Green Learning – The Benefits of Online Education

By Ed Zurek; President and CEO of InsuranceStudy.com

My eight-year-old daughter came home from school with a project for her second-grade class: asking families how they could become more earth friendly.  As a family, we sat down and diligently reviewed all the possible scenarios that the assignment required: How could we conserve gasoline? How dowe use less paper? How could we conserve water? How could we prevent wasting electricity? How could we reduce our carbon footprint?

After completing the questionnaire it occurred to me that we, as insurance agents, could have a significant impact on our own carbon footprint by making some small changes in our day-to-day activities.

One of the easiest adjustments would be for agents to take training and continuing education courses online. This very simple solution would save millions of gallons of gas, millions of sheets of paper and millions of dollars.  Add to that the thousands of hours of rescued productivity over the old-school methods of attending seminars and classroom events, and the benefits add up quickly.

At the end of 2008, there were approximately 1.9 million licensed insurance professionals in the United States. Each and every one of them is required to take CE of some sort on a regularly scheduled basis, usually annually or biannually. Think about the carbon footprint we leave as we drive from place to place, attending event after event to pick up a few hours of CE here and another few there.

Let’s assume that each trip uses one gallon of gasoline to get to an event and another gallon to get to an office from the event.  Let’s also assume that you attend five CE events per year, for the purpose of earning enough CE credit to renew your insurance license.

What is the COST of the carbon footprint we leave behind? If 2 gallons of gas is $5.00, then 5 trips per year costs $25.00. That means that 1.9 million agents would spend $47,500,000 on gas to attend CE seminars each year.

If you order books or courses through the mail or attend an event with handouts, you also have an impact. If printed material per page is 10 cents and the average  is 15 pages per hour of training with the average number of CE hours annually being 12 to 15 then the total annual cost spent on printed material is $38,475,000. Together that totals $86 million annually. Yes, $86,000,000!

This number doesn’t even include carbon emissions, garbage generated at the events,  cost of electricity at the venue, cost of heating or air conditioning the venue, cost of the service staff and their carbon footprint, cost of the presenters, postage and handling, lost productivity.

For some people online training has replaced the traditional books-and-classroom-type events.  If half of all agents got their CE from online sources, we would still be consuming millions of dollars worth of non-renewable resources while contributing to the poisoning of the planet.

Online CE options are plentiful.  Look for companies that have a long history of service and a large library of online courses.  Many companies will now let you review course material before they make you pay for a course.  This assures that the course you purchase really contains the material you expected.

Don’t automatically pick cost over quality.  CEU, Kaplan, WebCE and my company, InsuranceStudy.com, all offer a wide variety of options, all tailored toward the agent.

What I learned from the second grade assignment is true for all of us:  Each of us needs to make small changes to make a BIG difference. It’s not about pressing for major reform; it’s about the little things we each do each day for ourselves. We owe it to our children, their children and all future generations.