The Rise of Premium Course Platforms: A New Approach to Online Learning Production
by Calix Huang
MOOCs, Marketplaces and Premium Course Platforms
Notable MOOC (massive open online course) platforms such as Coursera and edX have become household names, and they have become a great source for affordable upskilling and access to knowledge. A report by Class Central also shows that platforms such as Coursera and edX served a total of 41M users in 2019, which was steeply increased to 111M users in 2020. For many, traditional MOOCs have become the default form of online education.
Other platforms, like Udemy and Skillshare, have approached the sharing of online knowledge through the creation of educational marketplaces. In an educational marketplace, anyone can be a creator and not only share their knowledge, but also monetize it.
With so many competitors in the online learning space, and so many courses already existing on traditional MOOC platforms and educational marketplaces, new competitors are looking to stand out through the production quality of their video content. The emergence of platforms like MasterClass and Outlier has started to disrupt the online course market as premium course platforms.
What’s the difference between Traditional MOOCs, educational marketplaces, and premium MOOC platforms?
Traditional MOOC platforms vet their content carefully, usually by ensuring that the content creator is connected to an educational brand. For example, Coursera and edX only publish content that’s created by instructors or professors that are part of related universities. Often, the content itself isn’t monetized on these platforms; instead, aspects such as certifications upon course completion or access to projects are kept behind a paywall.
Educational marketplaces are double-sided marketplaces composed of learners and instructors. Services like Udemy may allow just about anyone to be an instructor and create a course if they can pass an approval process that filters out courses that don’t meet certain standards. Course creators retain ownership of their courses, and will receive a share of their course’s revenue through Instructor Revenue Shares. The quality of courses that exist on educational marketplaces is highly varied, but prospective students can use ratings and reviews from past students to choose a course, which overall, can give great insight into course quality.
Premium course platforms basically entail the creation of high-quality online courses made centrally with high production value. These courses are usually created by extremely well-vetted instructors, as well as a full videography and post-production team, allowing the platforms to retain full ownership of all the courses created. Because of this, premium course platforms like MasterClass and Outlier don’t actually have rating or review systems.
Confused? Here are a few examples of each.
Traditional MOOC platforms
Coursera; Being one of the first MOOC platforms to ever exist, Coursera was one of the earliest pioneers of MOOCs and was also one of the first to scale towards success in education technology. Coursera partners with universities and educational organizations to offer online courses to the masses, and monetizes their platform through paid certifications and degrees. Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller had started offering their courses online in 2011, which then turned into their resignation from Stanford and commitment towards starting Coursera. Professors at Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Michigan soon followed, which kicked off the 2012 Year of the MOOC.
Caption: On Traditional MOOC Platforms like Coursera and edX, videos are created by university or corporate partners, only some of whom focus on production quality.
edX; Founded out of Harvard and MIT, edX was dedicated towards being a public educational good, taking in donations to be put towards keeping education pure and free. They provide free online courses powered by their school and university partners, as well as provide micro-degrees for Bachelors and Masters programs. With their recent $800M acquisition by 2U (a for-profit Edtech company) back in 2021, they’re now starting to ramp up on marketing, looking to raise both edX’s and 2U’s brand to a whole new level.
Educational marketplaces
Udemy; With over 40 million learners and 56,000 instructors on the platform, Udemy is one of the largest educational marketplaces for MOOCs on the Internet. Udemy holds over 130,000 online courses, specializing in industry-level upskilling, providing industry-recognized certifications, and teaching skills in software like programming and digital marketing. Leveraging their success from selling online courses to consumers, Udemy released Udemy for Business in 2014, an enterprise version of Udemy sold to businesses, allowing them to help upskill their team and support professional development.
Skillshare; With a focus in creative skill education, Skillshare hosts over 20,000 classes from 6,000 teachers on everything from design, photography, cooking, and even knitting. Though Skillshare does not provide certifications upon course completion, they’ve created a subtle, yet strong community of learners from a wide variety of courses. Just taking a glance at their student projects and cohort-based courses (CBC) known as ChromaCourses, Skillshare is venturing into innovative learning models with the traction they’ve already had. It’s also worth noting that Skillshare has both an education marketplace and a premium course offering; “Skillshare Originals” are made in-house with vetted, even celebrity, instructors and full video teams, while the majority of courses on the platform are submitted by external creators.
Premium course platforms
MasterClass; Valued at $2.75b and having had over $455m of funding, MasterClass has made its mark as being one of the highest quality online course providers that exists on the Internet. Not only has their name and brand made a name for itself in everyone’s minds, they’ve poured heart and soul into the production quality of the courses. And they haven’t just gotten “industry experts” to be their instructors - they’ve chosen some of the best-known and most-respected representatives of each industry. Names like Samuel L. Jackson, Gordon Ramsay, and Natalie Portman are just a few celebrities that exist in their wide portfolio of course instructors.
Outlier; Despite only being around since 2018, Outlier has become a recent startup with many eyeballs on it. Created by MasterClass founder Aaron Rasmussen, it’s clear that Outlier’s mission is to disrupt online college education with the quality of educational material, but also with the affordability of their courses. With traditional college courses averaging around $2,400, Outlier cuts that cost by over 6x with a fee of $400. Despite the dramatic increase in production quality in comparison to current online education options, Outlier has managed to help students save money on top of that. Though Outlier only has 11 courses available (as of January 2022), they hope to add 14 new courses by the end of 2022 with their $30m Series B raise.
Emile; Emile is tackling alternative high school education by providing courses at the utmost quality. Though Emile initially started by offering AP education material only, they’ve expanded to offer 28 courses (as of January 2022) for core classes, electives, AP courses, and even experiential education. Not only do their courses count as high school credit, but some can also count as college credit. As stated in TechCrunch, Emile’s COO hopes to tap into the $600B of annual governmental funding that high school education receives in the US to make themselves the next Edtech unicorn.
Jumpcut; Being one of the older premium course platforms, Jumpcut has been around since 2014, and even took part in Y-Combinator’s Summer 2016 batch. Jumpcut has taken an interesting approach to the courses that they’ve produced, many of them pertaining to content creation and how to navigate virality and monetization. Their 4 main courses, Viral Academy, Automated Income Machine, Video Ads Bootcamp, and Contagious Content all have produced many success stories, which has boosted their credibility tremendously. Having only raised $2M after all these years and having a founding team of past creatives and videographers, they are truly building a company for the long haul.
Section4; Joining the races recently in 2019 and founded by serial entrepreneur and NYU Stern Professor Scott Galloway, Section4 is growing rapidly through providing elite business education for everyone. Section4’s courses are known as sprints, which are highly immersive and intensive educational time periods that usually span 2-3 weeks, and all of them pertain to various business concepts. Just to name a few of their upcoming sprints (as of January 2022), are The Principles of Winning Products, Principles of Data and Analytics, and Building Habit-Forming Products. Section4’s interesting business model entails a $995 annual fee to take 1 sprint of choice, and paying for additional sprints at a heavy $500 discount. With such a high price to pay for individuals, Section4 has made their enterprise plan for companies a key success in revenue. Recently, Section4 raised their $30M Series A round led by General Catalyst with participation from Learn Capital and GSV Ventures in March 2021.
Wondrium; Formerly known as The Great Courses Plus, Wondrium offers high quality long-form courses in a wide variety of subjects like art and physics. Wondrium incites engagement through their courses by packing short-form videos, documentaries, and tutorials into each course’s curriculum. wBeyond subjects, they provide big collections of courses through partnering with world-renowned organizations in video-learning experiences including National Geographic and Smithsonian. With Wondrium’s rebrand from The Great Courses Plus taking place in May 2021 taking place recently, Wondrium’s mission is to offer the most diverse, mind blowing, non-fiction learning experiences in the world by making lifelong learning and personal enrichment a fun and fulfilling experience for everyone.
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With traditional MOOC platforms and educational marketplaces dominating the online learning space for years, premium course platforms, as well as a steady increase in production values among some creators, have started to improve how people can learn online more effectively: through higher production quality and engaging content.
This disruption hasn’t just allowed more companies to enter the world of online learning, but they’ve allowed more creatives and media veterans to help lead the charge, such as Kong Pham of Jumpcut and Aaron Rasmussen of MasterClass and Outlier.
In my opinion, premium course platforms are improving online learning for the better through higher production quality, engaging content and diversity.