Monday, November 19, 2012

Funding Options for eLearning Programs


Since my professional aspirations are to working in the Training and Development department of a private company, my response to the Week 7 blog question will focus on funding options for private sector companies. The two funding options discussed in the chapter 7 of Bates book titled “Funding Strategies, Collaboration, and Competition,” are reallocating funds and partnering with public sector organizations. Both options I believe are low cost methods to funding eLearning for employees.
Since private sector companies do not have the option of getting funding from government resources, they must fund eLearning programs using internal resources. Therefore, the company will either have the find ways to raise the money or allocate resources the company already has. According to Bates, “making a strategic commitment to the use of technology for teaching with no external or additional resources to pay for such changes, must prepared to consider closing program and activities that are costly and relatively ineffective in order to pay for the new investment” (Bates, 2000).
Another option that I think has the potential to be a very low cost method of providing eLearning opportunities for employees would be to partner with a college or university. Instead of footing the bill for developing an online program, the company could develop a partnership with a college or universities where in exchange for discounted tuition; employees would take online courses paid for by the company. I think that this would be very efficient, because employees could opt to take online course that would not interfere or take away from their regular work day. Again this type of training would have to be optional because it would mean that employees are spending additional hours outside of work to receive training. The incentive would have to be a free course that offers college credit to get buy in from employees.