Online Learners, A Growing Market
Course Coach has identified six major market areas that will be addressed in three different phases:
Phase 1 - Canada and the USA
Phase 2 - The UK and Australia
Phase 3 - China and India
In Phase 1 alone there is currently a market opportunity of over 9 million students. Based on the outlook provided above this number is expected to grow. Even a 5% share of the current market means close to half a million users.
Phase 1 represents an important opportunity to perfect our tool in a familiar socio-cultural climate and English language learner area before moving to Phase 2 and finally a larger market area in Phase 3.
Buyers will be reached through a variety of media rich marketing campaigns illustrating the issues of student funding and retention due to struggling online learners. The campaigns will highlight the efficiencies and resource savings of Course Coach. For the K-12 market provincial and state online learning and technology associations will be contacted as well as identified online distributed learning schools. These associations and schools will receive marketing information as well as product trials. For the higher education market, schools with online distributed learning programs will be contacted in the same manner. Marketing to the realm of professional development will be targeted primarily to larger organizations identified as new to online learning programs or having struggling online learning programs.
Online learning is becoming an increasingly popular option for learners in K-12, higher education and professional development programs. Even with apparent steady growth, online learning is still a number of years away from reaching its maximum impact according to the New Media Consortium (NMC) (2014a).
A Snapshot of Opportunity
Institutions with an online learning platform: 65%
Institutions that had had no discussions to-date about online learning in 2013: 9%
EDUCAUSE Core Data Service 2013
32% (or 6.7 million students) of the total higher education enrolment in the USA took at least one online course in the Fall of 2011, an increase of more than half a million students from 2010.
Babson Survey Research Group (2013) in NMC's Horizon Report, 2014 Higher Education Edition (2014a)
A number of US states are mandating that students take online courses as a requirement for high school graduation in order to be prepared for future work and learning.
NMC, 2014b