Over the last few months Birthlight has been enjoying the benefits of online courses. Due to the lockdown Birthlight found itself in a position where it needed to offer courses but without the ability to meet face to face. For some courses this was easier than others. The land courses seem to be more conducive to Zoom-based courses. But we even managed to do some blended Aqua courses. We found that these courses added some surprising benefits for attendees.
“Having all the resources to look back over for students has been a great advantage to learning the material”
Firstly, online courses can come with the benefit of reduced costs for attendees. The normal costs that come along with face-to-face courses, for example, accomadation, and associated travel expenses were able to be saved. This can be a considerable savings especially if you were to have to travel a great distance for a course.
I enjoyed the online experience, having the breakout rooms and rotation of groups gave us the possibility to get to know each other, there were moments of sharing that really build a nice group dynamics.
Another benefit came with being able to invite a global audience. The nice thing about Zoom and similar technologies is that it is worldwide and can accomodate those in any location as long as the time of the course was conducive to attending. This allowed us to expand our reach globally to others who may not otherwise be able to attend such courses.
Thirdly, we all benefit from having others from different cultures attending the courses. This allows for sharing between cultures and nationalities which we normally did not have on other courses. We can all learn from how things may be done differently in different cultures.
Lastly, as Kirsteen Ruffell, our course coordinator, points out “Having all the resources to look back over for students has been a great advantage to learning the material”. The LearnDash course material being online allows the students to revisit any material they want a refresher on or that they may have missed initially. It also allows people who have work commitments to take the course and then if they miss one small part due to not being able to be there they can go back and watch the video of that part.
But the proof is in the pudding. Many of our students have mentioned themselves of the advantages to themselves of the online courses. For example, Faye from the UK said, “I highly recommend the baby yoga and massage course. It was very in-depth and taught by a wonderful teacher who clearly has so much knowledge and experience. The online materials to support learning are brilliant, and you are able to access this after the live course dates are over, meaning you can continue to build on what you have learnt during the live sessions. I highly recommend this course and Birthlight as a course provider”.