What price is the right price for a MOOC subscription?

Last week I received the following in response to Coursera’s pilot of a general subscription for all their courses for $49 per month:

“$49 per month! for $9.99 I can get all the music in the world” (edited for clarity)

Well not all the music in the world but point taken. There are two components at play here: (1) To what extent are MOOCs ‘media’ al la Netflix and Spotify and so comparable in pricing and (2) What is the right price for Coursera’s subscription?

(1) Are MOOCs ‘media’?

Strictly speaking much if not all of the web could probably be described as media in some form or another but for analytical purposes we can think of this in terms of how a user might consume MOOCs compared with how they would consume media such as Spotify. The easy answer is ‘it depends’, evidently there isn’t a clear demarcation — someone taking ‘Hadrian’s Wall’ on FutureLearn might view it as akin to a BBC documentary with a bit more engagement (reading, commenting etc). However, given Coursera’s pivot towards professional learners (and with the subscription presumably a plank in the strategy) I’d say MOOCs while similar, ought not to be categorised as media like Spotify etc due to:

(a) Their consumption is active rather than passive (commenting, note taking i.e. learning)

(b) They tend to be far more time consuming than equivalent media (~20–40 hours) per unit

© They are mentally taxing rather than fun. Rewarding, useful yes but for most — especially for professional learning — I doubt they’d be in the same mental bucket as entertainment and I’ve yet to hear someone suggest ‘FutureLearn and Chill’ but perhaps my readers in the can falsify that.

(2) Is the price right?

Coursera’s $49 is at least in part a path dependent price from their days of pay per MOOC. Coursera, as with all MOOC platforms, tried to optimise conversion against price to maximise revenue per course. Coursera settled roughly on $49 per MOOC (in order to simplify pricing) and with some variation this is par for the course for the major MOOC platforms.

It’s also logical in the consumption sense, most Coursera MOOCs are 4-weeks with a price around $49 so on that basis it’s a MOOC per month just packaged into a subscription model (it is cheaper however than what a learner would pay for a Specialization). However an important caveat is that general subscription might well have a very different optimal point for maximising revenue. For example, $15 a month could in theory see a huge surge in the number of users enrolling justifying a lower price point. Presumably Coursera tested some of this in the pilot, it would be difficult for them to trial a radically different pricing structure and then roll it back if it failed. It’s also reasonable from a competitor point of view with DataCamp at $29 per month, Treehouse $25 (and they are specialist providers with less portfolio).

The answer then is probably ‘yes’, it is the right price. Coursera’s consumers are purchasing a different product from Netflix and spotify, for a different purpose (career) and the pricing most likely reflects historic data on what maximises overall revenue. However MOOC users are hardly static, if having an online learning subscription becomes the norm for professionals then prices might drop through competition and a higher volume of users that allows a lower price point while still covering business costs.

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