How OnCourse Learning Reduced Training Operational Costs

Companies that specialize in creating learning and training content increasingly face challenges in how to distribute their material while minimizing operational costs and assuring a quality user experience. In an increasingly-competitive environment, dollars saved by operational efficiencies can be invested in areas which improve customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retention. But, how can publishers and trainers stay nimble in these areas when they have developed large or even massive content collections?

In this post, we'll explore how OnCourse Learning substantially reduced operational costs related to its training materials while delivering a modern, digital-first experience for students.

Company Background

For more than 60 years, OnCourse Learning has been delivering continuing education, pre-licensing, and corporate training to over 3 million alumni across 11K+ courses. Top companies and millions of professionals nationwide know OnCourse by their premier brands in regulated industries, including Nurse.com, ProSchools, TrainingPro, and AHIT (American Home Inspectors Training). OnCourse Learning brings together the nation’s best-in-class brands and a multidisciplinary education solution to enhance professions, guide career paths, and start new careers.

Key Challenges

OnCourse Learning has offered training courses and materials to the international market for years. While they had historically offered only print materials, they wanted to expand into digital delivery in order to reduce major operational costs resulting from printing and shipping their materials internationally.

Additionally, OnCourse Learning had a significant amount of training material already developed for printed formats. They wanted to make sure that transitioning to digital to reduce operational costs did not create a new cost by requiring them to re-author or rebuild their materials. Re-authoring their materials would be a major undertaking, cost, and slow down their go to market strategy.

To accomplish these goals, OnCourse Learning knew they needed a secure ebook solution that could make their existing files interactive to meet their customers’ expectations.

Project Goals

Expedited Implementation

Due to their large volume of content, OnCourse new they needed a partner who could help them quickly scale their content migration. SharedBook's Professional Services team worked with OnCourse to manage and expedite the process.

Leveraging Existing Content

To avoid creating additional costs and time delays, it was essential that the solution be able to ingest OnCourse's current materials without them needing to be recreated in new formats. SharedBook's platform allowed them to easily upload their existing document formats to a secure, cloud-based content collection. Assets in this collection could then be combined into course resources and deployed to students.

Modern User Experience

OnCourse felt it was important to deliver the kind of user experience modern learners expect. Students reading their content via SharedBook's mobile apps or web reader were able to perform searches within and across books, highlight, annotate, bookmark, and even share notes and comments with other students.

Business Impacts

Reduced Shippings Costs and Logistics Challenges

The ability to offer a large catalog of digital titles to international students has solved several challenges for OnCourse. First, it has substantially reduced shipping-related operational costs. Second, it has solved prior challenges with materials getting stuck in customs when in transit to learners. These factors, in addition to SharedBook's modern user experience, allow OnCourse to provide an exceptional learner experience while reducing overall costs.

In Their Words

In summarizing her experience with SharedBook, Executive Editor Sara Glassmeyer said, "Being able to work with our files and still give the user the same online features was a time and cost savings. If you want to manage and control your ebooks and work with the files that you already own, SharedBook is the company for you."