Online Learning — Affordable, Long Term and Practical Solutions

I grew up in blue collar Cleveland in the 1970s. We didn’t waste money. We were hard working Rustbelt Ohioans. That’s why I hate to see people waste their money on learning management systems (LMS). I’ve worked with a lot of systems. They can be expensive, messy and difficult to work with. They require staffing. They break. Reorganizing content is difficult. And more alarming, there is no guarantee they will be around tomorrow. The market is saturated and not everyone will survive.

I also survived the dot com bubble burst. Like our frugal grandparents, who survived the depression, I’ll never completely put my trust in any software startup or even an established SAAS service. I don’t believe the hype. I saw them all disappear overnight in the bubble burst of 2001.

Imagine you spend years building a curriculum on a platform, and then one day they disappear. Now, imagine you are paying $5 per user per month. Even with a small amount of users, let’s say 1000 that comes to $60,000 a year.

Would you rather:

A. Log in to Moodle, struggle to figure out the navigation, find your course, drill through a bunch of links, launch your course, start your course, navigate to resources, attempt to go back to your course, click 5 links, end up in the wrong place, finally go back to your course, take a quiz, struggle through a drag and drop, exit, return, try to find everything again, take another quiz, start a video, go make lunch while it runs, return from lunch, put on Netflix and finish the course by guessing through all of it, pass (or fail) the course, retain very little, OR

B. Log in, surf around, exit.

My solution: HTML & Javascript, a Database with authentication and Google Analytics. That’s it. I’m doing this now and it works. Simple.

I’d like to tell you all about it. I have success stories to show! I’d like to help you.