Very few will argue that eLearning, at least in the long run, saves a company money. It might require an up-front investment that's larger than instructor-led training, but if you look at the overall picture, eLearning does save a company money in more ways than one.

Eliminate Travel and Living Expenses
Travel and living expenses usually account for 40% to 60% of training budget (unless your employees and/or clients all live in the same geographical area of course). By delivering courses over the Internet, travel and living expenses are automatically reduced to zero, thereby saving you about half your training budget.

Eliminate Facilities and Equipment
The vast majority of Canadians now have access to the Internet, either at home, work or school. By offering courses over the Web, you no longer need classrooms, projectors, etc.

If your employees do not have access to the Internet at work, you might still require a computer lab for them to take courses on site, but optionally, you might want to encourage them to study from home, even if it means giving them the required time off. Most LMS's nowadays allow you to track your students' progress, so it's easy to tell whether or not your employees are indeed learning or wasting their time.

Reduce Instructor Salaries
Delivering asynchronous courses via the Web significantly reduces the need for instructors. Contrary to what some might claim, it does not however eliminate it. Great courses require careful instructional design regardless of how they are delivered. In order for learning to take place, certain elements must be present, and leaving the design of your training courses to non-experienced staff is a mistake.

Eliminate Printing Costs
All instructor-led courses I've ever attended included training manuals. That's because once the instructor is gone, the information is gone - with the exception of course of what you managed to retain following a marathon cramming session, which is typically very little! Printing manuals with hundreds of pages isn't only bad for the environment; it's bad for your wallet. The cost especially adds up when errors or omissions are found in the pre-printed copies, requiring you to throw them all out and print a new batch.

Enable Off Hours Learning
One of the biggest advantages of eLearning is that it allows students to learn anytime, anywhere. This means your employees or clients can learn from home during off-hours, thereby keeping them productive during regular business hours. This increased productivity is huge for a company's bottom-line, especially for organizations where payroll is one of their largest expenses.

Shorten Classroom Sessions
E-Learning is also proven to shorten classroom sessions by half. Students in instructor-led classes typically ask a lot of questions. This form of interactivity greatly improves learning and should strongly be encouraged, but let's be honest. How many times have you been in a course where a student asks a question that is irrelevant to the topic at hand and then goes off on a tangent, wasting time for the entire class?

(Q&A sessions are important, even during asynchronous eLearning. This, however, is the topic of a separate article.)

Increase Employee Productivity
In a recent survey conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC) of 100 Canadian companies, 83 percent of employees said that eLearning increased their productivity. Personally, I think increased productivity is a result of learning, and not necessarily eLearning, but nevertheless, it's worth reminding people that training in general increases productivity, regardless of the medium.