There’s probably no proving my theory, but I’ve long believed that associations and non-profits lag behind corporate and academics when it comes to adopting adult learning theory and the use of technology in education, among other things. The first — adult learning — is worthy of a separate post, so I’ll leave that aside for the time being.

And lagging in technology is easily explained: associations are generally more risk-adverse. This is a good thing. Countless organizations have invested hundreds of thousands (and in the cases of some corporations, millions) of dollars in technology just to get an edge, only to see those investments fail to earn back even a portion of their cost.

We need to be good stewards of our members’ investments in our organization, and that means being cautious.

But we’re slowly catching up.

According to Ambient Insight’s report, “The US Market for  Self-Paced eLearning Products and Services: 2009-2014 Forecast and Analysis,” the growth of self-paced elearning among NGO’s, non-profits, and associations will rise just over 5%. Highest growth sectors are projected to be the healthcare industry and academics (K-12 and higher education).

Why are associations and non-profits expected to grow more rapidly than corporations? Primarily because we’re just catching up to their reliance on self-paced elearning, which is established among for-profits but still relatively new for us. They haven’t given up on self-paced elearning, their growth in that type of elearning hast just stabilized while they focus on other initiatives.

And why is this important for you to know? Benchmarking across the training industry — not just across other associations — is essential if you want to continue to offer leading edge educational events. Stand-alone, self-paced, asynchronous elearning can be a big part of that, so if you’re not devising a strategy for your association’s growth in this area, you’re going to be behind the eight ball before you know it.

More and more associations are starting to feel the pressure of encroaching competition from all sides:

• For-profit corporations are better equipped than ever to offer free Webinars and other opportunities to customers (our members), often providing the same or similar content that we would have to charge a fee to offer.
• Institutions of higher education are functioning more like member associations, offering social networking and other ways of connecting and sharing experiences and knowledge.

The technology necessary for self-paced elearning and social networking is less expensive, more available, and more accessible every day. Ambient Insights reports that the largest investments (across all sectors) that will be made in elearning include hosted platform services (for example, social networking and/or learning management systems housed by the vendor on the Web, rather than on your server) and non-IT, self-paced elearning content. [For access to a free, downloadable executive summary of this report and others, click here.]

Aren’t these the very things your association is considering? Obviously, you’re not alone.

But here’s another factor in this equation that deserves some attention. Bear with me for some important economics. As the recession loomed, investors anticipated that elearning would get more attention and business, and acted accordingly. They dropped over a billion dollars in learning technology companies, particularly those specializing in academics. Tens of millions of those dollars went to companies that provide learning platforms to corporate and government clients.

Those companies now have lots of money for research and business development which they will then offer to their customers — in the corporate and government sectors.

Of course, you’ll benefit in the long run from those investments in a sort of “trickle-down” fashion — the corporations and government will continue to finance the newest innovations at the highest cost, and we’ll reap the rewards of systems and programs that will have the bugs (mostly) worked out of them, with efficiencies that will make them more affordable and stable. 

The trick will be to find that most opportune time to incorporate those innovations — early enough to avoid losing your members’ attention to corporate competitors, yet late enough to get an affordable, working solution.

Does your elearning strategy position you well for this? Are you ready?

When you’re considering venturing into elearning for the first time or expanding your offerings, you’re always looking at an investment. And as a responsible steward of your association’s budget, you want to make sure your investments are sound and your justifications for those expenditures are solid.

If they’re not, the board of directors will never approve them, right? And even if they did, you’d toss and turn at night, wondering what you’ve gotten yourself into.

Two new resources are now available to help you!

Tagoras has just released a condensed version of its Association E-learning: State of the Sector report. In 61 pages you’ll get the key data from a survey of nearly 500 trade and professional associations about their e-learning activities. Available at just $99, this sort of research at this price is unheard of — and aLearning commends Tagoras for their willingness to make their study available at a more affordable cost without loss of value.

What does the report mean to you? Benchmarking. Examples. Contacts. Case studies.

More than that, you’ll discover what your options are. You probably have more elearning possibilities than you think. Options are everything. Examples and a proven track record to support them are priceless.

Follow this link to order your copy: http://www.tagoras.com/catalog/association-elearning-condensed/

And for guidance on what to do with those options — how to fit elearning effectively into a full education curriculum and create an elearning strategy, you of course need to get a copy of (warning: shameless plug ahead) aLearning: A Trail Guide to Association eLearning. At just $25 for a downloadable copy or $35 (plus shipping) for a printed version, you won’t find another resource as packed with examples and how-to information on this topic anywhere.

To learn more about the book or to order your copy of aLearning, just click the blue and orange “Buy Now – Lulu” button on the left.

Together the two resources will cost you less than $140 — a small price to pay when you’re considering spending thousands in software, hardware, consulting, and other services and products.

Go into the process of building your elearning program as informed as you can be. Build credibility for yourself and support for your initiative. Don’t wait.

Though all has looked quiet on the surface, it’s been very, very busy behind the scenes at the aLearning Blog. Here’s what’s been going on: aLearning: A Trail Guide for an Association’s eLearning Strategy.

Yes. A book. A book about three seemingly disparate things: Associations. Strategy. eLearning.

It’s the book I wish I’d had when our association headed into online learnig — and me, with experience developing elearning! So I can imagine how lost many association execs and learning professionals feel when they need to sort it all out.

No wonder so many associations lack a workable elearning strategy, as Jeff Cobb discovered in his newly-released report. His blog summarizes the issues very well. I agree with his advice:  ”…start viewing e-learning as s strategic part of your mission and your business and begin treating it like the substantial, long-term asset it could become.”

 aLearning: A Trail Guide for an Association’s eLearning Strategy will be available in 3-4 weeks. From lingo you need to know, to deciding whether an LMS is necessary for you or not, to conducting needs assessments and scans, including deciding what you need to offer and the best modalities for each topic (yes, Learning 2.o is discussed), all the way through to estimating costs, issuing an RFP and selecting a vendor — this book includes activities, charts, examples, and a case study to help you work through each step in the process as you go.

You’ll end up with  more than a workable (and flexible) strategy — you’ll have covered some essential steps necessary for creating your business plan as well.

If you’d like more info on the book, please e-mail me directly. Watch for more here soon!

If you haven’t gotten yourself a copy of Jeff Cobb’s 2008 Association Sector E-Learning Survey Summary Report, GET IT and READ IT and HIGHLIGHT IT and LIVE IT.

Far too much here to summarize, but a few things popped out that struck me as counterintuitive. Of course, I generally function in a counterintuitive way, so perhaps someone will let me know what I’m missing….

Under “Business Goals & Marketing,” Jeff notes that,

“A slim majority of respondents already using e-learning (50.2%) as well [as] respondents planning to use e-learning (52.5%) indicated that their offerings must [be] self-sustaining and profitable. An additional 33.7% of current users and 38.3% of planned users indicate that their offerings must be self-sustaining though not necessarily profitable.”

He goes on to report that,

“The vast majority of respondents currently using e-learning (86.0%) or planning to use e-learning (77.4%) charge or plan to charge for some or all of their offerings.”

So… most organizations need to offer financially sustainable, if not profitable, online learning. And most are planning to charge money for them.

Recently, a separate study indicated that the average price for a Webinar is $230. Remember, a Webinar is a one-time deal. (I’m making an assumption here — that if a recording is offered, there’s a pricetag on it.) Elearning, particularly asynchronous courses, are generally provided for a much longer period of time.

With me so far? Okay. Jeff’s report goes on to share what respondents had to say about what they charge or plan to charge for their e-learning:

“The average price per course hour for organizations currently offering e-learning is US $56.79. For organizations planning to offer e-leraning in the next 12 months, the average projected price per course hour is US $52.24.”

HUH???!??!?  Why would you charge less than average? Why would you LOWER that per hour course rate when people will need e-learning more than ever in the next year at least? Doesn’t it make more sense to charge what you must in order to at least meet your expenses?

What am I missing in this picture?

Because it seems to me if you keep aiming at your shoes, you’re bound to shoot yourself in the foot.

…then it must be so! ASAE & The Center conducted a research study they called “Associations of the Future.” Among the trends identified by the study: “Growing popularity of online education relative to that of classroom-based courses.” (See Associations Now, December 2008, page 20, for a brief summary, or the full report for more details.)

You’ve been hearing, ”Social media is essential for associations.”

I’ll add to that: “Online learning is essential for associations.” And by online learning, I don’t just mean Webinars. If you’re not learning about and considering all the various ways learning can be effectively delivered online, then you need to get on task sooner rather than later. Right now it’s the best option for continuing to deliver quality professional development to our members, despite travel and other budgetary constraints.

Don’t wait or it will be too late.

Two respected sources, citing at least two respected studies, indicate that elearning development will continue to increase in the next year.

Chief Learning Officer (www.CLOmedia.com) surveys a segment of its readership monthly on various topics, and in November reported on expected investments of training dollars and whether those investments in training are expected to increase or decrease. Forty-two percent of responding learning officers reported an anticipated increase in spending. The highest area of growth? eLearning, of course! Seventy-nine percent of respondents said they expected to increase el-learning. The next highest response was performance management (70%), so elearning is clearly a key focus for learning executives in the next year. When ased about their use of external providers of the next two years, 53% of respondents cited outsourcing content development work on a project-to-project basis.

The 2008 ASTD State of the Industry Report (www.astd.org) was reported in the November issue of T+D magazine, and those results support the CLO findings as well — organizations have continued to increase the amount of online learning they offer. In 2006, 65% of learning hours were “instructor-led real time” but dropped to 61% in 2007. “Technology-based” learning hours comprised 30.3% of offerings in 2006 but grew to 32.6% in 2007.

If you benchmark against for-profit training, 90% of online learning was self-paced in 2007, and has been at that level for several years. Maybe even more important is this data nugget: in 2007, more than a third of learning hours were offered via technology (online).

How do you stack up?

Okay… one more piece of data from the same issue of T+D: In resonse to the question, “Has the economy changed the types and amount of training your organization provides to employees?” 62% of respondents said, “Yes.”

Ours has. We’re offering at least one Webinar in place of a live event just in the next month.

How prepared are you? Has your association’s learning strategy anticipated lower registrations and enrollments for live events? Have you, like those for-profits surveyed and summarized here, planned to increase online learning to ensure your members continue to get the training and education they need and expect? If you were to be surveyed today about your online learning plans, what would you say? Are you ready for tougher times ahead, or not?

Development Teams 

One of the things I’ve been curious about is whether associations outsource much of their online learning development, and whether there’s a relationship between size of the organization and whether they outsource.  Of the survey respondents, the majority (64%) said they outsource the technical aspects of their Webinars, while only 18% handle these tasks in-house (a team directly employed by the association). 

Equal numbers of respondents report outsourcing the development of their asynchronous offerings than those who report developing them in-house (27% for each).

No clear correlation could be found between the size of the association (and number of dedicated education professionals on the staff) to whether an association outsources certain aspects of the online learning program.  Organizations report working with their volunteers, the staff, and vendors in several combinations as they develop online offerings. 

It is clear that when it comes to the technical side of conducting a Webinar, most associations are more comfortable hiring a service than handling this aspect on their own.

Survey Conclusions

Although the sample size was far too small to draw any conclusions for trade associations in general (and those primarily affiliated with colleges and universities in particular), this basic survey provides a neat snapshot of online learning in some organizations.

In looking at the snapshot, a few things come into sharp focus:

• Size of the organization and its staff does not drive the investment in people nor dollars when it comes to online learning.  Most organizations devote 10% of their education program budget to online learning, regardless of the number of individual members served.
• Organizations tend to offer synchronous, live Webinars and similar events prior to venturing into asynchronous learning options.  The transition is usually from live Webinars to recorded/archived Webinars to stand-alone courses.
• Few of the associations responding to this survey are blending synchronous and asynchronous delivery options.  When they do, they tend to be on a program-specific basis, rather than part of a broader, curriculum-based strategy.
• Most associations plan to expand their online learning offerings in the next year.  About half expect to increase their budgets to accommodate this expansion, and a few have even hired an additional staff member to assist with the heavier workload more online learning will create.
• Associations responding to the survey generally indicated careful planning and a deliberate pace in developing their online learning programs.  Assessment of the success of current or previous offerings was noted in several cases as the driving force behind either moving forward or taking stock before doing so.

Do these results jibe with your association’s current online learning status?  Future plans?  Post a comment and let us know! 

Online Learning Plans for 2008

What are the responding organizations planning for online learning in 2008?  A large majority (73%) said they will offer more online courses/events in 2008 than they did in 2007.  Other respondents were unsure or anticipating offering the same number as the previous year. 

It seems that most organizationscontinue to move forward with online learning once they venture into it.  In some cases, associations are stepping back to assess their level of success before investing any further, but most noted a high degree of satisfaction with their online initiative.  In a few cases, respondents noted that their education staff had been expanded to provide additional in-house assistance with their online and general education offerings.  Another noted that increased affordability of offering online learning is leading their association to increase their offerings in the next year.

Budgets

Most organizations opted not to provide specific financial information, some noting that their structure makes a simple response difficult, while others noted that education does not have a distinct budget within their association.  From the data received, no support could even be found to support an assumption that large organizations (10,000 members or more, in this case) have larger education budgets. 

What could be extrapolated from the numbers provided was an idea of how much of an education budget is dedicated to online learning — anywhere from 2-13%.  About half of the respondents said their 2008 online learning budget would remain about the same and about half said they would be increasing their online budget.  No one responded that they expected a drop in allocations for e-learning.

Conclusions

Most organizations recognize the importance of invtesting in online education but are designating only modest portions of their overall education budgets to this segment.  The survey did not probe for reasons, but general survey comments suggest that because live offerings — which are more expensive to provide than online courses — are still offered more frequently than online programs, more of the education budget must be devoted to them. 

The trend, however, is clear: online learning is not going away, and in some cases associations plan to not only offer more e-learning, but to devote more of their staff and dollars to pay for it.

Are these results in line with what your association is planning for 2008?  Are you getting the funding you need to implement your online learning strategy?

Next time…. what are associations doing in-house, and what are they outsourcing, when it comes to elearning?  And some final conclusions.

Who’s Offering Online Learning, and What Types Are Being Offered?

In the 12 months previous to the survey, 54% of responding organizations said they offered 3-4 synchronous events, including Webinars.  18% offered one, and about half that many offered 5-11 or more. 

While synchronous events on a quarterly basis or so seems the norm among this group, asynchronous options were offered by far fewer respondents, nearly half (46%) of whom said they did not offer asynchronous programs at all in the previous year.  Of the associations offering them, all said they were offering two or more, with one organization reporting they offered more than one per month.  Most of the organizations offering four or more asynchronous events per year noted that these were always or nearly always archived/recorded versions of events that were originally presented live.

Even fewer responding organizations offered blended options (about 28%); all who said they offer them serve 10,000 or more individual members. 

Conclusions 

Although these results suggest synchronous Webinars and asynchronous archiving of them are becoming mainstream practices in the area of online learning within associations, asynchronous courses that are not archived/recorded Webinars and blended learning are largely untapped options within these associations.  That the larger associations are offering blended learning supports the idea that a larger staff and infrastructure better lend themselves to offering a variety of learning events, online or not. 

What About Your Association?

Where does your association fall in this data? Are you in the mainstream, or venturing out? Is offering asynchronous or blended learning a challenge? What barriers are you facing?

Next Time…

What are the responding organizations planning for the next few years?  Are they planning more online learning? Less? Larger budgets to accommodate those plans? Or will they have to balance an expanding number of online offerings with the same budget?

Note: Any gap in blog entries over the next few weeks is due to association-related travel. 

Thank you to those of you who responded to requests for participation in the aLearning Blog’s online learning survey, posted on Survey Monkey.  You’ll find here, and in subsequent posts, a summary of the responses and results.  Please note that despite reminders to complete the survey, severa of those invited to participate chose not to, and so not enough responses came in to give us a viable sample.  Therefore this disclaimer: please don’t use these results as benchmarking data for your organization, but consider this a snapshot of what respondents are doing in their associations with online learning.

First, who was invited to participate, and who responded? 

Respondent Demographics

Sixty-six associations of various sizes (in terms of membership and staff) were selected to participate based on their service to members in higher education.  Of those, about 17% responded (a viable sample size is usually about 20%), so n=11, which is a very small respondent pool. Membership size was measured by individual members served, regardless of whether an association formally recognizes an institution as its member. This provided a common basis for measurement and analysis.

Respondents represent:

• organizations of 1000 members or more, with 45% of those having at least 10,000 members.  The highest reported membership was 200,000.
• staff sizes from 1-60; 36% with fewer than 10; 36% with 45 or more; and 27% with 12-22 staff members

More than half of the respondents are at associations where 10-20% of the staff is fully dedicated to education.  Of those, only one large association has a higher percentage of education staff.  Organizations reporting 17-25% of their staff as fully-dedicated to education represent 1000-6000 individual members.  Some organizations with 10,000 or more members reported 14% of their overall full-time staff is fully-dedicated to education.

Conclusions

Organizations representing 1000 or fewer members are not represented in this survey because they did not respond to the invitation.  This supports findings by the ASAE and The Center that smaller organizations do not have the resources/time to respond to surveys, and tend to be underrepresented in data.

Distribution of staff sizes in the survey results is relatively even an only generally correlates to the size of the organization. For example, one association reported one full-time staff member for more than 10,000 members; a similar-sized organization reported a staff of 60.  Reasons for this broad range in staffing weren’t addressed in the survey.

As with overall staffing, no clear correlation can be made between the number of association members served and the number of full-time education professionals on staff.  In some cases, larger organizations have more education specialists, but smaller associations sometimes reported that a higher percentage of staff members are dedicated to education.  They survey did not probe into the reasons behind staffing levels, but one assumption is that the association’s mission drives staffing levels (i.e., when professional development is part of the mission, more resources are dedicated to it), not the number of members served.

Next time… how many respondents are offering elearning, and what are they offering?

Would you like a copy of the report e-mailed to you? If so, click here.