An online course marketplace is a website where teachers, companies and universities publish courses, and anyone can buy them. The website hosts the videos, takes the payment and shows the reviews, and it keeps a share of each sale. Coursera and Udemy are two of the world's largest, and both have engineering teams in India.
The website does not make most of its courses. This is the marketplace model: the website lets others list their products and earns a commission, instead of making and owning the products itself.
How does a course get there? A teacher records a course, for example 40 short videos with quizzes, and uploads it. The marketplace checks that the course follows its rules, such as clear sound and no copied material, and then lists it in its search. Learners find the course, read the reviews and buy it. The marketplace plays the videos, keeps track of how far each learner has got, and issues a certificate of completion at the end.
Consider a chartered accountant in Guwahati who teaches advanced Excel. She uploads a 12-hour course and prices it at ₹499. In one month, 1,000 learners buy it, so the sales come to ₹4,99,000. Say the marketplace keeps half of each sale, because it found these buyers through its own search and advertisements. She then receives about ₹2.5 lakh before tax. When she brings a buyer herself, through her own link, she usually keeps a much larger share.
Universities publish too. Many university courses use freemium pricing: anyone can watch the lectures for free, and a learner pays only for graded assignments and a certificate. Some marketplaces also sell a subscription that opens the whole library for a monthly fee.
Companies are a large group of buyers. A company buys a business plan, and its employees take courses from the library. The courses are often loaded into the company's learning management system (LMS) for companies, which assigns them to employees and tracks who has finished. Such ready-made course libraries are one kind of eLearning content.
Why do learners use marketplaces? A course often costs a few hundred rupees, it can be taken at any hour, and there is a course on almost any subject. The weakness is quality. Anyone can publish, so the reviews and ratings matter a great deal. Many learners also stop before the end, because nobody checks on them.
How is it different from a cohort-based course? On a marketplace, each learner studies alone, at their own pace, from recorded videos. In a cohort course, a group starts on the same day and follows a schedule with live sessions. A marketplace course is also different from an online degree programme, which ends in a university degree.