The MOOC Business Plan — from campustechnology.com by David Raths
With millions of students taking high-quality MOOCs for free, schools and course providers are now searching for a viable business model.
Excerpt:
Name a product sold in stores for thousands of dollars that can be obtained for free online. If you’re struggling for an answer, don’t be surprised–no company would last very long under those circumstances. Yet that’s exactly the predicament in which higher education finds itself as MOOCs begin to disrupt the traditional post-secondary model. Schools are giving away what was once their most valued treasure–the intellectual property of their faculty–for nothing.
Obviously, it’s not a sustainable business model, so what’s next? Where will the money come from? While it may seem surprising, no one really seems to know. For many colleges and universities, the current environment more closely resembles a high-stakes game of musical chairs–everyone is terrified of being left without a chair when the music stops. But the game is being played by more than just schools. From a business standpoint, higher education is ripe for reinvention, and it has attracted a slew of companies–both old and new–that smell significant profit.
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For Coursera, this task is already under way. “Some business models are becoming clear,” says Andrew Ng, cofounder of the for-profit company. “Some we are confident will work; others we are still experimenting with.”
“You could have a certificate of a course completed at Duke University [NC]–that could be a valuable credential,” adds Ng. “We have projected that this alone will lead us to sustainability. In the first quarter of the signature track, we brought in $220,000, and in the second quarter, which hasn’t ended yet, we roughly doubled that amount. So we project that by itself that will make us sustainable.”