Sometimes, you may also need to decide if you are going to charge a fee for people to participate in your online training opportunity. In many cases, you will not have a choice in this matter – your course may be offered on a fee-for-service basis by a college or university, or other type of public or private organization. However, if you do have a choice, if you are going to charge a fee, you will have to set up some type of registration process. Depending on the type of technology you use, it may be possible for people to register, pay the course fee and have immediate access to the training. Alternatively, you may need to have people register and pay the course fee ahead of time before you provide them with instructions on how to access the training. In some organizations, such as colleges or universities, the registration process would be handled by a different department and you will not be involved in it.
Although you may not be charging a fee for people to access your training, you might require participants to purchase some materials in order to complete the course. You can choose to have them pay any associated costs to your organization and arrange to have the materials sent to the participants, or you can ask them to purchase materials directly through your organization's bookstore or another department, or from a publicly available source such as Indigo/Chapters or Amazon. The biggest advantage of having participants order the materials through you is that you will know they have them in time. However, it also means you need to have the capacity to process orders and payments and also to ship materials. While this type of activity is matter-of-course for larger organizations, it may pose some problems for smaller ones. Having participants purchase materials themselves means that you don't have to worry about the logistics, but it does mean that you have to trust they will purchase the necessary material in a timely fashion.
