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Today, we are thrilled to announce the latest feature of our Course Creation Platform: the ability to charge for Courses.
At Course Hero, we believe that in order for a learning system to be sustainable, it has to benefit both the student and the educator. We first launched Courses to help bring awesome, freely available educational content to eager learners in an engaging way. Both students and educators responded to Courses enthusiastically and we received hundreds of requests for new Courses, and much to our excitement, we also received interest from educators wanting to teach their own courses on Course Hero. We immediately set out to build a tool for these educators to do so.
We released our Course Creation Platform earlier this fall, but realized that it wasn’t enough to just let educators share their content if they wanted to, we had to give them a real reason to participate on Course Hero. Today, we added the ability for educators to monetize their expertise with to charge for the content they deliver through Course Hero.
Like any economy, in order to be sustainable, both the supply and demand sides have to benefit from the transaction. In education, we see so many inefficiencies where teachers aren’t being sufficiently rewarded for sharing their knowledge and student’s feel like they are over paying for the education their receiving. With Course Hero, we believe there is an opportunity to create a knowledge marketplace where students and teachers can share and access educational content, and both sides can benefit from the exchange.
The ability for educators to offer paid Courses is just the first step in Course Hero’s evolution towards this marketplace. Education opens up new opportunities and enriches lives, and we’re committed to fostering a sustainable environment where knowledge can be exchanged and accessed by interested learners around the world. In the coming months, we’ll also be opening up our tutoring platform for independent experts to register as a Course Hero Tutor, tutor Course Hero users and be compensated accordingly (interested experts can register in advance). Stay tuned!
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Course Hero, Inc. Creates a Knowledge Marketplace by Adding a Paid Option to Its Course Creation Platform
Platform Adds Option for Subject Matter Experts to Monetize Skills
Redwood City, CA (PRWEB) November 29, 2012
Today, Course Hero, a provider of online education tools, announced that it will be adding a feature to its Course Creation Platform that allows subject matter experts to monetize their knowledge.
The ability to charge for Courses hosted on Course Hero is the newest feature of the company’s Course Creation Platform, which enables experts to build and deliver engaging Courses and publish them to Course Hero’s catalog. The Course Creation Platform, released in August, takes experts through a simple step-by-step process for organizing content, delivering assessments and incentivizing student progress with game mechanics. With the addition of Paid Courses, experts now have the option to either make their content free or set a price for access to their Course.
Course Hero believes that for an educational offering to be sustainable, it should allow both learner and content expert to prosper. As a result, the company is taking the steps necessary to evolve its platform into a knowledge marketplace where this can happen. While opening up the Courses platform to allow experts to monetize their knowledge is the first feature update, Course Hero continues to update the rest of its platform, especially its online Tutoring process, to encourage experts to participate and be compensated accordingly.
A recent survey of more than 1,800 Course Hero users reveals that 67.5% have or would pay to take an online course, showing there is a market for quality online courseware. There is also an appetite for hearing from experts outside of academia, with 50.6% of respondents saying they would be interested in taking a course from an industry leader and 31.5% interested in learning from a successful executive.
“Both students and subject matter experts need tangible rewards to incentivize students to continue learning and experts to create the necessary educational material,” said Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero. “With Paid Courses, we’re enabling a knowledge marketplace that not only allows students to access the high quality content they need to achieve their goals but also gives subject matter experts ownership of the process, allowing them to be financially rewarded for sharing their insights.”
At launch, Course Hero is offering two new courses from tried-and-trusted educators including “Photoshop CS6 Crash Course” by consultant and designer Jeremy Shuback, who has taught more than 150,000 people Photoshop, and “Branding, Public Relations, and Social Media Foundations” by branding consultant and content manager for Games for Change, Jeff Ramos.
Course Hero allows experts to set their own prices for courses through a revenue share model. Course Hero will host the content, maintain the gamification badging system and market the courses to the company’s 2.5 million and growing user base. Experts can also opt to contribute to Course Hero’s free and open courseware catalog, which already houses more than 40 courses in areas including Entrepreneurship, Business and Web Programming.
“We believe that an open knowledge market that financially rewards experts will incent people to share better content, offering learners a more enriching experience,” added Grauer.
Additional courses will be added over the next few months. To suggest a course topic or start building your own course, visit the Courses section of the website.
About Course Hero
Course Hero is an online platform providing educational resources to help students learn more effectively. Whether exploring new subjects or mastering key topics, Course Hero provides interested learners with the tools they need to achieve their goals. For more information, visit us at http://www.coursehero.com.
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