What does Capita Selecta do?
Capita Selecta (onward calledCapita) is a tutoring business offering crash courses for exam preparation mainly for University students in the Netherlands and also for HBO students. Recently it also started entering the High School exam preparation tutoring to expand its market. The business model is simple: as a student you can sign up for a course, paying about 10 euro per hour. An average course has 12 hours and can maximum host 10 students. Tutors teaching the course are older students, who are paid 12 euro as a starting salary, which can grow to 15 or even 20 euro per hour when they show they are reliable. In the Netherlands Capita is the oldest and biggest University tutoring business. That is also why so many people are customers or tutors: a long-standing reputation, confirmed by a strong presence in each university.
The market trends
Although Capita is the biggest player, competition is fierce and cost-based. Every individual can nowadays rent a room from the university and give a course to a little class of students. Furthermore bigger competitors like AthenaStudies use lower prices to fight the branding Capita has and that leads to extra pressure on prices.
The Disruptive Technology and its evaluation
A trend in the tutoring business one cannot ignore is the e-learning. E-learning is being embraced by all the major Universities in the USA and slowly but surely also in Europe. The market both for students and for corporate is expanding and creating more demand for online courses. In this way, everyone with an internet connection can be reached, wherever he is in the world at whatever time he wants. With an average growth of 5.8%, also the traditional education providers are jumping into E-learning and MOOCs .
RSM is among others one of the innovators in Europe, offering a MOOC one Coursera about Innovation Management on Coursera. It was a success, many customers payed to have access to it and the Bachelor RSM students expressed positive feedback.
Implementation
Combining the positive RSM MOOC experience with a qualitative interview with a management member at Capita, we made an IT strategy for the business.
Currently Capita uses IT as cost center (i.e. website, subscription and newsletter). That means that the IT strategy is driven by the business strategy (having more customers) and a strategic execution approach described by Henderson & Venkatraman, highlighting the importance of a well-defined strategy. In order to offer online courses Capita needs a third party software that hosts video on a platform, which we called YouCapita. The initial investment consists mainly of getting acquainted with the software and buying equipment. The rest is just creating the content, what the current tutors can do. YouCapita will offer COOCs (Capita-Owned Online Courses) for a yearly subscription of €5o for normal users with a singular access to content and € 100 for premium ones with unlimited access.
Being remarkably cheaper and more reachable than the current courses, we believe that YouCapita can deliver value to Capita as well as to new customers.
