Is Freemium a Way To Go for E-learning Solutions?

In 2016 I took a sabbatical year dedicated to studies. Between others I’ve taken foundation courses about the education paradigms of the 21st century, project-based learning, problem-based learning, methodologies and software tools specific to e-Learning.

Today I can say that I was in the right place at the right time, because all those courses were offered for free by an international educational platform sponsored by multiple companies, and I had the chance to do my home works by employing freemium packages offered that time by various online software solution providers.

Now, two years later, some of those freemium packages ar no more available at all, others have been “streamlined”, so they are suitable only for testing purposes. Last year the platform’s biggest sponsor has stepped back, and several courses taken by me are no more part of the current offer.

The thing is, that in 2016 my average monthly Internet traffic was over 50 GB, respectively the educators and the operational personnel of such platforms need acceptable technical conditions and salaries ...In other words decent quality and good results imply a reasonable cost level.

E-learning activities are big IT&C resource consumers, and additionally to processor power, storage and bandwidth they require complex software solutions.

Managing and maintaining successfully such a platform goes far beyond the financial capabilities of a small-medium company, and even big, nationwide companies are creating associations, and doing lobbying for grants in order to assure the continuity and quality of the E-learning services delivered by their platforms.

Taking in account the resource-intensive nature of multimedia file handling and teleconferencing software, it’s better to treat with reserve those services offering “too many” resources as part of a freemium package. Sooner or later their funds are going to end, and then we may run in trouble with our course materials, quizzes, catalogs, home works, messages, forums etc. stored by them in some proprietary database.

For example Moodlecloud is offering a freemium package suitable for storing link collections rather than multimedia files, but most software features are available, and an educator can learn for free how to work with the software, respectively he/she can evaluate the file importing and exporting features, and the compatibility level with a different platform.