Abstract:

Currently, there are several thousand online and mobile learning platforms offering millions of courses to billions of students and learners, and e-learning has become increasingly common in modern education, particularly incentivized with the COVID-19 pandemic. However, we also witness that not all of these attempts have been successful and that the quality of courses, materials, and delivery varies. To keep up with the competition, most of the popular high-quality e-learning platforms need to constantly and continuously improve their services, evolving various aspects of their business models, user experience and interfaces, distribution channels and delivery modes, as well as supported devices and technical background.

One of these acknowledged solutions is a Norwegian online learning platform presented in this paper, which went through the transition from a monthly-based subscription model to a tier-based one, and consequently tackled numerous changes in the platform itself. We described the background of this platform and the type of courses it is has been offering in the last 9 years to more than 18000 students from different Norwegian universities, as well as the initially supported monthly-based subscription model, describing its benefits and advantages, but also its shortcomings and the motivation behind the decision to change it and conduct this research.

In order to test the users' willingness to accept the proposed new model, we used several analytical methods and tools to track and analyze the user purchasing behavior, which helped to confirm its viability. Our findings are based on the internally collected and analyzed data from parallelly performed split tests done on the purchasing section of the platform, with over 6000 users participating.

Based on our preliminary results, we propose a new, tier-based subscription model, which ultimately offers more flexibility to the students, not just with regard to the particular content they wish to access, but also in terms of switching between different tiers. This paper also presents the importance of revising and adapting subscription models of e-learning platforms as their content and user bases grow and develop over time, as well as our future plans, recommendations, and conclusions.

Keywords:

e-learning, subscription model, online exam, split testing, user behavior analysis.