The education technology market is predicted to grow annually at 11% and reach $341 billion by 2025. Approximate annual revenue of Udemy is $28M in comparison to Coursera — $140M and Udacity $67.5M. Moreover, EdTech Venture Capital invested $2B into edtech startups in 2018.
With all this data, it’s unsurprising that you would like to know how to create MOOCs (massive online open courses) platform like Udemy, Coursera or EdX to take a piece of that sweet pie.
Before creating a product you should know how to make money with it. There are several ways to monetize online education platform:
1. Paid courses
This is the most obvious way to monetize elearning website. According to public stats, top 10 teachers on Udemy have earned more than $17M. Udemy instructors earn 97% of course revenue if the customer was referred by the teacher and 50% if a student has come by Udemy recommendation.
2. Paid certificates
Coursera allows students to buy a certificate for $50. The data analyzed on iMBA course at Coursera shows that 49,000 students paid $50 for a certificate. In addition to that, 150 people have bought a college credit and 800 a degree for $22K.
3. Monthly subscriptions
This business model isn’t new and becomes very popular nowadays. It’s easier for people who enroll in a long-term course to pay $50 every month instead of paying a large sum beforehand.
This model is also great for business, as money is coming every month and it’s easier to predict revenue.
4. Corporate education
Companies usually invest in employees education. Both Udemy and Coursera provide corporate learning. On Coursera, the payments start at $400 per user per year for a minimum of 5 users and on Udemy at $240 at the same terms. More than 500 companies are signed up for Coursera for Business.
5. Donations
The best example of this monetization model is Khan Academy, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, which is free for students as well as for teachers. According to their report, in 2017, Khan Academy fundraised more than $53 million for the development of the platform.
Let’s now take a look at how those MOOCs platforms actually work by decomposing them to separate features:
Categories and search
Every elearning platform is basically a catalog of courses, so browsing through them should be comfortable and quick.
To provide users with efficient browsing experience your platform should have such features as:
- Categories and subcategories
- Courses recommendations (latest, most popular, based on recent activity, etc.).
- Search by keyword
- Search filters (by category, subcategories, language, price, author, etc.):
Authentication
Every modern platform should provide users with a quick and easy sign up via email or social accounts.
User types and profiles
On the elearning platforms like Udemy, Coursera or EdX there are two basic types of users:
- Student Profile.
This type of account has such features as user information, profile setting, wishlist, info about purchases and transactions, tabs with active and completed courses, achievements like certificates, credits, points, badges, etc. - Teacher Profile.
The difference between user and teacher profiles is in the teacher’s ability to create courses and see detailed statistics in the dashboard.
So there should be the ability to register as a student or as a teacher.
Course creation
The course creation tool should not only allow to set up a curriculum but also add various types of content like video, audio, images, slides, PDFs. Moreover, teachers have to have the ability to create quizzes, coding exercises, assignments, tests, etc.
Dashboard
Online education platforms should provide teachers with the ability to monitor their success on the platform. There are some basic features that should be included:
- List of instructor’s courses
- Performance dashboards with data about the number of students, enrolments, ratings, traffic, conversion and revenue.
Course page
The visual representation and set of features of the course can be as rich as you like. However, there is some basic functionality every online course page should have:
- Brief description
- Information about the author
- Syllabus
- Start and end dates (if there are any)
- Ratings and reviews
- Certificates or grades info
- Feedback and rating system
- Most of the courses are design for specific discipline or activity type, but usually, it’s a list of lessons with recorded videos, text, tests and files
- Consider using gamification to engage learners more. It can be presented in the way of badges, rewards, points, etc.
Payments integrations
Most of the online business models include purchases, therefore you should provide users with comfortable and secure payment methods.
Cross-device adaptivity
Your platform should be accessed from any device. Moreover, MNAlearning reports that mobile learners usually study for 40 minutes longer than desktop users. That’s why you should consider the creation of mlearning experience through mobile applications.
Email marketing system integration
Email marketing is needed to promote new courses and send courses recommendations to users as well as to notify users about payments, course endings, etc.
Those were basic features of almost every online education platform like Udemy. However, the success of your project doesn’t depend solely on features. You should have a unique idea, something that will make you different and will drive learners to your platform. About it and other important things, we will talk below.
Now when you understand how MOOCs platforms work and make money, we can move to the most exciting part of the journey — the creation of the product that people will love. We will start with basic things like the idea and target audience, then will move to the MVP to test your idea and finish with the final product development and launch.
How Your Project Is Unique?
What unique value does your platform provide to users? Why should students be on your platform? How does it differentiate from competitors like Udemy, Coursera, EdX, Udacity? What are the strongest and the main features?
To better understand your idea, try to think in terms of the user:
- What pains do you think students have?
- What other platforms lack?
- What would students like to have?
- How your platform relieve their pains?
- How does it help them achieve their gains?
Also, create value proposition canvas and business model canvas to have a clear vision of your business. I will not explain them here as it will take a ton of time, you can learn more by the links.
Define The Target Audience
Before designing and building anything, you should understand who you will be building it for. As I have mentioned before, in MOOCs you will have two types of users: a teacher and a student. So you should define at least two buyer personas. Hubspot has a great tool for building buyer personas, which includes such parameters as:
- Gender
- Age
- Interests
- Social media they use
- What websites and blogs do they read
- Where you can find them
Knowing your target audience will help you in marketing as well as in the design process. For example for a younger audience, you would like to make your platform more playful, exciting and use their language.
Design User Experience
User experience design is quite a complex thing to do, especially if you don’t have professional knowledge. As a startup owner, you probably will hire a development team, however, it’s good for you to imagine the platform, before asking someone to build it for you.
You don’t have to be a skilled designer to create few wireframes to visualize how your platform will look like.
Mapping user stories by the template As a
After defining user stories you can start drawing wireframes with tools like MarvelApp or delegate it to the user experience designer.
Create An MVP
MVP means Minimum Valuable Product. Basically, it’s a test version of your platforms with only essential features. Why build an MVP? It helps to collect feedback from your users, understand your strong and weak points and in general test how people like it.
I have already mentioned few MVP stages before, like designing wireframes. Now it’s time to go through few more steps:
- Design of the user interface
- Code writing
- Testing and fixing bugs
- Deploying to servers
You should consult with a team of developers to choose a technological stack of the platform. Moreover, consider outsourcing your project to lower costs and still receive a high-quality product.
Beta Test
After developing the test version of your online education platform, it’s time to show it to the world and test. If you haven’t done pre-launch marketing and don’t have a ready email list, use target social media ads. Also, submit your website to niche portals like ProductHunt, CrunchBase, and AngelList to give it exposure.
I don’t want to stop on marketing here, so let’s dive into how you should measure the success and performance of your MVP:
- Do surveys to understand what people like and dislike
- Conversion rate of sign-ups and purchases
- Percentage of active users
- Churn rate (how many users have abandoned your platform in a month)
- Lifetime Value (LTV). How much money users spend on your platform for the whole period. (e.g. monthly subscription is $30 and user have used your platform for 6 months, LTV is $180)
- Course completion rate and other students performance metrics.
These are the basic matrix to tack and understand how things are going and if your elearning project has a chance for life. Remember, that 90% of all startups die in the first year.
Final Online Education Platform Development And Launch
After you have tested your idea through MVP and decided to move forward (I truly hope it is like that), you should collect all the feedback from your beta users and decide what features should be added before the official launch of the platform.
After your platform is full of cool features and ready to receive thousands of happy users, boost your marketing efforts and go straight to success!
It’s great that you are thinking about creating MOOCs platform like Udemy, Coursera, EdX, Udacity etc. and help people to share and receive knowledge.
In order to achieve the success you need 3 essentials:
- Great idea and business model that will help you beat the competition and big players.
- Validation of idea through MVP.
- A strong team of experienced developers to help you build and maintain a great product.
The startup journey is challenging and it’s not about unicorns and smoothie, it’s about hard work on testing, measuring, gathering feedback and rebuilding. Good luck.
Need help with product development? Elligense has years of expertise in software development.
