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Fast growing Wealth Dragons – scaling with Coursio

Wealth Dragons, one of the fastest growing education companies in the field of wealth creation has successfully scaled their business by creating an online education offering. In a short period of time Wealth Dragons has created a more engaging learning environment for their students by using Coursio, adding another dimension to its traditional course format.

Wealth Dragons was founded in 2009 by Vincent Wong, as he wanted to pass on his own expertise in the property management business as a response to the lack of wealth education traditionally taught in schools.

After a few very successful years Vincent began to look for a way to scale up the business and take the company to the next level. Vincent wanted to take Wealth Dragons’ traditional education offering online and find a way to work with a digital distribution model. For Wealth Dragons it was important to use a service which could help them create a customizable learning experience by using the most modern web technology available.

Wealth Dragons began to use Coursio in late spring 2014 and for Wealth Dragons it felt like a natural choice of partner in scaling their online presence.

Vincent has been very satisfied with the partnership so far: "Coursio's simple yet powerful service has enabled us to scale our business in a new way, opening up a new- and growing revenue stream. We're able to customize our online courses to our students and make their learning more fun and efficient."

So far Wealth Dragons has published an online training program in property wealth management through Coursio.

The next step for Wealth Dragons is to develop its online education offering even further and launch numerous wealth creation courses online on an open portal – accessible to everyone.

Keep an eye on Wealth Dragons and its upcoming online courses with Coursio!

To get more information about how Coursio can help you create a scalable online education offering, please book your free Demo here. We’d love to hear from you.

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Make your Facebook marketing more profitable

Helping others to monetize and share their knowledge by creating and distributing online guides and courses is the core of Coursio. We are happy and proud to support our users to open up a new growing revenue stream with our easy-to-use tool. Once again Coursio is glad to share big news as one of our users is ready to publish its first online courses!

The Amazing Society is a Swedish company which helps companies, organizations and municipalities to grow by using social media. Coursio started to collaborate with The Amazing Society in the beginning of summer 2014. The purpose of the collaboration is to help them to open a new growing revenue stream. Coursio has been supporting The Amazing Society during the process: from the creation of an idea to a successful online course launch.

Within a few months The Amazing Society did not only manage to publish their first online course, they took it a step further and published three at the same time. At Coursio we are not only amazed by the quality and content of the online courses, but we also appreciate The Amazing Society’s drive that reflects the core of our company.

The new online courses teach students about Facebook, a social media channel which has become an essential part of online marketing for companies.  For The Amazing Society it’s about being ahead of the game and doing things correctly: “It can be very time consuming to establish a profitable social media presence if you don’t know how or what to do. With our updated knowledge on what is happening on the market right now and what will happen tomorrow, we help you to establish a profitable presence.”

The Facebook courses are developed for professionals like marketers, communicators, customer care representatives and sales people providing content according to everyone’s needs. You can learn about how to create Facebook pages, how to build a profitable Facebook communication strategy or gain know-how about Edgerank.

Take the next step in becoming a Facebook marketing expert and sign up to the online courses here. Coursio recommends!

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Turn your knowledge into business with Star Sisters!

The fact that mental- and physical health go hand in hand is no secret, but our Swedish customer Star Sisters have put their mind into helping people with their online courses.

Carina Ovesson and Helena Magdalena Ivekrans want to inspire and help everyone that wants to follow their hearts and fulfill their dreams. Star Sisters have not only created 4 online courses with high quality in the shortest time in Coursio’s history, but they have also taken the next step with their course platform; Star Sisters offers others the possibility to create their online courses under the Star Sisters portal and provide a unique distribution- and marketing channel.

Star Sisters started using Coursio in July 2014 in order to create online course offering within personal development. When working with Star Sisters we at Coursio have provided support in how to create, structure and market courses online in order for them to open up a new growing revenue stream.

Within a few weeks after publishing the first online course Star Sisters noticed an increase in the number of website visitors. The courses have been highly appreciated by the students and have helped them to improve self-awareness and self-knowledge skills among others. Sara Wintherfrid Josefsson, one of the many Star Sister students says: “ The Mindfulness course is fantastic and you develop as a person when you work with yourself in that way. My biggest insight from the course is learning to accept my own feelings and thoughts.”

Star Sisters have now developed their online course platform further and offer others the possibility to publish- and sell courses through Star Sisters own portal.

No matter if you are an expert in a subject and would like to educate others or you already have course content which you would like to publish online - Star Sisters will help you to monetize your educational offering. Contact Star Sisters directly on their website if you are interested in discussing a partnership with them!

At Coursio, we see a big trend in creating knowledge platforms online, but we would like to congratulate Star Sisters for taking it a step further and at the same time encourage you to take advantage of the possibility to also turn your knowledge into business!

Visit their website and learn how to get started!

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A profitable digital offering in online media, is it possible?

That was the title of a seminar we recently organized with the Swedish Media Publishers Association (SMPA). We were invited to present to their members, who are Consumer and B2B Magazines,  how they through packaging existing editorial content as online courses and guides can create a profitable digital offering.

Our CEO Christoffer Elings-Pers started off the presentation by giving an historical overview of how publishing content online has changed over time, from the early content portals (in Sweden as the likes of Spray and Passagen) to the ones we see today. Christoffer then introduced an overview of how charging for digital content has evolved from iTunes to Spotify and Netflix services. He showed how we at Coursio since 10 years back have worked with different concepts based on charging for content online connected to a trademark and packaged as courses and guides. Examples like Emelie Ohlsson have shown that building a tribe of followers and giving them an attractive content offering is possible to monetize on and this is what we believe will be the future for the publishing industry and not something which only will be applied by bloggers but larger publishing houses as well.

After this inspiring introduction I took over and went through how our customers like Aller and LRF Media have created course and guide offerings. I talked about how the strategy behind such launches can look like and how our customers create everything from smaller guides to larger online courses, depending on the amount of content and level of interaction between course creator and consumer. This lead us into an interesting discussion on how the participants could implement such strategies in their own organization, what kind of content and trends that we see on the market and how this can be translated into a scalable digital business.

To get more information about how our established process and best practice for publishing houses or to get an extract of our presentation at the SMPA seminar e-mail us here.

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Coursio TV Episode 3 - Notes

The latest function to be released in Coursio Lunchbox is the Notes functionality. Basically it means that “Readers”, the users of courses created in our tool, can take notes directly connected to the content. In this way they can put in comments and ideas regarding the different parts of the content and take notes related to a certain video, image or text. We are really happy about this functionality as it increases the value for readers of content and it is also a pillar for future development in the app. Notes can become a powerful feature to “tag” your own content, extract the most important part of the course and possibly also making it more social and engaging for the readers.

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MOOC:s are reviewing their business model

We have in several posts on this blogged commented on the development of MOOC:s around the world and how they are changing the educational space. This november we saw an interesting U-turn from one of the main players Udacity that they are changing their business model from providing free courses to start charging for their content. As can be read in this article on Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Udacity, they have been wrestling how to combat the problem of high drop out rates from their courses. Starting to charge for courses the students will presumably be more motivated to finish the course. Personally I believe this to be a natural path to go for the MOOC:s. Publishing the educational content for free with no clear revenue model is unsustainable and unfortunately looks like the first desperate attempts by publishing houses to gain market share on internet by providing magazines and newspapers for free online. 

Interestingly Udacity are on to something else that we have seen is popular amongst our own customers, which is to get the production of the courses sponsored. In their latest Computer Science Course offered together with Georgia Institute of Technology not only do the students pay for attendning the course and getting a certificate, the whole production cost of 2 mn USD (a crazy high amount, high quality courses can be produced for much less in my experience) is covered by AT&T who pays to get access to a new pool of engineers that take the course. Several of Coursios customers have identified this opportunity as well and both sponsored production costs or getting partners to take part in production of the course content is becoming increasingly popular. 

Keep following us here on the blog to get the latest updates and news on the MOOCs around the world!

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Health magazine MåBra drives online sales through guides on diet and workout

Driving online sales for magazines today is a big challenge. Pushed by the development of the market many magazines find themselves in a situation where they are distributing content for free online and the only way to create revenue from vistors is through ad-sales. The Swedish health magazine MåBra, belonging to one of Sweden largest media groups Aller Media, has innovatively challenged this using Coursio to create online guides on diets and workout that work on desktop as well as smartphones and tablet devices. Selling these, in connection to free content that is available on their website, they have created a new growing revenue stream.

Key for us at Coursio when working with MåBra has been to use our experience in how to create, package and market courses and guides online, to help them launch their first guides in just a couple of weeks from starting to work with the tool. The launch process started off by MåBra identifying - in assistance with Coursio - key areas where they already had content suited for packaging into online guides and defining how to structure this content in the first guide that was released: GI Turbo. In this diet-guide MåBra assembled free available content like recipes and FAQ regarding the Low-GI diet with instructor led workout videos (sourced from a DVD they had included as an addon to a previous printed copy of the magazine) and short videoclips exclusively produced for this guide with their popular diet blogger Marie Tegnér.

While launching this guide both online and through ads in the printed magazine MåBra’s online editor Jennie Sandberg saw a sudden high increase in website traffic generated by articles on the 5:2 Diet. “Suddenly we were seeing an increase in traffic and that almost all of our top 10 read articles on the site came from searches on the 5:2 diet. There was a huge interest out there to know more about it and I saw how we quickly through Coursio could provide our readers a good guide to this diet”.

Jennie assembled the best content they had in this subject in a short mobile 5:2 guide giving interested readers a possibility of getting a neatly packaged and well structured overview of the diet for USD 15. It was published in just 2 days and marketed mainly online in connection to articles driving traffic on the subject (see all articles here http://mabra.com/etikett/52-dieten/ and example article here http://mabra.com/laga-kalorisnal-mat-med-basta-52-gronsaken/)

Sales of these guides have been successful and has given MåBra more ideas on how to expand there guide offering in the future. Keep track here or on their website mabra.com for new concepts and guide releases soon to come!

“The collaboration with Coursio has been a good opportunity for us to quickly and easily test our readers willingness to pay for digital content” Liselotte Stålberg - editor in chief MåBra.

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The MOOCs are coming to Sweden

Last week we saw some interesting news in the Swedish online education space. Karolinska Institutet (KI) will be the first Swedish university to launch MOOC courses and are taking action on a subject that has been debated by many of the other universities for a while without resulting in any action. 

In June the challenge for the Swedish Universities was highlighted in a debate article in SVD. Just a couple of days later Stockholm University, the largest University in the Nordics, presented that they are joining the partnership Unordic which is aiming at launching the first Nordic MOOC initiative and not only provide free open courses but also courses giving credits to the students. 

Now we can see that even though the good intentions seem to be found amongst the Nordic Universities it will probably KI that will be first to take action and launch a MOOC with the US based organization EdX as a partner. 

Hopefully this will speed up the process amongst the other universities and open up Sweden for the online educational scene. A scene they know they have to enter but unfortunately are slow to act on. Something that might come from having an educational system where the income of universities are not based on tuition fees but on public grants, connected to achievements and time spent on research and not on teaching excellence. 

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Create revenues online through courses and guides

Entrepreneurs, bloggers and speakers are showing it over and over again that the online environment is a perfect spot for creating so called passive incomes - incomes received on a regular basis with little effort to maintain it. One way of generating these incomes is to create a revenue stream from online courses and guides. Everything from cooking, photography to advanced subjects such as computer science can be taught online. A lot of how to guides can be found on YouTUBE for free but using tools such as Coursio you can package video, text and image content into interactive online guides that can be sold to your audience. Our customers have shown that their followers want to have one place to go to get this information and be able to access it wherever they are through desktop, smartphones and tablets and they are willing to pay for it as long as its easy and accessible. This is how for example Emelie Ohlsson - photoblogger and entrepreneur have built a business around her biggest passion using Coursio. 

This week this subject was brought up by Isabella Löwengrip (Blondinbella) and Pingis in their Economistas Podcast, one of Swedens right now most popular podcasts. In the podcast they discuss how you can create passive income streams, how online courses and guides are the way to go and why Coursio is a great service to use when creating them. Check out the podcast on http://www.expressen.se/podcast/en-economistas-podcast/7e-avsnittet-av-en-economistas-podcast/ and listen from minute 13.30 - 17 to here more about Coursio and online courses. 

Thanx Isabella and Pingis for the inspiration!

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Coursio TV - Episode 2 - Updated Invitation flow and Circles

We have now updated the invitation flow in Coursio Lunchbox. The invitation flow is used for users not selling their courses through our Webshop or the API meaning they have to upload the users manually. We want this invitation process be really simple and quick not depending on if you want add one user or hundreds at the same time. Therefore you just choose which course to invite to, paste a list of users and press invite. They get an e-mail where they can sign in to the course. As a protection only users with the designated e-mail can register to the course which guarantees the e-mail link and Course is not spread to others. In the invitation mode you can also check the status of invitations sent out, re-send them or export you user list.

We have chosen to place the invitation mode in the Circles to keep the user management in one place. The idea behind the Circles is to group users in a Course so that you can follow their progress and give them separate preferences. In the current Coursio version this is manifested in the discussion module where you can choose to limit the discussion to a specific Circle of users. This is though only the beginning of a future development where for example sections of the Course can be restricted to users of certain Circles.

See you soon and if you have any questions on Coursio or the new functions let us know!

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Coursio TV - Episode 1 - Discussion Module

The latest feature released in Coursio Lunchbox is the Discussion Module. The idea is to be able to add interaction from your users straight into the course content. We have previously seen that when having the forum as a separate page a lot of users where linking from their course content to the forum discussion. We now believe in trying to incorporate everything around your content, just as we have done with the tasks. Therefore we have inserted this interactive functionality as a module just like text or images that can be inserted wherever your want in your course or guide. In this way your users can comment different parts of the content and the course automatically becomes more engaging and interesting for the users. The content will then live on and be developed by your users.

The discussion module can be chosen as public but also to only be displayed for different circles of users, meaning that the discussion is only visible for a limited group of users and not all the participants of the course.

The module can be used to comment and interact around one video or image on one page or it can also be used to create general forum discussions around your content. Create a separate page which you for example call “Forum” and insert several discussion modules on different topics and suddenly you have a general forum for your participants to discuss course-related or non-course related subjects. Good luck with this new feature and hope you love it as much as we do!

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MOOC trenden från USA driver utbildnings marknaden framåt

 Det är inget snack om att de senaste halvårets hetaste trend inom utbildningsmarknaden online har varit framväxten av MOOC:ar. Se gärna Dave Cormiers klipp på YouTUBE som försöker förklara konceptet på under 5 minuter

Dessa massiva öppna onlineutbildningar som erbjuds av några av USAs toppuniversitet har gått från att vara ett experiment för att lära sig mer om hur man kan bedriva utbildning på ett engagerande och bra sätt till att bli en faktor som kan komma att förändra utbildningsmarknaden inte bara i USA utan även globalt. I diskussionen som kretsar kring MOOCar räknas numera inte bara öppna universitetsutbildningar utan även kursportaler som Udemy och Lynda in.

Mönstret i hur vi tar till oss information i dagens mobila internetbaserade samhälle där exempelvis nyheter och tv-program levereras via mobilen, i mindre uppdelade videoklipp eller podcasts och i anpassade format efter våra preferenser har börjat sprida sig även till utbildningsbranshen vilket framgången hos dessa MOOCar och kursportaler tydligt indikerar. Inte bara vi här på Coursio utan även Sveriges toppuniversitet ser att detta är något som kommer förändra marknaden framöver vilket togs upp i SVD ledarartikel i maj och på ett seminarium i samband med detta på KTH.

Kommer dom traditionella universiteten finnas kvar?

Trenden på marknaden kring hur vi vill ha en ökad tillgänglighet är något som vi på Coursio upplever och ser tydligare varje dag. Vi ser också ett skifte i hur vi utbildar oss under livets gång. Den tiden då man vid 25 års ålder var färdigutbildad från högskola och gick in i ett spår i arbetslivet fram till pensionen är över. Fler och fler ändrar inriktning på sina karriärer och väljer att utbilda sig fortlöpande och under olika tidpunkter i livet. Fler och fler vill fördjupa och förkovra sig i sina intressen och utveckla dessa kunskaper och betala för detta privat. Detta möjliggör framväxten av nya utbldningsinstitutioner som exempelvis utbildningsportaler på nätet som skapas av bloggare med specialistkunskaper och publicister som besitter material och kunskaper inom särskilda områden. Dessa kan paketera sin information och kunskap i ett tillgängligt kursformat för sina följare och öppna en ny typ av intäktskälla.

Universiteten kommer finnas kvar för att erbjuda en social plattform för de studerande som vill ha detta men för att säkerställa sin tillväxt framöver bör de också fundera på fler flexibla utbildningslösningar. Varför kan man bara läsa på program som sträcker sig över flera år? Varför inte dela upp utbildningar i mindre delar, paketera dessa i större utbildningsprogram och erbjuda studenter att ta dem i sin egna takt, i helt digitala format eller i en blandning av digitala och fysiska möten?

Framtiden är online utbildningar

Framtiden kommer utsäga vilka aktörer som överlever och hur utbildningsbranschen kommer att se ut, klart är dock att online alternativen är här för att stanna och de som är först in på marknaden och kan bygga upp sitt varumärke inom denna nya marknad kommer ha ett försprång gentemot andra. Vill du höra mer om hur vi ser på utbildningsbranschens utveckling och vilka möjligheter den öppnar för just dig hör av dig till oss!

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Welcome to the Coursio blog!

With the rebranding of Coursio I wanted to take some time to clarify the vision of Coursio and our values. How it is embedded in everything we do - and most importantly - the user experience.

When we created Coursio we wanted to make education online more simple. Everyone should be able to utilize the possibilities that the web and mobility offer.  But most importantly provide a service where the users are able to innovate and change the way they work today.

That was the reason for founding Coursio and what we strive for everyday in the team - to change the game of online education.

So what is the thought behind our new logo then?

Innovating the educational landscape

As we are soon launching the next generation of Coursio, that will be a completely new way of publishing and interacting around educational content (new user interface although still maintaining our core concept), we wanted the brand and our icon to truly represent what we are doing; "course innovation".

So we set out to create a totally new feeling and design of our new icon and connect it to the field we work within - innovating education online.Therefore we wanted to make the logo resemble this opportunity - what we refer to as the new education landscape.

Progression

For every user who starts using Coursio, no matter if its a blogger or individual publisher wanting to gain new online revenues, a large organization or enterprise creating a totally new product category or changing the way they communicate and distribute education online - we always see that the reason for "going Coursio". The ambition to develop and scale your business and online presence. Progression and forward movement is therefore a key value both when working with our users as well as when developing and innovating our service. 

Simplify

The basic foundation for both innovation and progression is to offer the simplest service for doing so. This has always been the core of Coursio and always will be - that anyone should be able to educate and interact with their users in a new way online.

Do you want to be part of the the future of online learning?

Let us know!

Christoffer Elings-Pers, CEO/Founder