Managing online course enrollment for groups or entire organizations can be complex, especially since LearnDash LMS was designed to offer course enrollment individually. Some challenges that are hard to meet using LearnDash out of the box include managing bulk enrollments, customizing pricing, and managing user roles according to the group’s or organization’s structure.
Additionally, organizations often have specific requirements that differ significantly from individual learners’ requirements, such as custom certificates and detailed reporting needs.
By understanding and addressing these challenges, you can leverage LearnDash as the base and customize it to effectively meet the needs of offering courses to organizational clients.
In this article, we’ll explore the requirements course creators must meet to sell course access to groups and organizations and provide guidelines on how to do so effectively based on our past work for our clients.
Use Cases and Examples
Before we start, let’s dive into some examples of when selling courses to groups or organizations might be profitable.
Corporate Training Programs
Many companies invest in employee development through training programs for all their employees. An organization might purchase online courses in areas like leadership, project management, or technical skills to upskill its entire workforce. For instance, a tech company could be interested in buying group access to advanced programming courses to ensure all developers are up-to-date. This bulk purchase saves costs compared to individual enrollments and allows the company to maintain consistency in training across the organization.
Educational Institutions
Schools and universities may seek online courses to supplement their existing curriculum for students or offer training to all their staff.
Government Agencies
Government agencies often require specialized employee training to meet regulatory requirements and improve operational efficiency. For example, a local government might buy access to online courses on public administration, cybersecurity, or compliance with new regulations.
Franchise Networks
Franchise businesses often need to provide uniform training across multiple locations. For instance, a fast-food chain might invest in an online food safety training program and want to purchase access for all employees.
Essential Features For Group Course Management
Selling to organizations requires bulk enrollment capabilities and efficient user management. Custom pricing structures or certificates are also often needed when dealing with organizations. When planning to sell courses to groups rather than individuals, you’ll want to keep all of the following possible requirements in mind.
Custom Certificates
LearnDash allows you to create and issue custom certificates to learners upon course completion. This feature particularly appeals to organizations that want to recognize and reward their employees or members for completing training programs.
Customization Options
Organizations appreciate the ability to customize courses to align with their internal processes and branding. Consider offering content personalization, allowing organizations to modify course materials to better align with their internal processes, policies, or industry-specific requirements. This might include adding custom modules, integrating company-specific assessments, or tailoring course completion requirements to each organization’s specific needs.
Bulk enrollment
Having systems and processes in place to allow an organization to purchase access for large groups easily. Your site should provide a streamlined process for bulk enrollments, enabling the purchaser to add multiple users in one go, assign them to specific courses, and manage their access levels. Additionally, offering tiered pricing for bulk purchases can incentivize organizations to enroll more participants at once. Automated enrollment features, where users receive instant access to the course materials upon registration, can also save administrative time and enhance the user experience.
User Management
When dealing with group enrollments, efficient user management becomes crucial. Organizations need tools to monitor progress, track performance, and manage user roles within the course. Consider implementing features that allow administrators to easily assign courses to users, create sub-groups within the organization, and generate reports on learner progress and completion rates. Role-based access controls are also necessary, enabling different levels of access for administrators, managers, and learners.
Reporting
When selling courses to big organizations, companies, or franchises, in most cases, a group representative or manager will need to manage and monitor the results of their learners. Unlike with individual learners, when reporting is handled internally by your team, selling courses to groups means equipping your customers with a system that enables them to track learner progress, including course activity, quiz results, assignments, and essays, on their own and generate reports according to their institutional or organizational requirements..
Custom Pricing Structures
Organizations often have different budget constraints and training needs than individual learners, which makes custom pricing structures an essential feature. Consider offering bulk discounts or subscription-based pricing models, where organizations can pay a flat fee for access to multiple courses over a specified period. Additionally, you can offer tailored pricing based on the number of users, course complexity, or the level of customization required.
Pricing Strategies for Selling to Groups and Organizations
Pricing your courses for groups and organizations requires a different approach than selling to individual learners. Organizations often expect volume discounts or packages, such as course bundles or subscriptions. For this purpose, there are many different pricing strategies to consider.
Per-Seat Pricing
Charge a per-seat fee that decreases as the number of enrolled participants increases. For example, discount groups of 10, 50, or 100 learners.
Flat-Rate Pricing
Offer a flat rate for unlimited access to the course for a set period. This model is attractive to organizations anticipating frequent new enrollments or needing flexibility in training programs.
Subscription-Based Pricing
Provide organizations with a subscription option that grants access to your entire selection of courses or a select group of courses. This model is ideal for ongoing training needs and can lead to recurring revenue.
Custom Quotes
For large or highly customized projects, offer custom quotes based on the organization’s needs and requirements. This allows you to factor in customization, support, and integration complexity.
How We Customized LearnDash For Selling Courses To Groups and Organizations
GBRI
One of the clients we have worked with on implementing group online course sales is GBRI, an eLearning platform based in New York City, dedicated to providing affordable and impactful sustainability education.
They have an extensive education offering, including 400 course videos, articles, activities, quizzes, exam preparation resources, and training materials.
Part of their objectives include offering organizational partnerships, allowing organizations to purchase seats in bulk and then add and enroll their members in specific courses rather than catering solely to individual users.
In this case, we used the Uncanny Groups for LearnDash plugin, which allows users to configure, manage, and report on groups. The plugin was integrated with WooCommerce for the checkout. This way customers can purchase several “course seats” at once, all as a part of a group, which can be managed by a leader on the front-end.
Early Learning Cafe
Another instance where we worked on providing courses on an organizational level was when we worked with Early Learning Cafe, which offers a vast catalog of courses for early learning educators and caregivers. Their classes are geared to both individuals and groups of educators. Their goal? To establish a supportive community and active discussions around the learning experience offered on their site.
They have accomplished this by selling group course access on their site. For example, Early Learning Cafe has served the Canadian government on a county level, serving its childcare programs, including daycare centers, home daycares, nursery schools, and private preschools. In this instance, the government purchased course subscriptions in bulk for their early childhood education (ECE) workers.
learnDash for Groups and Organizations
Adding these features and strategies will make your courses more attractive to organizations, easier to manage, and more profitable overall. When you get what organizations need for group course management, you’ll set yourself up as the go-to option for companies wanting effective, scalable training for their teams.
