Online education has gained a lot of traction. The pandemic showed us that education can continue even if you are unable to leave your home. And anyone would be tempted to learn something from the convenience of their homes and mobile devices given the sheer number of courses available online.
Here are two major players in the global edtech market that have revolutionized online education: Udemy and Coursera. Let’s examine their operation and what makes them so effective.
Eren Bali, Gagan Biyani, and Oktay Caglar founded Udemy in 2010. Today, the company offers a startling 1,83,000 courses, taught in more than 75 languages by 65,000 teachers.
It also provides Udemy Business, which has more than 10515 registered organizations worldwide that are concerned with the development of their employees. Nearly 3.7 million free learners have been converted into buyers thanks to it.
Except for the Udemy pro Subscription, each course is sold separately, and customers have lifetime access to the material. The brand stands out for its cutting-edge content created by subject matter specialists and seasoned professionals. In addition to providing more than 17,700 free courses, it also uses machine learning to keep students interested.
The business went public in 2021 after raising $421 million and having a $3.8 billion valuation.
The online learning and teaching platform Coursera was founded in 2012 by professors of computer science Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller.
More than 5300 courses from more than 250 universities are available under the EdTech brand. It has a huge student base of more than 97 million students who are enrolled in certificate, university degree, and even diploma programs.
Coursera gives users the option to “stack” content, which promotes flexibility. The brand provides the most relevant projects and job-based certificates from organizations like IBM, Salesforce, Meta, and Google.
The EdTech platform was initially completely free. Today, however, revenue is generated by users or consumers who purchase content at a set price as well as by offering subscription licenses to customers in the university, business, and government sectors.
A second source of income is from partnerships with universities, where Coursera receives a share of the money that the universities bring in.
Differences and similarities
Both brands act as a marketplace because they don’t produce any courses.
On the other hand, Coursera is a condensed market where only a select group of academic institutions, including Imperial and Stanford, as well as companies like Google and IBM, can produce courses. By having affiliations with universities, it gains credibility.
While Udemy offers more career-focused courses, Coursera is thought to be more academically oriented.
However, during the pandemic, when online learning experienced a massive boom and has since been adopted by millions of students worldwide, both edtech platforms received a boost.
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