Webinar Education Model

With high-speed internet connections and the evolving acceptance of online education, the webinar appears to be business model that can deliver a desirable product:

• The cost per hour of education is easy to calculate.  My baseline is the aggregate of class fee, travel, lodging, and meals.  If  I can find an interesting course with an aggregate cost of about $20/hour, it may be an educational product that gets my attention for Continuing Education.  For residential appraisers, it is interesting to see the strides made by one of the national education providers.   I am sure there are probably other firms delivering competing products, but I happen to like the way I have been treated at their courses. 
  
• No travel costs
  
• No lodging costs
  
• No meals

It is interesting to note that one national organization,  the Appraisal Foundation, has kept its core staff size small at their headquarters, while expanding the scope of their reach by using well-known education providers to produce material for dissemination over the internet and compiling the pool of test questions for USPAP-related examinations.   It is hard to ignore the path taken by the Appraisal Foundation when the directors of the Appraisal Foundation are familiar with the operations of many different professional appraisal associations.   

For folks interested in education, it reasonable, in my opinion, to utilize the existing services and technology of specialized providers to deliver the message.  The creation of the core content and identification of the key concepts is left in the hands of the professional experts to formulate the course content and monitor quality of th presentation to the students. 

Using specialist to control costs is good management.  For example, modern agriculture is replete with custom service providers: grain harvesting, fertilizer application, and custom-crush wineries come to mind. Let's look at one segment of the wine business in California to illustrate that a custom service provider can be utilized effectively.  

• Using the services of a custom-crush wine-making facility is a business model that works well for a small and/or specialized enterprised.  The winery is largely a "virtual" business with all or some of the services provided by the custom-crush facility.  There is a check-list of individual fees for the use of the crush/press, pumps, filters, tanks, barrels, wine-making personnel, etc.  With the capital-intensive facility and machinery available on a piece-meal basis, as needed, the wine-making entrepreneur can focus on purchasing the desired quality of grapes,  perfecting product quality, and on marketing the finished product to the consumer.   In my mind the blue-sky of business value is in that last step of delivering a pleasing product to the retail customer.  Often times, the consumer is seeking a predictable quality of product.  Attaching a credible story to go with the label is part of brand development.

Hopefully, as we all approach the uncharted territory of the 21st century, it will be possible to consider business models that are outside the box and incorporate the new technology into more facets of daily life.

Ciao!