The E-Learning industry has been one of the most rapidly growing in the 2010s. The global market for eLearning courses was worth USD 107 billion in 2015, but the value is expected to triple by 2025. It’s also increasingly used by companies and organizations. In 2017, almost 80% of US companies reported that they used online learning courses.
Of course, with this kind of growth and expansion comes the other side of the coin. Whenever there’s a rising star in business opportunities and models, people who are looking to make money flock to it. This is known as the Market for Lemons – the quality decreases because there is an increased number of players on the market, while buyers don’t have reliable ways of determining which ones are the best (this principle is also known as information asymmetry).
Just like in the market for lemons, high-quality online training courses don’t have a lot of signals to prove that they work – you need to rely on reviews and you can only see for yourself after you start the course. In the same way, courses of lesser quality can mimic those same marketing strategies and trick you into purchasing their program. So, to handle this issue, we’re bringing you the most important things to look for when you’re choosing an online training course:
1) Focus on independent reviews
As we have previously hinted, learner reviews are the most objective way you can learn about an eLearning course’s quality. However, keep in mind that there can be a bias regarding people who decide to leave a review. Namely, people who are unsatisfied with the course and angry about the value they got for their money are much more likely to leave a review. On the other hand, people who are relatively satisfied or thrilled with the course might not see the point in leaving a review or simply forget about it.
In any way, you should take reviews with a grain of salt, but they’re a great glimpse of what’s expecting you if you enroll. If you’re interested in starting an eLearning course, steer away from the course’s own promotional talk and go straight to the reviews. In the case you’re still not sure, then proceed in reading what the author(s) says about the course themselves.
2) Follow industry thought leaders and experts
Thanks to the Internet, we now receive nifty digests and recommendations of all the things that are worth reading, listening to, learning, and much more. Instead of scanning the web and drowning in a sea of informational content, you can go straight to experts and look at what courses they recommend.
Again, in some cases, these features and mentions might be sponsored. Still, if someone is really an influential thinker in a particular field, they would rarely risk their reputation over a catastrophic affiliate course.
If you’re interested in the writing industry, you can follow TrustMyPaper (a professional writing service), BestEssayEducation (a company in the academic writing industry), or Writer’s Digest (the most popular journal for writers) to see recommendations on great writing courses.
3) Research the curriculum
Try to stay away from online training courses that don’t offer a brief list of the topics that will be covered in the course. This can result in your purchasing of an all-too-general course, or a level that you’re not ready for yet. Reading through the curriculum might give you a better idea of the course level than the actual course level they share.
For example, if you’re a digital marketer looking for an expert online course in SEO, you might find a course that boasts “advanced skills and techniques for experienced marketers”. Only when you look at the curriculum, you see that the topics covered are basic and common knowledge, like “it’s important to do keyword research”. This can happen when the course author cannot correctly estimate their own level of expertise.
Neightan White, a blogger and contributing writer at SupremeDissertations, says that “online training courses usually offer a pretty decent curriculum overview for potential students who are browsing through their course description. It’s like a movie giving an enticing trailer that follows the plot of the movie. You know what to expect, but you will never know what the approach will be and how much you will be able to learn from it.”
4) Search on reliable and credible platforms
Another way of filtering and sorting eLearning courses to find only the best ones is to use the best online learning platforms. The advantage of these websites is that they have their own rating system, which always includes honest reviews from students (even negative reviews). The delivery is also smoother and you’d be hard-pressed to find any technical errors within the course content itself.
Before they are submitted and approved by eLearning platforms, courses have to pass a quality check. That’s why this option is much better than purchasing an online course from a self-promotional website or landing page. These types of pages are designed to shut down any negative reviews and (possibly falsely) present the course as the best in the world. Approach each of them critically.
5) Ask your colleagues for recommendations
If you’re looking for a course that’s related to your profession and career, it’s likely that some of your colleagues have already taken one. Does your office have an Excel wizard? Ask them whether they have taken any Excel courses and are there any they would recommend. At work, it’s especially easy to identify who’s highly skilled at something. If you ask them how they got to that point and they recommend a course – that’s definitely what you should do too!
Conclusion
Just like all products and services, separating the wheat from the chaff in the world of online courses is hard and complicated. Some gems of online courses can be practically hidden because of poor marketing, while you might purchase some poorly-developed courses solely due to their huge advertising budget and brand reputation.
When you decide the exact topic you want to learn more about through a course, start from checking whether industry leaders recommend any online courses in that skill. You can also use course platforms to see the top-recommended ones. Also, remember to pay more attention to real reviews than promotional texts.
Bio
Kristin Savage is a professional writer and creative writing educator working with ClassyEssay and GrabMyEssay, professional academic writing services. She also contributes to TopEssayWriting as a research paper writer for papers related to education. Kristin is interested in the topics of life-long learning and self-improvement.
