A comparison of e-Learning Business Models
In the last 10 years many Massive Online Open Courses platform were started, where professors or professionals could share their knowledge with the world, getting feedback from students and improve.
The question is though : is this going to last forever? In this blog we take a look at Coursera, the first and biggest MOOC’s provider and Datacamp, a recent startup from Belgium that proves to be succesfull with a really different approach to online learning.
Coursera vs Datacamp – The revenue model
The online content of coursera is accessible for free, yet to earn a certificate and have access to graded material for a course, you will have to pay a remarkable amount of money ranging from around 50 euro to 80-90. If you apply for financial aid, you could get all this for free, since Coursera was founded as a non-profit business. Coursera has good relationships with universities and corporate partners who already benefit from having an online platform. Yet it has to turn profits to pay back the investors who seed it with $85 millions.
Datacamp provides free access to all the materials only for a number of courses, usually the beginner ones or the introduction lecture of the more advanced ones. On this platfrom you do not pay for course but a monthly premium account. If you are a student, this will cost you 9 euro per month, otherwise 25. 70% of Datacamp customers are professionals, very likely to paying customers for the subscription, although this piece of information was not disclosed. It started in 2013 and at the end of 2015 it was already profitable.
Teaching methods & Public
Coursera addresses pretty much everybody. Curious people looking for a class in humanities, professionals looking to acquire skills, students whose universities use the platform for extra courses. A coursera course is made up of some videos and some related notes, with links and extra resources. Furthermore, there is a forum where you can exchange comments or ask for help.
In Datacamp, you get to see a short video with examples and execution and afterwords you get little exercises to do practice. Little tips and the solutions are available if you do not get it.
Conclusion
Coursera could benefit a lot from applying different prices to its videos (versioning), for example offering a price based on status (i.e. students/ professionals) or on monthly use ( i.e. 3 hours of video available). Also Coursera offers the long tail of online courses, meaning that offering a subscription based fee would be more suitable for its products, just like Netflix and Spotify do.
On the other hand, Datacamp seems to be doing everything right, maybe due to its strongly data-driven culture. If we could suggest one thing is to improve popularity and brand awareness, by way of partnerships to accelerate the growth of the business.
Sources
https://moreorlessbunk.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/you-never-give-me-your-money/ (Coursera facts)
https://www.quora.com/How-does-Coursera-make-money-if-it-does-What-is-its-business-model (Coursera facts)
https://www.datacamp.com/about (Datacamp facts)
https://www.datacamp.com/community/blog/2015-in-review-and-a-preview-of-2016(Datacamp facts)
http://olc.onlinelearningconsortium.org/publications/survey/online_nation (online learning trends)
https://www.class-central.com/report/mooc-trends-2015-rise-self-paced-courses/ (online learning trends)
Group 29: Dave Honcoop, Robin Aardoom, David Fortini, Jovan Gligorevic
