We’ve all heard the quote telling us to teach someone to fish and not giving them the fish. This is true as making people able to do something for themselves is better and the feeling of doing it is one of the reasons I started a business whose goal is to educate. However the education business model is not perfect for reaching the highest amount of people we can aim to affect (or is it effect). Giving it a thought I got the idea of applying the Freemium model to education. Now this may sound a bit crazy, but I think Freemium in education can be a huge game changer if private education companies and people get it right. This model will permit earn more profits and broaden the market of people that can get educated by us.
First of all, I would like to state that I think primary and secondary education should be provided by the governments and that this education should be of quality and considering all aspects of development in the student. I also believe that higher education could be private or public by choice, but that everybody needs to have access to some kind of it. In this post I’m talking about offering to teach certain skills for people that either would like a career change or have found their professions have evolved and they need to add a new skill to their backpack.
To apply the Freemium model to education the first step should be to establish what degrees of knowledge will enable the student to get employed (in the sense of produce money). Once this is established the course needs to be developed in two stages: the free and the premium. The free part has to be valuable enough to get the student employed and earning some money. We need to make this free part a course or subject (could be a series of webinars) that yields something good for the student. In other words this free course needs to give A-level content and teach useful skills so the student increases her value on the market (with all the other things that compose that value). Once the student increases her value on the market and gets a job, a raise or starts a business the premium part can kick in.
The premium part would not be payed by all of the students, the price will have to be higher or the course will need to be scalable. In this premium course we can focus on either one of two things, make the course broad enough for lot’s of people to come or make it excellent enough for people to see lot’s of value in it and pay the premium fee. So the model is based on empowering people with enough knowledge they can start to earn money doing what they love or applying the skil they wanted to learn and then profit when they want to further their ability. For example, if I want to learn how to code in Python i can get the basic python course for free and start applying it to my job, when this turns out in a valuable skill I might need to further my knowledge in python and here is when I will pay for it.
Some solid data and numbers will be needed, but the model can work great for training academies and professionals seeking to make a business of sharing the knowledge they have gained with others. Freemium works specially if you need to get the trust of people with a new product. In education people will go to the provider with the best reputation and the free courses will help break that conception about the new players being bad.
To add up you need to teach people how to fish, get them fishing and then bring them to make them fish bigger fish.
