Makers, Marketplaces and MOOCs. The Anatomy of Online Course Platforms.

Hey Content, meet Distribution. The four major Online Course Platform (OCP) models.

Makers

Maker platforms empower creators, professionals and small businesses to create, sell and deliver their courses online. They specialize in white-labeled learning environments, working behind the scenes to champion the brand, alone. Whether personal, professional or business, they offer increasingly sophisticated courseware and marketing tools, payment and customer/learner relationship management systems.

Creators bring their own curriculum and content and pay different levels of fixed monthly subscription fees for powerful platforms. Distribution, however, is their sole responsibility. Some days, maker platforms want to be marketplaces. To support their makers beyond content tools with distribution. And to be relevant beyond courseware creation and management. But they tread a fine line and may find themselves in a squeeze between LMS diversification and marketplace monopolization.

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Marketplaces

Beyond education, online marketplaces connect buyers and sellers, in this case, learners and trainers/teachers, on a proprietary platform. The marketplace does not hold any type of inventory itself but helps the buyers and sellers to facilitate a transaction. Sellers can focus on their core competency, that is providing customers with the most relevant products. In this case, that’s helping learners everywhere, acquiring knowledge and skills.

Marketplaces, like Udemy, offer up to 97% revenue share for instructors/makers who refer and bring their own students to the marketplace. But once a maker, makes a market, the power often shifts away from the marketplace itself. In most cases, however, instructors share 25% of course revenue, estimated at $15-30 per month per course on average, but those at the top are earning $2000 a month per course a handful up to $20,000.

DIY

The D.I.Y, or ‘Do It Yourself’ model represents institutions or generally large organizations and enterprises that create and design their own content/courses and opt for a ‘back-of-house’ technology system to support online course delivery, direct to the learner.

Put simply, this is a university, college, school or company choosing a traditional Learning Management System to design, build, house and deliver their own online courses. Curriculum and content is institutional and distribution is direct to learner. DIY and Maker share LMS roots, but diverge in spaces such as enrolment and payment. The DIY model is often, but not always, in the context of enrolment management, admissions, government-backed or subsidized tuition, more complex than direct to consumer, generally credit-card powered payment for anyone who seeks the acquire the knowledge and skills on offer.

MOOC

The MOOC moniker captured our imaginations in 2012, but today barely describes or wraps around the multi-brand, institutional model scaling university and enterprise curriculum around the world. Meanwhile, governments everywhere are embracing the core concepts of national and regional platforms powering institutionally sponsored learning, most notably in emerging markets.

In the model we reluctantly label here as ‘MOOC’, the platform somewhat moderates content, built and sourced from institutional partners who generally receive a revenue share where the course is not ‘open’ or free. MOOCs have spent the last decade reaching hundreds of millions of learners and now products like ‘Coursera for Campus’ bring the ‘sharing economy’ to higher education, straddling both DIY and MOOC.

Learn More. Join the Webinar.

MOOCs started the last decade as a proof of concept and finished with 380 million students taking over 30 thousand courses and 50 degrees from over 1,000 Universities globally. The borderless digital market for ‘just-in-time’ skills and knowledge is highly competitive and represents a rapidly evolving part of the post-secondary education landscape, with MOOCs morphing from B2C higher education replacement to B2B partner and builder of digital ecosystem.

This session will consider the evolution of the MOOC-model and the role it has yet to play in the evolving post-secondary education market.

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