I am not being New Age in the title of this post. Holistic refers here to e-learning courses which have been planned not just from a pedagogical point of view but also from a business point of view. The UnderstandIT EU-supported project, which has just officially finished, sought to test whether the intensive planning process known as Concurrent Design, which has already been proven in the development of elearning as CCeD, could also work as an online planning process. As part of the very structured CCeD process the UnderstandIT team decided to innovate also by seeing if the final elearning product could be based on Osterwalder’s Business Model Generator to ensure that a viable business plan was an integrated part of the final product.
The hope was that, using our test course, aimed at vocational teachers to enable them to improve their ICT integration skills as well as learn how to coach their colleagues in these skills, we would end up with a generic, one size fits all for the new improved VITAE course.
Predictably enough this was not possible. Financial frameworks differ across Europe as do training regimes, value of training, standard salaries for trainers and so on. What to do? Wasn’t it possible to come up with any business plan for the course? And so the idea of an adaptive tool was born (still in alpha).
The tool takes you through Osterwalders 9 value propositions and requires you to input information and make decisions about the following:
1. Customer segments
2. Value proposition
3. Channels
4. Customer relationships
5. Revenue streams
6. Key resources
7. Key activities
8. Key partnerships
9. Cost structure
Along the way you get help with illustrative case studies to help you answer all the questions.
The end result should be a viable business plan for running the VITAE course in your context.
The UnderstandIT project is now over but in the future we could consider making a generic tool for generating viable business plans for any type of e-learning training using the same approach. (Click to enlarge image).
