Will This Work for You?

You can see it happening all over the Web. It’s not new, but it’s better than it used to be. It’s putting old methods to work with new technologies. It’s evolving methods to take advantage of the unique properties of Web 2.0. What is it?

The subscription-based learning model, of course!

As usual, while everybody’s been looking to colleges and universities to lead the way in online education, somebody else got there better. I’d say got there first, but traditional academics have been putting courses online for some time now.

But all they’ve done, in most cases, is shovel their content into HTML, put it onto a password-protected site, and charge you an arm and a leg to view it. After they put you through the agony of the typical university admissions process, that is.

One exception to this that I know of is Cabrillo College’s Ed2Go system, which has been fairly successful with it’s limited classes that typically go for $50-$100 a course.

Will the subscription model work?

Who knows? I suspect it will work really well for some subject matter and less well for other subject matter. A lot depends on the target market and the quality of the material.

Brian and Tony Clark have been driving the vanguard of this wave with their Teaching Sells site, which focuses on, you guessed it, creating online membership education sites. If you got in on the ground floor, you were able to watch the evolution of the course and the structure of their site.

Instead of waiting until everything was written and taped and built, the Clarks began presenting their material as they created it. This gave quite a few people a good view of the process from the ground up. An invaluable set of lessons in constructing such a program.

From eBook to membership site

Others folks, like Aaron Wall, of SEO Book fame, has recently opened a membership-based site at which he adds his valuable SEO information and gets feedback from his community of users. While Wall always did a good job of communicating with purchasers of his book, it’s easy to see how a membership site can simplify the process of communicating valuable, time-sensitive material.

To be fair, membership sites have been around for some time, particularly in the Internet Marketing space. Having only belonged to one of these for a few months, I can’t speak for them all, but the quality must certainly vary, and prices seem to bear little relation to value from what I can tell from the outside looking in.

It remains to be seen if certain topics have the legs to support long-term memberships, but that doesn’t diminish the value of a structured learning environment to online learners, not to mention the efficiencies that such an environment can provide you in your own business. Some businesses are a perfect match for a membership model: business coaching, music instruction, and complex, broad topics.

If you like teaching, writing, and interacting with people who share your interests on an ongoing basis, you might consider how you could take advantage of this movement.

Check out Teaching Sells, not only for information about one way to approach structured learning environments, but also to see just how somebody has made it work for them.

And no, I haven’t put together my own course. Yet. I’ve been too busy to ask people what they might be interested in learning. If you have some ideas, leave me a comment.