When you analyse your education business model using the Business Model Generation Canvas you need to start thinking in terms of what your business’s value propositions are.

Value propositions are the bundle of products and services that create value for specific customer segments.

What are ALEC’s Value propositions?

Tell me if we’re on the right track…

ALEC provides training and assessment for the NCALNE (Voc). According to the Tertiary Education Commission’s Plan Guidance for providers, from 2015 this qualification will become the minimum compulsory qualification for tutors delivering Student Achievement Component (SAC) funded or Youth Guarantee (YG) funded training. It’s already an expected qualification for all training either at or below level 3 on the NZQA qualifications framework.

In summary:

• ALEC provides NCALNE (Voc) training, assessment, and credentials.
• The ALEC brand is recognised in the wider tertiary education sector as representing quality training and assessment with regards to the NCALNE (Voc).
• We do it in a way that is practical, “hands on”, and informed by good practice and current research.
• Our training helps tutors teach anything, improves their students’ learning, and shows them ways to do their jobs better.
• This work helps tutors and their employers meet government expectations and solves some literacy and numeracy-related compliance problems.
• We take things that are potentially complex such as the frameworks for analysing literacy and numeracy and make them comprehensible for our learners. This is a very self conscious feature of our approach to designing content and assessment.
• The NCALNE (Voc) is a vehicle for transmission of the government-mandated infrastructure for literacy and numeracy including the Literacy and Numeracy for Adults Assessment Tool (LNAAT) and Pathways Awarua.
• Through our professional development work we are actively shaping the sector that we work in.

In terms of what we need to add moving forward:

• An ALNE focused consulting tool, like a kind of organisational literacy and numeracy “health check” or “warrant of fitness” that would allow us to expand our consulting role, and identify multiple professional development pathways within organisations for a wider range of staff.
• We need to create much more online and video-based content. Our analysis of current education trends both in Aotearoa New Zealand and worldwide indicate that education companies need to make a shift to thinking of themselves more as online media companies.
• For our face-to-face and blended delivery we need a still more “hands on” approach again than what we’ve currently got. While we already have a very practical focus which has met the needs of the trades and vocational trainers and tutors that we’ve always worked with, we see the need to continue to push our practical approach in new directions.
• In terms of the online approach, in addition to more video we also need more of a self-service and perhaps automated or semi-automated approach. We can increase our cost effectiveness by pushing more content online, and perhaps automating several aspects of the assessment process as well. Technological solutions here may enable us to remain profitable, but offer lower cost delivery in the future.

What do you think…?