A new model of improving and monetizing MOOC education?

The last years have seen a sud­den emer­gence of plat­forms offer­ing edu­ca­tion on a – pre­sum­ably – col­lege lev­el for free: start­ing with Sebas­t­ian Thrun’s now almost leg­endary AI-class, which gave rise to an illus­tri­ous set of start-ups most­ly fund­ed by Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties: among them Udac­i­ty, Cours­era, edX and oth­ers.

After a eupho­ria about the com­ing democ­ra­ti­za­tion of high­er edu­ca­tion, the last months have shown that despite the free avail­abil­i­ty, users of those plat­form most­ly come from a wealthy back­ground and are already very high­ly edu­cat­ed. In addi­tion, only a small sub­set of the users enrolling into such an online course actu­al­ly do fin­ish is or even just stick to it for more than the first week lec­tures.

As I have been an avid user of those plat­forms myself and have used the last month to refresh and deep­en my knowl­edge on sta­tis­ti­cal analy­ses and data sci­ence in gen­er­al – more on that in a dif­fer­ent post – I am hap­py to see that Cours­era has devel­oped a new idea of how to mon­e­tize their prod­uct: While until now each of the cours­es stood on its own, Cours­era has now intro­duced Spe­cial­iza­tions, a sequen­tial­ly orga­nized set of cours­es on a spe­cif­ic top­ic, offer­ing cer­tifi­cates not only on a sin­gle course but on the com­plete Spe­cial­iza­tion. Those include some­where between three and ten cours­es and a con­clud­ing cap­stone project. Spe­cial­iza­tions are not offered for free as the stu­dent has to earn a ver­i­fied cer­tifi­cate to make sure it is actu­al­ly he doing the assign­ments. But rang­ing from 29$ to 49$ per course, those costs seem rea­son­able.

To me, this sounds like a great mod­el as it offers more val­ue to the stu­dent by allow­ing him not only to col­lect cer­tifi­cates on iso­lat­ed cours­es but a short struc­tured pro­gram of attuned con­tent, offer­ing a deep­er intro­duc­tion into the top­ic. The cap­stone project at the end of the course even might have the char­ac­ter of a the­sis, bring­ing togeth­er knowl­edge acquired in the sep­a­rate class­es. I have already done my intro­duc­tion to data sci­ence and the oth­er top­ics do not inter­est me as much right now, so that I won’t be enrolling in one of the ten Spe­cial­iza­tions offered, but – not being able to stop learn­ing – I am already deeply involved in Stanford’s Intro­duc­tion to Data­bas­es…