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.
