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May 8, 2022 09:02 pm

Got a Coupon For That College Course? Marketing Gimmicks Come To Higher Ed

"A decade ago, it would have been hard to imagine a college handing out coupons or running limited-time offers," notes the education site EdSurge. "College was something you applied to get into, and entered with a seriousness of intent to complete." But now, writes long-time Slashdot reader jyosim....As online education has become mainstream, new providers have moved to the same marketing tactics as selling any widget. Especially upstart providers like Udemy, Coursera and edX. In some cases the courses are offered by well-known universities partnering with those companies. Students sometimes buy courses when they're on sale intending to take them, but then never get around to it. It's the academic equivalent of signing up for a gym membership in January in the burst of new-year's-resolution optimism and then rarely going to work out. Udemy's algorithm "favors courses with more students," points out EdSurge, "so professors have an incentive to encourage bulk registration" (during periods when courses are free or discounted). And the stakes are high. 19 instructors made more than $1 million last year, Udemy's CEO notes. And a result of this competion, he adds, is that a whopping 63% of their top 1,800 courses had been updated in just the last 90 days — "to make the content better and better over time so they get more views and they make more money." EdSurge adds:To some academics, the trend is a long-predicted impact of commodifying higher education that will lead students to view college as less about a relationship with an instructor and more about the attainment of a fixed set of knowledge for as low a price as possible... Online education has brought new marketing practices that emphasize the student as a customer. Whether that ends up helping accessibility (through lower prices) or diminishing quality and how seriously students take the learning process, or a mix of both, is still up for debate.

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