What is my favourite application?

Today, I realized I spent more than 10 hours on Coursera every week for the past year and I really enjoyed this platform. Coursera is a platform that you can build skills with online courses from top institutions and universities. I like it since I can learn a lot from top universities whenever and wherever I am, no time, places limits at a low cost or even free. I learnt a lot courses on it and I really want to introduce it to you.

How did I know Coursera?

I still remember the first time I met Coursera when I was learning Deep Learning taught by Andrew Ng, who was a famous professor in Stanford University. At the end of his class in deeplearning.ai, he would introduce us Coursera created by Daphne Koller and himself. MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) was bringing educational and vocational courses online and Coursera totally won my fragemental time on PC. Similarly, Weixin Reading introduced online reading to the public in China, and became the most visited app on my phone when I was free.

What is the customer journey map?

The general process of an individual user can be divided into the following steps.

Log in as individual user or enterprise users
Find the courses you want by searching jobs, skills, or universities
Read the introduction of the course and enroll
Take the course with your customize schedule
Take all discussions, tests, peer value, and quiz
Earn a certificate provided by Coursera and institutions
Share your learning and certificates to LinkedIn or other platforms

Business model of Coursera

Who are the customers? (Customer Segments)

Coursera provides services to two main kinds customer segments. The first one is educational institutions like universitties and companies, which wants to share course resources with a fully access. The other one can be the end-users who want to learn some skills in specific fields but may find it difficult to get access to educational resources.

The following types of people can be their potential end-users:

High school students who want to take college courses in advance.
College students who want to take online courses rather than offline courses.
College students who want to learn extracurricular skills.
Fresh graduate students who want to decide or change career path.
People who already have a job want to strengthen their existing knowledge.
People who already have jobs and want to learn new skills.

Try to imagine this scenario: more and more people realize the importance of life-long learning. As a fresh graduate, Allen is pursuing a full-time job related to product management, business development. For a better fit, he chooses courses related to digital product managemt, Data analysis, and project managemtn on Coursera and spends 10 hours per week on it.

What value does Coursera deliver to customers? (Value Propositions)

When it comes to what customer needs Coursera want to satisfy, it allows end-users like me easy and complete access to top educational online resources that many constomers may find unaffordable or inaccessable through its website and application.

Sharing high-level courses also means that universities and insititutions can reach a greater number of consumers more easily, futhering their individual brand identities.

How does Coursera make money? (Revenue Streams)

Courserea starts its journey with the goal of providing high-level education resources for free to anyone looking for it. Now, Coursera charges from several channels to improve its services.

Free access

There are many ways to get access to some courses for free since some courses are provided to everyone for free. Besides that, people can choose audition when choose whether to pay for the course so that they still have access to most course materials for this course without a certificate.

Certificates

Most courses are offered with no charge. However, people who want to earn a certificate of completion which is a trusted and shareable way to showcase their new skills can choose to pay the course fee. This feature was landed in 2013, giving paying students access to graded assignments, homework, and examinations. If completed satisfactorily, they can earn a verified certificate at the end of the course, and they can visit the course in the future with no limits. The course fee varies between from $39 to $89 depending on the course. Nowadays, people can choose to be a membership with no limits to a sea of courses at a cost of $39 per month.

If you have planty time during some period so that you can finish the course within the7-days trail, once finished, you can also get the certificate and have no limits when revisit the course in the future.

Specializations

This feature is a bundle of different but related courses designed to help customers deepen their expertise in a specific area. For example, DeFi: The future Finance Specialization consisted of 4 courses aims to provide learners a much deeper understanding of both the infrastructure of DeFi and leading applications. Customers can pay monthly subscription fees between $39 to $89, depending on the specialization, for access to all resources and specialization certificates.

Coursera for Business

Coursera for Business enables businesses to offer their employees or teams access to a sea of courses to boost their expertise. Compared to traditional certificates, Coursera provides this service with a lower fee of $400 per employee per year. Enterprise packages comes with higher cost than personal or teams’ plan. Coursera for Campus provides silimar option to the government and universities.

Since higher price and growing customers in this segment, it has quickly become a key channel of revenue.

University Degrees

Collaborated with top universities world wide, Coursera offers students a chance to complete a fully recognized Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree, including MBA from UIUC. The price is far lower compared to degrees in campus, but with the same instructors who teach in person. Scholarships are provided. It’s reported that Coursera generated $12.0M in revenue in Q1, 2021 with 13,493 students enrolled.

Competitve analysis

SWOT Analysis

Strength

Strong relationships with its key partners to offer colourful and high-level courses.
First-move advantages: kind of becoming market standard. After Coursera, many universities or educational angency like MOOC China, and MIT opensource, built their own platform which follows these standards. What’s more, the earlier Coursera ran into the market, the bigger market share it would take. Some MOOC platforms like Xue Tang Zai Xian created by Chinese government and universities has limited market usually in domestic rather than a golbal market.
Good environment to spread courses. Multi-lanuage courses are provided to learners from all over the world. At the same time, Coursera advocates learners to take part in translation event so that subttitle will be translate into their mother language and would be offered after reviews.
Diverse revenue channels. Multiple revenue model enables Couresera great resources to not only keep competitve to the threat of newcomers but also invest into R&D.

Weakness

Services Coursera provided are more focus on solution space, which means more about what can they do. Sometimes they ignore the interests of external stakeholders.
Poor visual design. Terrible design on both Andriod and iPhone.

Opportunities

Covid-19 has changed many people’s lifestyle. Some universities promoted hybrid teaching model, and sea of students were trying to get access to online learning. Even after Covid, people really enjoy online learning since they can follow their own schedule.
Globalization enables Coursera more international markets. Growth in international market can also help Coursera diversify the risk as it will be less dependent on domestic market for revenue.
Technology empowering more possibilities. With the development and application of Machine Learning and AI, more smart features including recommendation can be offered to keep customers active.

Threats

Government Regulations. Coursera should keep a close eye on the fast changing government regulations under the growing conflicts environment .
Customers are moving toward mobile which can hamper the growth as Coursera still hasn’t got a comprehensive mobile strategy.

What can be improved?

Nice improvements from my experiences

As a customer, although Coursera provides great services, for more effience and easy of use, some nice improvments can be the following:

A calendar that shows due dates for assignments and quizzes across all of your courses. When I signed up for 3-4 classes, it’s hard to keep track of what is due and when. Optional email reminders would be a nice touch.
Quick feedbacks and colorful interations to keep users active. Solving small but not so primitive tasks by students could help feeling the progress. And the more types of such quizzes are presented (not just a multiple choice), the more learners will be willing to join. What’s more, peer value and discussion can be offered for students to communicate more to help each other so that they will spend more time on it to get a better understanding and build the willing to learn other related courses.
Better interaction design on Mobile application. A terrible journey starts when open Coursea on both Android and iPhone. It’s difficult for me to get what I want.
Better recommendation performance. Sometimes, after finishing one course, if learners want a deep understanding of specific field, a good recommendation at the end of learning will keep them engaged.

More testing should be conducted so that we can learn from the feedbacks from users and provide higher-perforance services.

Future plan

Some plans can be taken into consideration for further marketing.

Conduct geographic analysis to move to new markets.
Conduct IP analysis to keep competition out of the door.
Invest more in building an easy-use mobile application.
Keep existing customers active so that improve their customers life value. Some nice try can be introducing a new product or service of Coursera to existing customers, improving interaction and visual design.
Improve customer loyalty of Coursera Coursera’s customers. Marketing efforts can be used to increase loyalty among existing customers by organizing events, and by providing post purchase information and services.
Increase brand awareness. Features like stronger and multiple sharing channels can reach new audiences on social media. What’s more, newcomers have a better chance of choosing a course through a friend’s recommendation.

More info and market analysis should be conducted to build a good strategy. Will be added soon.

Thank you for your time : )