Way to go guys – Learnable.com gives Australian Students 10,000 free places worth $10 million

 

Learnable the programming focused MOOC has launched their election campaign with a bang doing what no politician is capable of this year (but will probably take credit for) by offering free enrollment in one of their 3000+ programming courses for 10,000 Australian students.

This is a fantastic gesture and I would suggest a very low-cost way of getting major traction on their platform.

Learnable was launched in 2010 by Matt Mickiewicz and Mark Harbottle the founders at Sitepoint who also are the founders of 99Designs.com and Flippa.com Most of the competition in the MOOC market seems to focused on University courses and whilst there are numerous pay per class websites, I’m not really sure anyone has managed to get this working at scale.

Whilst Learnable has been relatively low-key since their launch, SitePoint’s was a long time success originally in the web design and SEO space with a very active forum in the early days. Judging by the photos on Flickr the Sitepoint team seem to get along really well.

Their first outside investment came in 2011, as they announced a $35 million investment in 99designs led by venture capital firm Accel Partners.

Pricing is not unreasonable compared to doing a day course or the commercial training market and it would be very difficult to find these sorts of resources in one place otherwise, you can choose monthly at $29 per month with unlimited courses and text books or $15 per month if billed yearly. Yearly access for less than the daily rate of a face to face training course sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Congratulation guys, nice guesture and a very effective marketing campaign, what comes around goes around, you guys deserve to be successful.

 

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