Management Articles

Comparing Costs: E-Learning Vs Traditional

Learn Management Articles on management-info.biz. Comparing Costs: E-Learning Vs Traditional article will help answer your questions on Management Articles.We at management-info.biz specialize in Management Articles. Management Articles at management-info.biz provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

It is important for managers and organizations to consider a number of different factors when determing the best training delivery approach for their staff or organization. Factors include: efficiency, timeliness, consistency and appropriateness of the delivery method. The key factor for most organizations, however, is program cost. Program cost may be comprised of a number of related sub-factors, too, which may include: development costs, instructor time, materials, travel, and opportunity costs for the students and participants. All these factors can have a wide variance, even in similar programs, due to the delivery method used.

Managers may want to develop their own mathematical model to better understand the relationship between costs and delivery of their training programs. Many managers have found a common key element when they have analyzed the costs of their learning programs. Their key finding: e-learning is less expensive to deliver almost regardless of the participant population. For example: in populations where the participants number 100 or more, e-learning had clear cost advantages and as the population number increases, so does the cost advantage. Cost advantages were still measureable in groups of 100 or less and even with classes as short as one hour in length. In a corporate study conducted by Catepillar, they determined that e-learning was 40% less expensive than the tradiational classroom models.

When preparing to conduct a cost analysis study, managers should be prepared to understand all the different factors involved with the development and delivery of training programs and then develop a customized list of factors that are applicable to the organization's training needs and environment. For example, the costs associated with a physical classroom can widely vary depending on the geographic and physical plant characteristics of the company. For some organizations, it may not be relevant to conduct any sort of market analysis if their niche market is highly specialized or small. On the other hand, factors such as timeliness, travel costs or development costs may be very relevant for the organization to consider say, for example, if they are outsourcing their training programs.

After the manager has created their unique "model" or list of factors or variables for analysis, they are ready to begin the comparison process. Gather data from comoparable organizations or training delivery programs, preferably from those using like and differening models. This will help in benchmarking the organization's costs to that of comparable companies. If the organization or department has specific regulatory or quality assurance standards, such as Cancer Registry departments as part of a healthcare organization, the costs associated with training (or not providing training) for compliance may also need to included in the analysis process.

e-Learning may not be the best delivery method for all training. For example, programs that require role-playing, individual or group interaction or observation of the participants are not conducive to online learning. On the other hand, the total cost of delivering instructor-led classes to many students must be taken into consideration whenever the organization begins planning a large training program. Cost analysis may reveal that a combination of both e-learning and tradiational classroom can deliver the optimal training delivery needs of the organization. Once the manager has completed the cost comparison process results should be documented carefully and used for future comparative studies or even for training program justification and strategic planning purposes.

Copyright 2005, M. A. Webb. All Rights Reserved

PUBLISHING RIGHTS:

You have permission to publish this article electronically, in print, in your e-book or on your website, free of charge, as long as the author's information and web link are included at the bottom of the article and the article is not changed, modified or altered in any way. The web link should be active when the article is reprinted on a web site or in an email. The author would appreciate an email indicating you wish to post this article to a website, and the link to where it is posted.

My colleagues and I get asked a lot about licensing. Frankly, Microsoft doesn’t have a great reputation for keeping it simple. And to be totally transparent – I, like many of my colleagues, would usually rather stick a fork in my eye that talk about it because it can get complicated. And confusing. And just…ugh.

So you can imagine my joy when I was asked to write a newsletter editorial about simplifying licensing. Exactly.

Then I had a very enlightening conversation with Terry Choquette, Licensing Marketing Manager at Microsoft and she pointed me to a few resources that got back to the basics and laid it all out very simply. I like simple. And I decided that this simple information was as blog worthy as it was newsletter worthy. While details about software licensing is not everybody’s favourite reading material, stick with me on this.

Ways to buy a license

First of all, there are 3 ways to buy a license as illustrated in the slide below: a full packaged product from a retail store, an OEM product on a new computer or a volume agreement from a reseller.

Volume licensing agreements

While you could simply walk into the nearest Best Buy or Future Shop and make your purchase, most organizations that need 5 or more licenses can benefit best from volume licensing agreements. Why? Well, there are some pricing advantages, there are more flexible options based on size and type of business, payment structure, ownership of software, etc., there are additional use rights for cross-language and reimaging machines, and there are use rights to new product versions, support, training, tools, etc., with Software Assurance (more about this below). 

For this post, I’m going to limit my discourse to those organizations who want to license less than 250 devices or users, which I would hazard a guess applies to most of you reading this blog. If you need help with licensing options for 250 devices/users or more, lemme know and I’ll put you in touch with people who can help you or you can check out these online resources.

Below is a great 3.5 minute video that lays out the volume licensing options that are part of the Microsoft Open License program for small and medium sized businesses:

(Please visit the site to view this video)

 

Basically, there are 3 volume licensing agreement options: Open License, Open Value and Open Value Subscription. Now if you want more detail than the video gives (you did watch it right? C’mon it’s only 3.5 minutes long and it’s pretty entertaining!), you’ll want to take a look at the Open License Program Guide. It has a very useful chart on page 8 which compares what you get with an Open License agreement compared to an Open Value agreement.

Software Assurance

Software Assurance is something that can be added to your volume license agreement which provides 24x7 support, deployment planning services, training, and the latest software releases. Although once viewed as simply an insurance policy for free software upgrades, Software Assurance has now been recognized by analysts as an essential tool for getting the most out of your licensing purchase.

Below is a screen shot from an interactive PDF listing the benefits of Software Assurance with each type of licensing agreement.

For more information about Software Assurance and what it can do for your organization, check out the Software Assurance site.

Let me know if this was helpful!

More Articles: