Page 15 - Campus Technology, March/April 2019

back of their minds. One of the first attempts that all these providers tried to do was recruit- ing, where they would find students from among the people who did well in their courses and pass their résumés around to different compa- nies. I don’t think that worked out well.
But eventually they came around to focusing on professional training. Udacity went in the strongest, by going into the nanodegrees and deciding they were no longer a “MOOC provid- er” and no longer interested in partnering with universities. They were the first ones to go all in into this model.
Coursera did too eventually. But the difference with Udacity was that they started creating their own content. Coursera still has their university partners, so they kind of have to wait for their partners to create the right content.
What Coursera did a few years ago was launch an RFP process where they say, “These are the kinds of content, the kinds of specializations we want.” And universities can bid on it and then get $50,000 or $100,000 to make that specializa- tion. That [advance] was then taken out of future earnings. Basically, Coursera was able to take some control of the process instead of waiting for universities to create the content.
Again, that shows the difference between Coursera and Udacity and other platforms. Because of the focus on monetization, they take more proactive actions instead of waiting in many cases.
CT: Is it too late for universities that want to get onto this gravy train?
Shah: If a professor is already famous or has a following on one of the platforms, they can get a lot of press, so it’s still viable. The space is big enough and the number of paid users is growing, so I think that there is still a lot of opportunity to create content that at least breaks even. We see new courses being added [to Coursera and edX] at the same rate as they were being added before, so in that sense things haven’t slowed down.
CT: Any MOOC predictions for the coming year?
Shah: I don’t see any major changes in the status quo. I don’t think a major new provider will be launched in the near future. I feel like the market is sort of settled now and the focus is more on the big-ticket items, like online degrees and cor- porate training.
When MOOCs started out, they were in the new market of low-cost or free, unaccredited, online college courses. They had to create this whole new market from scratch. They had to educate people on what MOOCs were, the ben- efits, why you should take them. They had to teach students as well as their employers. With corporate training and online degrees, however, they’re now breaking into more traditional mar- kets of online degrees and corporate learning, which are already big, lucrative markets. And the providers have an advantage. Because of the free online courses, there are also a lot of online users, which helps generate business for online degrees, where the cost for user acquisition is high. The free online courses are a marketing channel for the online degrees. And through cor- porate training, they can sell university-level courses, which is a differentiator from traditional players like PluralSight, Lynda.com or skillsoft.
CT: But you predict a healthy future for MOOCs?
Shah: In terms of them making money, yes. But as a student who likes free courses, sometimes I get nervous. What I’m optimistic about is that they’ll keep offering these courses for free or free to audit because they act as a marketing channel and that gives them a financial reason for MOOCs to exist. But it’s mostly optimism. I don’t know if that’s how it will turn out to be.
Dian Schaffhauser is a senior contributing editor for Campus Technology.
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