The Covid crisis kept a large part of the busy workforce and students all around the world at home. This was a great opportunity to up-skill themselves. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) played an important role here. Websites like Coursera, Edx, Udacity and Udemy are some of the top providers which have been successful in getting 10s of millions of new learners onboard during these times.
Various MOOC providers have their own model of collaborating with creators and reaching the masses. Initially the concept was started as a not for profit organisation which gradually became a business model generating millions in monthly revenue. Thanks to these providers, learners are able to access world class content irrespective of their location and financial capacity. From viewing lectures of universities like Harvard, MIT, Stanford to getting professional courses of corporates like Google, Amazon, Facebook etc. MOOCs actually removed the barrier for the less privileged.
The providers use almost the same concepts but have different ways of packaging the courses. The most widely used is an individual course where the lectures are available for free, you just have to pay to get certified. There are other advanced programs like specialisation, nanodegree, micromasters, Masters, iMBA and many more which different MOOC providers offer. These advanced courses are comparatively costly than the standalone ones, they are the major contributor to the overall revenues.
Coursera being the leader in the segment, has collaborations with all the top universities with more than 4000 courses on its catalogue. A year ago, with its series E round of funding, coursera turned a unicorn. The covid crisis made them emerge as a bigger player than ever before. It offered university students free access to a large variety of courses of which they could get certified too. It received over 10 million new enrollments in just the first 30-day period.
Edx is the second largest MOOC provider which was started by Harvard and MIT which is still a not for profit organisation. Edx introduced the micromasters program where the students could gain credits of masters level courses from the universities. It also has programs of online degrees which has 1000s of graduates till now. Khan Academy is another not for profit educator but it is not associated with any specific institute.
Udacity being another major player has mainly focussed on collaborating with the companies to create courses that are relevant to todays’ world and would make the learners employable. Their flagship course is the Nanodegree program which largely makes the students industry ready. These are generally priced around $1200 to $1600.
The Indian government launched it's own MOOC platform named SWAYAM in 2017 where they provide free courses from the elite institutes of the country with the intent to provide quality education to the masses.
There are several other MOOC providers like udemy that have dynamic pricing and where anyone is allowed to create and publish the courses. These platforms have become a good tool for freelancers to teach as well as learn anything at very affordable prices.In the times of COVID, several MOOC providers offered their platform to local universities and even schools to run their courses.
MOOCs in many cases have now become sources of certificates only rather than learning. Getting certified from a reputed institute through MOOCs may not make such an impact on the resume now due such high penetration in the covid times. Also, different MOOC providers have different names for their packages. This makes it difficult for the employer to compare the level of competency of the candidate in a specific field.The global MOOC market is expected to grow at around 40% CAGR for the next 5 years.
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