Why free digital marketing course is failing

Digital marketing is probably one of the best career options now-a-days. This is fast becoming the field of choice for many individuals to pursue professionally.

Now the question is how to become a digital marketer. 

The first step towards developing a career in digital marketing is that one understands the kind of skills required to become a digital marketer.

The second step is to understand and learn digital marketing.

There are many ways to learn digital marketing by yourself. However, to learn digital marketing in a through manner, one needs to undertake a course in digital marketing.

This is because to learn any concept and subject it is very important to understand it in a structured way. While self-learning through random knowledge sources on the subject is great but it is just not good when it comes to understanding the subject/concept thoroughly, meaningfully (where you can apply the concept and subject for practical purposes) and deeply.

This is true with digital marketing as well. There are many free sources that you can learn digital marketing from but to learn it deeply, and be application based and to have practical knowledge in it, one needs to learn digital marketing through a course.

One has two options while undertaking a digital marketing course; which are:

1. To take a free digital marketing course
2. To take a in-depth paid specialized digital marketing course.

There is always a debate in your head if you should take a free digital marketing course or a paid one i.e. Free Digital Marketing Course Vs Paid Digital Marketing Course.

While taking up a paid digital marketing course is always beneficial for it being very in-depth or specialized (i.e. designed and developed for specific students/audience), taking up a free course has its own advantages. To check the many advantages that a free digital marketing course has check here

Learning digital marketing for free while has many benefits, has many challenges too.

That is the reason in this blog we shall limit ourselves to understand the various pitfalls/disadvantages of joining a free digital marketing course.

Learning digital marketing for free is not made for everyone. It demands a specific skillset from an individual to actually take benefit out of a free digital marketing course.

It comes with its own set of restrictions and might not be suitable for everyone.

Let us take a look at some of them – Reasons that free digital marketing course is not suitable for everyone and might fail for many students:

1. It is not in depth: Most of the free digital marketing courses do not go in-depth. And hence might not be enough to qualify you for professional jobs and practical applications
2. It is not structured well: The crux of any learning is the structure of it. Any haphazard form of information is just information. The problem with most free courses is that they provide just information but not structure is well to provide concrete knowledge.
3. It is not in sync with our natural style of learning i.e. how we as human beings learn: Most free courses require you to read by yourself. They don’t bring upon many other learners together to share ideas etc. This is not the natural style of learning for human beings.
4. It lacks employability: Free courses are not recognised by the industry as credible. This is because most of them are not coming from authentic courses.
5. It gives not certification or any certification from a free course is of little value: Continuing the point above, since the credibility is lacking, certification from a free course is of little value. Moreover, many digital marketing free courses do not give certifications.
6. It requires a lot of self-drive: Since you are along and can go at your own pace amount of self-drive required is huge.
7. It requires a lot of motivation and dedication: From the above point, when you are studying along without the influence of instructor and peer, it required a lot of motivation and dedication to really go through the entire course.
8. There is very little guidance: With a real instructor, most free courses provide little guidance if you fail to understand anything. So you are on your own.
9. Many times, it lacks expert: Since free courses do help institutes to earn money, they normally don’t put much effort behind it. This leads to having mediocre expert giving lectures on digital marketing.
10. Authentication of information given is difficult: Again, from the above point, since the experts are not good, the credibility and authentication of the information is not there.
11. Lack of Evaluation and assessment: Most of the digital marketing free courses don’t have the kind of evaluation and assessment system required to give the appropriate feedback to the student so that he/she can improve on the areas where they are lagging.
12. Might take a lot of time to complete and might be difficult to finish: As you are on your own, there is no hurry to complete the course. Moreover, since it is for free you might feel it of less value. And hence you might not make the course as your Top priority. This makes the time taken to complete the course large. In some cases, I have seen student leaving the free course in between and not even completing it.