Discounts On Online Courses Are Wrong

Never discount unique and fresh online content! Competing on price in content sales is dumb. Just imagine if Hollywood studios started to offer gradually lower prices on their new movies trying to outdo their rivals on price. One can expect a bit of a price drop on old titles, but those reductions are carefully controlled.

In contrast, current prevalent marketing approach of many major online education content providers is based on extreme discounting of their courses regardless of the lifecycle stage of those courses. Companies that engage in this practice are confusing consumers, destroying their brands and killing customer loyalty. This apocalyptic scenario is well pronounced for B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) companies whose direct and most important customers are course authors.

To illustrate the trend, consider the following messaging from several providers. Here’s how Udemy kills course author loyalty, and confuses consumers. First, they email with “top 10 trending courses”, note the prices:

Udemy email encouraging me to buy courses

Then a few hours later they follow up with a discounted offer:

Discounts on Udemy are confusing

Will anyone ever buy at full price? – Nope. And one cannot imagine the frustration of becoming a course author for Udemy – whatever price the course author may think their course is worth, Udemy will always undercut the author via one of these “campaigns”.

Tareasplus tries hard to lead Udemy in the race to the bottom in Latin America:

Steep discounts on Tareasplus kill any desire to buy at full price.

In Spain, an English language course provider ABA is pulling the rug from under its own feet:

65% discount! Really?

And so on…

It seems that these companies are not aware that they are selling content. They behave like clothing retailers who need to liquidate out-of-season fashions to bring in the next season’s collection. Except, retailers know all too well what exactly their respective brands stand for: convenience, value-for-money, status statement, luxury, etc. Online education content providers do not know the exact value or positioning of their brand.

In clothing retail, the seasonal approach to inventory management is sound and explicable, although most high-value brands will never run steep discounts – or any discounts – in stores even at the risk of having unsold inventory between seasons. For instance, it is unheard of for Luis Vuitton bag at a 50% discount – unheard of! These companies liquidate unsold inventory in special “premium outlets” – stores usually situated at a great distance from key retail locations. Some companies sometimes run special and carefully controlled online sales. These measures allow the vendors to isolate the effect of discounted products on their core business and to keep and enhance the value of their brands.

To understand why discounting content is an absolute disaster and a great danger for the content provider’s brands, look at Hollywood’s war on pirating. The same is true for software giants’ fight on illegal software copying. Media industries understand very clearly that they produce unique products that can and do provide long recurring cash flows to their owners.

Education marketplaces that regularly wreck their foundations with extreme discounts need to reconsider their pricing strategies. Carefully tracking the lifecycle of a course is an important thing to do. When the course is new and you have something unique to sell it is incredibly dumb to run discounts.

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Digital Training

Digital Training

digital training

On July 6th 2014, Tech Crunch posted an article written by Ingrid Lunden – the headline quoted the research organisation Gartner: “Device Shipments Break 2.4B Units In 2014, Tablets To Overtake PC Sales In 2015.”

That’s a lot of devices. Especially when you consider there are ‘only’ about 7 Billion of us on this planet.

In the enterprise space, this creates challenges as well as opportunities. The challenges in areas such as security and managing total cost of ownership, for example.

The opportunities lie in the unexplored potential of what these devices will allow in terms of employee interaction and engagement. And employers do want engaged employees.

Good training and development can act as a major contributor to greater employee engagement. But it is the very nature of training that is evolving in companies right before our eyes..and sometimes under our noses!

There is an on-going debate in the training community centred on traditional/physical or ‘in person’ training versus e-learning or digital training.This, as I have come to learn, is a vast topic that far exceeds the aspirations of this article. The key theme of this debate is: “Can e-learning or digital training ever be as good as the more traditional, in person, type?”. However, as so often happens, the debate may be asking the wrong questions – and also, as in many other debates, this one may be pandering to vested interests.

The only question that really matters is this:

“How do you produce and deliver great, engaging training to your people all the time so that they may develop to their fullest potential in the shortest possible time and consequently play an increasingly productive role in your organisation?”

It’s a long, detailed question, but take a second to re-read it, and see if it somehow resonates.

How valuable would be to you if you were fuelling this aspiration most of the time? Now back to technology for second.

Given this crazy growth of mobile devices – the same Gartner report says 256 Million tablets will be sold in 2014 – how can we leverage this for greater employee training and engagement? Sure, your tablet won’t replace the awesome trainer who kept you in bated breath through sales training for a whole day – but what can it do?

A whole bunch of very cool things is the answer.

Mobile devices are helping training become increasingly learner-centric – together with some superb software companies out there helping companies customise training needs down to the individual member of staff: immediate needs, strong points, learning styles…truly incredible stuff!

Yes, it is a Learner’s Revolution.

Your employees, The Learners want to learn, to develop…to grow; but they want to be able to do it where they want and when they want; and they want it to be fun and engaging – because when it is fun and engaging, they learn better, faster and want more.

And who would not want to head, manage or be a part of that kind of organisation?

Digital training – from the mobile device to the software platform you would use can make a huge difference in the quality and reach of your training. And no, it need not replace the cherished physical training, but it can complement it beautifully, and seamlessly if planned adequately.

So welcome to the world of Blended Learning!

A scenario:

Before a two-day sales training, employees receive some theoretical game-based modules to complete in their inbox – these can be accessed and completed on their iOS or Android devices, but must be done by the time training starts – like this when then get to Day 1, they have already become familiar with some key tenets of the training, and the facilitator during his ‘Live’ interaction with students in the room can focus on more practical case studies rather than wasting absorbing the whole time on theory.

But wait, that’s not all!

This Live training with the trainer and handful of students in the room is being filmed and beamed to tens, hundreds or thousands of trainees across the country, continent or planet – these colleagues could not make the trip, as it was too far, too costly…and quite frankly they would get as much from the training as their colleagues as the exercises they participate in still have to demonstrate the practical application of what they learned in theory.

Education and training are being disrupted, and it is a huge – and yes, rather fragmented and messy – area in full ebullition.

But it is also very exciting and brings with it more opportunities than challenges. A key challenge for organisations is to navigate these fragmented waters of Digital Training. There are many legacy systems exploiting their dominant market positions and extracting ludicrous price points from customers in a challenging economic environment. These same legacy systems are often not future-building and offer very closed standards not designed to cope with the increasingly rich, engaging and interactive training content being produced by thought leaders and innovators in the industry.

The good news is there are a handful of organisations out there that live and exist on the crest of this new wave and can deliver what you need and more in a simple and cost-efficient manner.

Some are better known, others more discreet, for now.

But they share a common and passionate belief that learning must be fun, easily accessible and rewarding, to all concerned.

Happy Digital Learning!

The Rukuku Team

 

 

 

 

 

 

Discussing Disruption and the Future of Edtech with Michael Horn, Part 2

Michael Horn is co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute and serves as the executive director of its education program. In 2008, he co-authored the award-winning book, Disrupting Class: How Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.

edtech, disruption, Michael Horn

Michael Horn is co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute and serves as the executive director of its education program.

Q: Looking at all the various levels of education, including corporate training, higher education, secondary and primary education, where do you see the most disruptive changes taking place?

R: In many ways the corporate training market had its first wave of disruption in the late 90’s and early 2000’s during the first dot com boom. We are now to the point where we are seeing a version 2.0 of that disruption in corporate learning markets with folks like Rukuku helping people create online courses quickly, take many courses, meet training needs internally, find employees or whatever it might be. Secondarily we are seeing activity in a lot of informal spaces, like the skill-based companies that are popping up. So, I think we are starting to see a second disruption take place in the corporate learning world.

Massive disruption is definitely happening in higher education, less in respect to MOOCS at this point and more from places like Southern New Hampshire University that has introduced competency-based online learning program. University Now has one of my favorite competency-based online learning programs, as well as Western Governor’s University. Players like that are creating a wave 2.0 of disruption in the higher ed space. In K12, a lot is going on but it is more at the classroom level and less at the whole school level. I don’t see a lot that leads me to believe that schools are going to get disrupted anytime soon.

Q: Personalization is a big selling point for Edtech. Each student can learn at his or her own pace. How does that fit with traditional idea of the classroom environment?

R:  I think the traditional classroom environment is going to struggle quite a bit.  It was built to batch up students, lecture to them in the same way at the same pace and so forth, and therefore it is inherently not suited for this personalizing learning world. Traditional institutions are adopting some of these innovations and layering them over the traditional classroom. I think we are going to struggle to see the dramatic leaps in personalization that we might from online learning simply because it’s not what those schools and colleges are trying to do or were built to do.

Q: Do we sacrifice anything in terms of social education, the general getting along with people sort of stuff?

R: In the K-12 arena and primary schools in particular, the majority of the growth in online learning is happening in blended learning environments. The reasons for that are straight-forward as opposed to higher education. Students at that age really need a safe place to go and learn. That’s a large part of the reason we are seeing this current blend of learning.

One of the surprises as I walk into blended learning schools is the amount of socialization taking place. Students might be working individually at their computers but they are constantly bouncing up to peer tutor each other and answer questions. It frees up the teacher to spend more time setting up projects with small group instructions for students to work on with each other.

In many ways, the traditional education system does the socialization job pretty poorly because if you remember back to the experiences a lot of us had in middle school, at least for me, a lot of the social stuff that was going on was pretty negative in nature, such as passing notes around, trying to get out of the lecture with other students, and destructive things like that. What I have been stunned by is how much the interactions I have seen in these blended learning environments are really positive social ones structured around learning. I think it’s enormously more productive.

Q; You’ve written much about the difficulties for universities to manage both research and teaching. Do you anticipate these two functions diverging?

R: Outside of the elite universities, I think that is correct. Those functions will really get unbundled and people will realize that the best researching places are not in fact the best teaching places. Activities can be done differently because information doesn’t have to be centralized and so closely bundled with research anymore.

It’s an open question on what will happen in the elite universities. The major question that people are not talking about as traditional institutions change is about research. What is the right model to incentivize really good research in a sustainable fashion going forward? It’s not clear to me that the current university model is right one. It’s a very serious question for the world because so many great advances come out of the basic research done in these places. How can we make that even better?

Q: Would that have implications for intellectual property rights?

R: Yes, absolutely. People have not given deep thought to what parts of university research should be able to be monetized. It is property that you really create and intellectual ownership gives great incentives. Other research may not rise to that level or may be in such an early stage that actually having a more open source look at it would be more useful.

Q: What people or profession do you see being most radically changed by technological changes?

R: I think it’s going to be difficult, to be candid. There will be lots of roles for teachers. In fact, the number of teachers may even increase. But as we have traditionally defined them, the mid-level professors that are really focused on research and view teaching as a convoluted part of the job, often having to make these weird tradeoffs between the two. That function may go away in the years ahead and I think it will be a difficult transition.

Q: What can students and parents do to take advantage of some of the opportunities offered by online learning?

R: It’s a huge opportunity for parents right now to really be able to drive their children’s education, to navigate all the low cost opportunities and be able to expose their children to so many opportunities that previously were limited by their zip codes.

My colleague Heather Staker has written a fair amount about this and about how parents can opt out of some of the traditional ways of doing education and think about this in much more expansive and exciting ways. I think it’s an unbridled opportunity for enterprising parents.

For students who are trying to excel in schools, MOOCs could be interesting also. For example, if I am a high school student, I suspect passing MIT physics would look more impressive to a college than getting a five on the AP exam. So, thinking about how to harness those opportunities is quite interesting.

Q:  Any other interesting trends that you feel like deserve more attention?

R:  I would add that, in K12, we are seeing tremendous growth in blended learning. The question is, how do we help districts manage this growth in smarter ways to incentivize a focus on student outcomes? At the higher ed levels I think lot of the oxygen has been taken out by what’s going to happen to traditional institutions or MOOCs that have been affiliated with traditional institutions. An interesting question is: how do we shed more light on what some of these alternative mechanisms are for creating programs that are useful for students? And lastly, how do we help people understand that in a lot of these contexts, employers really are the end customers? A lot of the work, like Rukuku does, in connecting those nodes is something that has been overlooked somewhat in the dialogue.

Discussing Disruption and the Future of Edtech with Michael Horn, Part 1

Michael Horn is co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute and serves as the executive director of its education program. In 2008, he co-authored the award-winning book, Disrupting Class: How Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.

edtech, disruption, Michael Horn

Michael Horn is co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute and serves as the executive director of its education program.

Q: You’ve said many times that the current online learning structures, especially Massive Open Online Classes (MOOCs), don’t have quite what it takes to disrupt traditional education. Why not? What’s lacking?

R: A couple of things are missing so far from the innovations that we have been seeing in the higher education space to make them truly disruptive. One of them is finding a real business model that allows sustainable growth and activity in the space instead of simply putting something out for free and hoping that a business model will eventually come together.

The second thing we’re seeing is that for these disruptions to ultimately be successful they have to solve a really important job to be done in the lives of employers or students or someone along the chain that is involved in education. A lot of them haven’t focused on solving that important job, one that’s really pressing. My sense is that those that are moving toward working with employers are starting to understand this better than others right now.

Q: Student assessment is one of the big challenges with MOOCs and digital learning in general. How do you see this issue being addressed, currently and in the future?

R: I think a couple of things could happen. First, to the extent that entities are partnering directly with the institutions themselves, they can together build specifications that, if the student passes and shows mastery, then employers will say, ‘yes, that looks like student success.’ That’s one way that might get solved. Second, I think you will simultaneously see independent assessments or consortia pop up whose purpose is to verify learning in an independent and objective way to help further competency-based learning. That’s the second thing that we will see coming out more and more.

Q: The college accreditation system is an obstacle for many online learning companies. Do you see that system evolving and/or a new system emerging?

R: In the short term, the college accreditation system is a barrier for a lot of this. The system is trying to evolve, but more likely we are going to see a new entity go around that accreditation system. That system was built for what it does today and it was quite successful in many ways in solving the set of problems that it did. But it’s antiquated for many of the problems we are talking about now, and the lessons from disruptions are pretty clear. It will be difficult to transform it into something that we want to solve these new, modern problems.

Q: How important is government policy in this process of disrupting education?

R: Disruption will happen regardless of what policy does or doesn’t do, but whether that disruption is positive or not, whether it really transforms the factory model of education into a student-centered one, that’s the huge question. Policy will shape and dictate that, to some degree, because policy incentivizes what sorts of programs are put in place, whether they in fact focus on student learning outcomes, and what the student learning outcomes that we care about are. Historically policies have been very focused on input-based ways of thinking about that, and accordingly we have very input-driven programs as opposed to ones that really prioritize learning outcomes.

In the higher education space, it will have a lot to do with how fast this disruption takes place. Policy could slow it down or could speed it up and make it focused on quality, if the right incentives are put in place.

Q: Do you see any signs of progress?

R: The Department of Education is starting to create waivers for competency-based learning programs that almost run around the accreditation organizations that are in place. Also, the dialogue has improved quite a bit around the potential of online learning. I think those are positive signs.

On the negative side, we have a fractured way of looking at the for-profit universities that have come before this wave, the innovation of the space over the past 20 years. The dialogue has broken down into for-profit equals good or bad, rather than a more nuanced look at the way the government’s policies actually incentivized poor behavior from some of these for-profits. Looking at the good behavior that they actually did do, I think the question ought to be not good or bad, but how do we take the innovation that happened there and is now happening elsewhere and marshal it toward a higher good and not repeat mistakes, rather than create a polarized debate.

Q: In the past, you’ve mentioned overseas markets as areas where large, open classes can really have impact. What do education companies need to go to properly realize that potential?

R: I think MOOCs can be helpful for emerging markets where there is lots of non-consumption, where lots of people need college education, where a liberal arts education is still in demand. MOOCs can help from the content point of view. The dangers are companies just assuming that the US-based courses will naturally be the things that help in those contexts, rather than really embedding themselves or working with partners who deeply understand those contexts to create things that are relevant and useful for those people. It’s going to be really important and challenging for folks in the US to create platforms that solve those problems in those contexts. There is huge opportunity but it will be very difficult as well.

In the second part of this interview, to be posted tomorrow, Michael looks more closely at how technology is influencing education at all levels, from primary school to corporate training. Stay Tuned! 

About that time vampire…

Aaaaaaaaaaaaah

We don’t think about it much, but taking a class is a massive time commitment.

First off, students, teachers and administrators have to get to and from the location where the class is being held. In my case, this means wasting away in traffic on the Washington area’s largest parking lot (yes, 495: I mean you). As first-world problems go, sitting in traffic is the worst. It’s the very bane of my existence. Things I’d rather be doing: anything. Staring at a wall. Shaking hands with Justin Bieber. Getting waterboarded. Just as long as I don’t have to be on that godforsaken Beltway!

That aside, another factor increasing the time required to take a course is that large classes mean time is used inefficiently as teachers try to keep things orderly. This becomes especially poignant when the guy in the back row keeps asking the same insipid question over and over again, and you can’t climb up there and… kindly suggest that he talk to the professor after class. Or send an email.

Everyone’s very busy these days – a couple of extra hours of free time would be a blessing to many. With that in mind, it’s refreshing to think about the time that can be saved by just going online.