Blended learning provides learners with the opportunity to take self-paced learning, including e-learning and microlearning.

Benefits of blended learning

While there are numerous benefits attached to using blended learning, here are a few of them below:

• helps to deliver training that caters to all learning styles using different techniques.
• A well-planned learning strategy can help to deliver efficient training to a broad audience.
• With this approach, instructors can easily offer ultimate flexibility to their learners, while presenting their content.
• A well-planned learning strategy is cost-effective, as it helps to save training costs.

But, what are the best practices to save training costs while using blended learning strategies? Let’s have a look at them below:

1. Plan on how to implement your blended learning

To save training costs, you need to first plan how to implement your blended learning. By so doing, you’ll be able to know whether or not you have all it takes to carry out the training effectively. So, to do that, you need to ask yourself the right questions.

Let’s have a quick look at some of the questions below:

• How will the implementation of blended learning help to fill the gap in traditional classroom training?
• Do you have the right support in place to implement your training?
• How about the blended learning model, do you have anyone, in particular, you’ll like to opt for?
• In case your learners are utilizing their mobile devices, do you have a better bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy in place?

Let’s face it, it requires a lot of careful planning to ensure your training budget is effectively utilized. With the right questions, you’ll be able to save your training costs using blended learning.

2. Set clear learning objectives

It’s important, before implementing your blended learning, to ensure that you set clear learning objectives. The essence of that is to help you deliver a training experience that is relevant to your learners’ needs.

However, if the learning objectives are not clear, it automatically means the training will fail to have a meaningful impact on your learners. Apart from that, it also means that you wasted your time, money, and resources, trying to offer irrelevances.

To avoid that, ensure you clearly identify your learning objectives, and carefully build your blended learning strategies around them.

3. Prioritize the content

To save training costs, you need to design your blended learning course, focusing it more on content that can be taught over time. What that implies is that you need to first teach the critical content, so that your learners can be able to apply the knowledge acquired in real-life cases.

In the case of the less-critical content, you can present it to your learners in a number of ways, including through subsequent courses or as just-in-time support, to help improve their retention ability.

4. Identify the classroom and online components

It’s also important that you identify the components that you’ll be using online and those that you’ll be needing in the classroom setting. One of the most important decisions for every training manager is to decide what the blend is going to look like.

So, in case you want to choose topics for your traditional classroom training, go for those that require face-to-face interactions. Some of these topics include behavioral training, sales, and leadership training.

Apart from that, you can also consider opting for topics that have a high-risk and high impact on businesses. In the case of e-learning, choose topics that can serve as pre-requisites to the classroom training. Also, you can use e-learning to provide self-assessment opportunities and just-in-time training for your learners.

5. Personalize training modules by role

To save your training costs, you must ensure that your blended learning strategy gives room for the delivery of personalized training modules, based on an individual learner’s role. For instance, in the case of utilizing blended learning for your organization’s onboarding process.

You can make use of the classroom for general information about your company. However, when it comes to e-learning, you need to deliver training that’s customized to fit an individual’s assigned role in your organization.

Conclusion

Many organizations are now having a shift away from the usual traditional training to a blended learning approach because of a number of reasons, including cost-effectiveness.

To save your training cost, it’s essential that you first make proper planning on how you’ll implement your blending learning strategy. Apart from that, ensure that you set clear learning objectives and prioritize your content to help your learners apply them to their job roles.

Also, ensure you make the right blending decision and customize training modules to suit individual learner’s job positions.