Case Study:

Blending Online Courses with Live Workshop for Profit

Helen Kirby, principal of Custom Brand in the UK, was looking for a way to enhance her multinational consulting practice. Ms. Kirby, an expert in marketing and branding, has a flourishing business providing training seminars to international managers. A typical client engagement involves the preparation and distribution of course materials, and a weekend-long workshop at a central location. The problem was that course delegates came from varying backgrounds with differing levels of marketing knowledge.

Custom Brand wanted to create a prerequisite course and make it available online for all delegates to complete before they attended the workshop. Because delegates were spread out geographically, it made sense to work with ACT360 Media to create a web-based program for them to complete on their own time.

Ms Kirby began by creating a draft of her course in Word and Powerpoint and forwarding to Pilar Gomez for instructional design. Ms. Gomez designed the structure of the course and optimized the information presented. The drafts were then passed to ACT360 Media's editors for final multimedia layout and setup on the ACT360 e-learning platform.

ACT360 Media served as Custom Brand's IT partner, configuring the e-learning platform and providing support as required. Training delegates were e-mailed a user name and password two weeks prior to the workshop, and asked to complete the course in advance. The Custom Brand online course consisted of:

- A knowledge pre-test
- Two online modules containing video clips and other multimedia
- A knowledge post-test
- A survey for course evaluation

"Workshop delegates found the online course engaging and relevant, and I was able to monitor score and usage reports using the ACT360 system," according to Ms. Kirby. "Because the class was well-prepared, I was able to cover a lot more material during the workshop and focus on high-value training activities."

"ACT360 made it easy for me to add web-based training to complement my weekend course. The corporate sponsor was impressed with the return on investment, and we can see that this will be a key tool to help us grow our business with our corporate clients."