Premium Online Courses – The Way To Go?

A couple of weeks ago I came across an online course about web security. The price tag was right on top of the sales page: $1500. Quite expensive, but I decided to skim through the information anyway. The course runs for 12 weeks, and every week you have two live online sessions with the instructor, where he will present the content of the course and answer to questions as he goes along.

On top of that there are practical assignments every week (i.e., students will need to either defend or attack websites, sometimes real ones), and a test in the end to ensure you learned all the essential stuff.

The instructor was pretty qualified, and he also guaranteed on the sales page that if you passed the test at the end of the course he would be glad to refer you as a “security consultant” to any of his contacts.

Guess what. After I was done reading all the information I was sold! I didn’t enroll right away because the next session coincides with my vacation, and I’ll be away from the computer, but I am definitely signing up for the next one. Here’s what convinced me:

• The content will be delivered live, so you can ask questions and interact with the instructor
• There are practical tasks and assignments from day 1, so you’ll actually learn to do the stuff
• The overall topic of the course is in high demand and has a lot of real-life applications
• Once you are done with the course you might even be able to land a gig thanks to a referral from the instructor
• The instructor is qualified and has a lot of credibility in his area

What I found interesting is that this model is different from the traditional online courses we see around. Usually they cost a lot less (e.g., from $50 to $300), the lessons are all recorded in advance, and you pretty much need to sort things out yourself.

With this premium model, instead, the instructor ensures that you’ll learn, apply and so something useful/profitable with the stuff you’ll learn.

If you are an expert in a certain field that is in high demand I think you should consider creating an online course with such premium structure. Sure, it will take some work to get things in place, but once you have it launching it should be both profitable for you and worthwhile for your students.