How COVID-19 is Affecting Education and Taking Your School Online
Greg Daco, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, says the economy is assured of a recession — at least two consecutive quarters of economic decline — with output falling 0.4 percent in the first quarter and 12 percent in the second. That would be the biggest quarterly contraction on record, but Goldman Sachs upped the ante on Friday, saying it expected a 24 percent drop in the second quarter. With the shelter in place bans all gatherings are banned thus forcing classrooms to go online.
However for schools there is a great opportunity here to bring your curriculum online. If your curriculum is ALREADY online it’s your time to SHINE. In China’s, E-Learning Leaders Add $3.2 Billion As Coronavirus Fears Drive Students Online.
Step one is staying Human and Putting People First: change your marketing messaging to reflect the increased sensitivity in all your campaigns and emails. Although the number of impressions have dropped for ads there’s still opportunities to convert leads as evidenced by our client accounts. We’re seeing major swings (good news) from two sets of seven day data comparisons. For Facebook for example across some of the clients we have:
$4.19 CPM from Mar 9 – Mar 15
$2.77 CPM from Mar 16 – Mar 22
It’s becoming cheaper to advertise since so many marketers are pulling out of the game.
CPAs are lowering and ROAS is going up. Just look at a quick snapshot of the same data ranges. 38% increase in ROAS and a CPA reduced by 33%.
In addition, we’re seeing a 71% decrease in CPA by changing our messaging to be Coronavirus related vs generic in this client account (still early on and not statistically significant):
Then figure out how to make your curriculum digital. It doesn’t have to be professionally polished and edited for now, as long as the content is there. You can just talk over a powerpoint and record the audio and video with https://www.loom.com/.
Then you need to make a decision and find out what kind of LMS would be the best option for your school. Should you opt for a cloud-based LMS solution? What if, money-wise, your limit is low and you need to consider trying an open-source LMS solution? No worries, here are the top things you need to consider when choosing an LMS for your business.
EasyLMK
Founded in 2013, Easy LMS is a user-friendly, intuitive and easy-to-distribute Learning Management System and a one of a kind solution for organizations. We provide a competitive Quiz solution, formal Exam solution, informative Course solution and an engaging Assessment solution with certification. All of this for very competitive pricing! With our easy-to-use tool you can engage, train and certify your employees or students.
It’s $20/month and there’s a free trial!
talentLMS
TalentLMS is a super-easy, cloud LMS to train your employees, partners and customers. It is fully customizable to your own needs, with simple and comprehensible analytics about everything that happens inside your elearning environment. It offers strong support for SCORM & TinCan (xAPI), notifications, course selling, video-conferencing, gamification, extensible user profiles and more features than you can imagine.
It’s $57/month and it has a free trial!
Google Classroom
Google Classroom is part of the G Suite for Education (Google for Education) package that includes Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar and other apps.
As of fall 2018, Google Classroom is available as an additional service to companies that are G Suite Basic, Business and Enterprise customers.
One of the biggest benefits of Google Classroom is it’s simple to use and encourages collaboration between students and teachers. Teachers can create a class and list educational apps, such as assignments in a few clicks. They can add students by name or send them a code to join. Students then can see what assignments are due, participate in discussion forums or message the teacher (either in private or via group chat).
Google Classroom is also available as a mobile app for iPhone and Android devices. It’s $4/user.
These are good options for your school. It seems things can return back to normal is about 60 days but this is a great time for your school to prepare your online curriculum just in case it takes until the end of the year for things to get back to normal.
Once you have your curriculum ready to go online, it’s time to ramp up your digital marketing efforts to promote this. It’s a bit tricky since you can’t host in-person open houses or events but with the right marketing funnels you can overcome this.
Most importantly stay safe, wash your hands, quarantine and prepare to capitalize when things go back to business as usual.
