Canadian Safety Institute (CSI) provides professional education and training in occupational health, safety, and environmental management.
CSI’s learners are adult professionals at various stages of their careers, ranging from recent graduates looking to build a career to seasoned professionals seeking to deepen their knowledge. They also work with those transitioning into health and safety from related areas, as well as leaders who want to broaden their expertise by adding health and safety to their existing skill set.
Today, CSI offers 15 professional development courses , serves approximately 5,000 learners in more than 30 countries , and has built a new revenue stream by developing custom e-learning for corporate and government clients.
Founded and led by Tonia Devenis, who has more than 30 years of experience in health and safety, environmental management, and sustainable development, CSI helps professionals at different stages of their careers build and expand their expertise.
The Challenge For many years, CSI delivered its courses exclusively through traditional classroom training.
Learners had to travel to attend courses, while CSI rented hotel conference rooms and produced printed course materials.
This created two major challenges:
High costs for learners. Flights, accommodation, and travel made professional training less affordable. For many learners, expenses and distance became a barrier to attending the courses. High delivery costs for CSI. Renting training facilities and producing high-quality printed materials added to the substantial costs. To keep our prices down and make our courses more affordable and accessible, we decided to add e-learning to our training portfolio.
Why iSpring? CSI chose iSpring because it offered the tools needed to build and deliver online training without hiring specialized e-learning developers.
The main reasons were:
Easy course creation. Tonia could create professional online courses herself without being a technical expert or hiring specialized e-learning developers.Multilingual training. CSI could create courses in multiple languages and reach a broader international audience. Authoring + LMS in one complete solution. iSpring Suite allowed the team to create courses, while iSpring LMS provided a place to host and deliver them.Cost efficiency. Compared with other platforms CSI evaluated, iSpring offered the functionality they needed at a much lower cost.I quickly realized I could create professional online courses myself, without hiring specialized e-learning developers. I developed our first courses myself.
From Classroom Training to Online Learning CSI’s course development process combines subject-matter expertise with instructional design.
The team starts by defining the learning objectives and course structure. The next step is to gather technical content and reference materials to build the framework, including the key topics, micromodules, learning sequence, and overall assessment strategy.
Subject-matter experts then work with instructional designers and e-learning developers to decide how to bring the content to life.
Depending on the course, they add:
Scenarios and interactions Exercises and knowledge checks Videos and voice-over Case studies Quizzes and final exams Practical assignments The course is then built in iSpring Suite , reviewed and tested, revised, and published to iSpring LMS .
This approach allows CSI to work on several projects simultaneously.
A short 30-45-minute course can now be developed in just a couple of days , while larger technical programs with 50-100 hours of learning content may take several months.
With iSpring Suite, this level of productivity is possible because so much of the functionality we need is built directly into the authoring tool.
The Results The move to e-learning has transformed CSI’s training business. It not only broke down geographical barriers, but opened up a new business opportunity.
5,000 learners reached. Learners are no longer limited by location and can participate from across Canada or anywhere in the world without the additional costs associated with face-to-face training. Approximately 5,000 learners from more than 30 countries have completed CSI’s online courses. At any given time, 100-300 learners are actively studying through iSpring LMS.
15 professional development courses. CSI now offers 15 comprehensive online courses , ranging from approximately 20 to 100 hours of study.The courses are available in multiple languages, with French-language courses also planned.
A new revenue stream. The biggest business impact goes beyond moving existing courses online. After developing its own e-learning programs and building internal design expertise, CSI began offering custom e-learning development to corporate and government clients.Its team of instructional designers and e-learning developers has now created dozens of online courses for external organizations.
What started as a way to make CSI’s own training more accessible has become a new business line and revenue stream .
Lower barriers to professional education. Learners no longer need to travel across Canada or internationally to attend CSI training.Online delivery eliminates the need for flights, accommodation, and other travel expenses, making professional development more accessible to a much wider audience.
The Bottom Line By moving from traditional classroom training to online learning, Canadian Safety Institute has overcome significant logistical and financial L&D challenges. It has expanded its reach while creating a more scalable training business.
5,000+ learners have completed CSI courses across 30+ countries , with 100-300 active learners studying at any given time.
At the same time, CSI has turned its internal e-learning expertise into dozens of custom courses for corporate and government clients , creating an entirely new revenue stream.
What started as a way to make our training more accessible and affordable has grown into a significant part of CSI’s business and created an entirely new revenue stream.
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