Start your journey to successful CE
With onboarding, approval processes, and creating courses, it’s only natural for a new CE provider to wonder how to get started. However, rather than worrying about how it may not work, think about how successful providers made it. They did it, and you can too!
To help you find your success, we have some words of wisdom and a few quick tips some of our most successful providers stand by. Take inspiration and guidance from them and start on your own path to being a thriving online CE provider.
What do you define as “success?”
There is more to being a good provider than having high course sales. Positive user reviews, return customers, and average test scores are also key metrics to consider, and there are many more.
As a provider, you need to decide what is most important to you, and make a purpose of recording that information. Do you want a few perfect, 5 star courses? Do you want the most courses on a certain topic?
Set clear objectives and goals and take smart measurements. For course-related measures, use surveys to gather information and collect licensee feedback. For everything else, design metrics just for you, so know how your account is doing based on the standards that matter to you.
SmartCE started as an individual with a goal to make CE better. He didn’t have any experience in the industry, but he set objectives, measured his progress and turned SmartCE into one of Table Mesa’s top providers. A little planning and action can have massive results.
Do your courses need some “spice?”
One of the major issues with continuing education today is that licensees get tired of the same approach to similar information. A huge cause of this is the way courses are made; everyone has been doing it the same way, neglecting to empower and motivate licensees. This needs to change!
When you were a student, what did your favorite teachers do to make class or presentations interesting? What made them stand out? Draw inspiration from inventive approaches and don’t stick to the same, standard method as everyone else.
Try adding media elements, like an audio recording (5x the retention rate of written text), or a video (10x higher than written information). Maybe introduce custom surveys to keep your licensees engaged and get better feedback. These are unique aspects of online courses, and they also break away from the traditional course approach.
Speaking of breaking away from the traditional approach, Saintil Education hand-builds each of their online courses; old materials are revised from scratch, walls of text are replaced with media, and creative approaches are used that make learning fast and even fun. And guess what . . . their courses are some of the most popular on our platform. Check one out for yourself.
Are you getting to know your fellow CE orgs?
You may have competitors when it comes to selling courses, but to improve CE as an industry, it will take all of us working together. Don’t be afraid to reach out to other providers, regardless of their area of expertise.
Don’t limit your connections to providers either. There are state boards and CE committees that are incredibly knowledgable and with great networking opportunities. Every connection you make gives you more influence and leverage to improve your courses and provider account.
Nurse Continuing Ed is one of Table Mesa’s largest providers. However, while they do offer many courses, it’s the diversity of states, professions, and requirements those courses meet that make them so successful. By building strong connections with other CE-related orgs, they have reached incredibly large audiences and made massive profits.
It’s as simple as that!
We mean it, this is all it takes to start down a path to success. Sure, we could give more tips and more examples, but success isn’t “one size fits all.”
Each of the providers we mentioned had inspirations that helped them get started, but they have success because of themselves. Do the same. Learn from them, and blaze your own path, by starting with objectives, imagination, and connections.
