Why Does UCT Charge So Much for Its Online Courses?

Another interest rate hike; another petrol price hike; the cost of living in South Africa seems to be getting more expensive by the day.  The advent of Internet 2.0 was supposed to help consumers stretch their ever shrinking Rands, but it seems that some South African entities are completely ignoring their primary missions in the pursuit of profit at the expense of the development of the country.

Who am I talking about - there are many that come to mind, but specifically the University of Cape Town ("UCT") and their online education classes.  In his 2009 book "What Would Google Do?" Jeff Jarvis looked at how Google changed the revenue mantra of business from "how much can we charge" to "how little can we charge".

Ivy League Universities are using the Freemium Model to share their education with the world.  Success stories include an Indian student who took a physics course from his home in rural India and was given a full scholarship to complete his degree at the university due to his work on the course.  Having seen the success of Massive Open OnLine Courses ("MOOC's") UCT decided not to use the existing providers but to build their own.  This added an additional layer of cost and instead of offering a free or nearly free course they charge as much as they would for a course that they offer in house.  Coursera which offers courses from Wharton School of Business; Ohio State; National Geographic Society and Johns Hopkins University allows you to do the course for free or a nominal fee of USD50 (ZAR520).  UCT offers courses starting from R8,800 (USD846).  When I queried this with the course provider they stated that the pass rate of the Coursera courses is 5% against their pass rate of 90%.  As Mark Twain succinctly put it "lies, damned lies and statistics".  It turns out that 70% of the students pass if they pay USD50 (Signature track).   The other difference noted by the UCT online course provider is that we have access to the lecturers.  MIT, another Ivy League University was offering a course with interaction with the lecturers for USD$495 (ZAR5,148).  Which would you prefer?  A diploma course from MIT or UCT?  In addition the MIT online offering offers a 1 week "test" before you pay.  A good way to check out if the content is right for you.  UCT's offerings don't offer this.

Coursera's Gamification Course Completion Profile

This was just about the fees.  Lets look at the numbers ... In another survey it was found that a median number of entrants to each MOOC course offered by the likes of Coursera and Edx was 33,000.  That gives us an assumed completion rate of 1,650 per course (using 5% completion).  UCT's online service provider has had 15,000 successful participants since inception.  A number that is achieved every 9th MOOC. Numbers that UCT can only hope to dream of in their current model.

So is UCT's mission to educate or to make money?  It would seem that it is to make a profit.  In this example a 43 year old professor and 1 web cam reached 140,000; 8,200 people completed the course over 2 offerings.  That is more than 1/2 of all the people who have completed the UCT online courses.
As if we didn't need more examples here is an example of a course run simultaneously online and on campus.  There were 29,000 online students and 100 campus based students.   Not only was the number of students who passed greater than 13 times the number who took the course on campus, but the students Signature track (paid USD50) had a pass rate of 99% vs on campus students of 74%.

Internet penetration and cost in South Africa means that our local providers will not get the numbers experienced by the examples above, but does training 15,000 people over 40 courses over 3 or 4 years really count as being revolutionary?  Will that fix South Africa's skills and education problem?  It seems that UCT is focusing on those who can pay, rather than educating the country.


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