Do you need an LMS?
Let’s imagine you’ve got an online clothing store. Since you know it’s best to service a niche, you’re selling clothing and accessories for Renaissance Faire actors and fans. You’ve got clothing for men and for women, peasants and royalty, merchants and musicians. Plus, all sorts of accessories like bags and belts, sashes and hats. You’ve been able to connect with your target audience, and it’s going pretty well.
You decide it’s a great idea to add online courses to your store. You’ve had a number of customers and prospects ask questions like, “What else do I need for this outfit?” and, “How do I wear this clothing?”
You could create a series of text and video lessons on wearing each item, and offer a corresponding lesson with the purchase of each clothing item. However, you wouldn’t really need an LMS (learning management system) for that. You’d either offer the lesson for free, or offer it as an inexpensive upsell (“Normally $9.99, add it to your order for only $2”).
Whether or not you decided to offer those specific videos, you could also add in a series of lessons – or a complete course – covering a complimentary subject. For instance, you could offer a course on “the care and cleaning of RenFaire clothing.” You might have a series on “finding period accurate accessories,” or even something specific like “caring for suede boots and clothing.” You could charge for each, bundle them together at a discount, or offer them for free.
My point is this: for a series of connected or interconnected lessons, it’s easier to create, manage, and dispense them through an online learning platform. However for one-off lessons, or a set of directions, you don’t really need a structure. You can simply connect the lessons to an object (“Learn to tie your scarf – click here to watch the video”), or just add a link to a web page, a text, or in an email. Yes, technically it’s still “teaching online,” but it’s not about the lessons themselves. The questions are: does my intended audience want to receive multiple connected lessons over time? Now, or in the foreseeable future, do I want to create enough content to become a series of interconnected lessons? If either of those are true, then you’ll want some or all of the structure of an LMS.
