of professional training, like continuing education, professional development, and compliance training is offered to fulfill requirements, the price of a course is important; self-paced courses help your audience maintain their licenses and certifications without breaking the bank!

Self-paced courses are also affordable because:

• There are no travel expenses associated with them.
• Companies don’t have to constantly rent space to train.
• Training instructors don’t need to be compensated each time a course is taken.

2. Offer Courses at Scale

Self-paced courses help professionals in different industries fulfill training requirements conveniently. Courses that are self-paced are created once and then can be accessed on demand– this makes it easy for businesses and customers all around the world to stay educated and up to date on certifications. You will want to create and manage your self-paced courses using a Learning Management System (LMS). An LMS is a software platform that helps your company create and manage training programs with little to no effort. Regardless of the industry that you are educating, self-paced courses help you scale since they make enrolling and taking courses easy for customers, and easy to manage for admins.

Self-paced courses are also low maintenance, and the majority of the budget required to offer them comes from initially creating and designing them; you may need to hire eLearning experts and instructional designers to help you create courses.

3. Report on Training Performance and Attendance

As opposed to manually reporting on the performance of your employees in a webinar or in-person training, self-paced courses make reporting efficient. All admins have to do to report on users’ attendance and grades in a self-paced course is click a few buttons – that is if you’re using an LMS. Moreover, for your company to benefit from this effective but simple reporting, your LMS needs to have built-in reporting capabilities. We recommend you use SaaS LMS, so your company isn’t spending excess money building, hosting, and maintaining your platform to sell courses.

The Academy Of Mine LMS allows admins to monitor and report on student grades and activity in real-time. In other words, all activities except for written assignments and discussion boards (posing a conversation with a classroom) are automatically tracked in the LMS for instructors and administrators to report on.

Time-based tracking examples: the percentage of a course that a user has completed, what date and time a user last logged in, and how much time a user has spent in a course or on an activity.

Performance-based reporting examples: what score did a user get on a multiple-choice quiz? Has a user passed their required courses? If so, what percentage did they get? What was a student’s response to a written assignment or discussion board? And more.

Using self-paced courses hosted on a platform like Academy of Mine, you can regulate students’ course engagement:

• Lock a course module to prevent students from skipping ahead in a course.
• Make an assessment timed.
• Disable skipping ahead in a video.
• Schedule the release of modules in a course to prevent students from rushing.
• Require students to spend a minimum amount of time on an activity.

Whether you’re training customers, partners, or employees – self-paced courses help you generate performance and attendance reports.

4. Help Professionals earn Credits and maintain Certifications

From real estate agents to lawyers and hospital nurses – professionals in all types of sectors have to maintain credits and certifications in their careers. Self-paced courses help employees take continuing education and professional development simply; all users need to enroll and finish courses online is a laptop or smart device with internet access. Self-paced learning doesn’t require users to travel, and courses can be completed at any time of the day. As long as a user completes a course before it expires or the credits are due in a sector, they’re good to go!

If you’re using an LMS like the Academy Of Mine platform, your customers will be notified by email when their certifications expire. Additionally, you can also have your system notify users after certification has expired.

More benefits to offering self-paced courses with Academy Of Mine:

• Redirect users to an external accreditation site after completing a course.
• Connect your CE broker and Accredible.
• Create certificate designs and save templates to reuse.
• Automatically award certificates to users after course completion.

You can learn more about offering continuing education with an LMS in this guide.

5. Eliminate Training Redundancies and Mishaps

Attending a webinar or in-person training is not always effective for businesses and individuals.

Here are some factors to consider while comparing live-virtual training (webinars or in-person) to self-paced learning:

• Does the training require face-face interactions with instructors and managers?
• The quality of education being received via live-virtual training depends on how well an instructor can teach.
• Webinar hosts and participants need a strong internet connection.
• Are the employees enrolled in training extroverted or introverted?

We’re not telling you that webinars and in-person events should be avoided for offering professional development and continuing education. However, if you’re looking to efficiently offer training at scale, then automating your training programs with self-paced courses is a no-brainer. Here’s one more benefit to self-paced learning – courses consist of PDFs, videos, and other pre-made pieces of content that allow your company to maintain quality control.

Imagine you’re a real estate or insurance company that’s giving sales training to partners and employees. Self-paced courses are perfect for training salespeople in large organizations since partners are in different time zones, and the training curriculum is straightforward.

6. Sell On-Demand Training

If you want to begin selling your company’s knowledge in a scalable way, then you need to create self-paced courses. In addition to self-paced courses, we recommend administering these courses with a Learning Management System (LMS), so that you can pull course reports on performance, attendance, and update courses easily.

When selling training courses online, you should use an LMS that connects with eCommerce platforms like Shopify, so you can sell courses on your pre-existing website. Even better, If you use the Academy Of Mine LMS to create and manage self-paced courses, then you can sell courses directly on the platform (no eCommerce site needed). Academy Of Mine integrates with Braintree by PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize.net to receive payments. AOM also integrates with Google Analytics and HubSpot for marketing attribution.

Start Training with Self-Paced Courses Today!

Whether you’re educating internal teams or certifying partners and customers, offering self-paced courses is one of the most scalable yet effective ways to train in business. From the creation to the selling and reporting of training, self-paced courses significantly help you manage professional development and other educational programs online.

Do you need help creating training courses? Follow these 6 tips to create effective self-paced courses today!