Why Learning Is Now A SaaS Model

The education and learning market is going through an enormous transformation and, like many other industries, it has discovered the customer and business benefits of using a SaaS-based business model.

Here are a few examples of companies that made the digital transition or, having been born in the digital era used SaaS from the get-go as the preferred delivery model.

Encyclopedia Britannica: The days of the mailman delivering a dozen or so Encyclopedia books each year to your living room is long gone. A Vindicia client, Encyclopedia Britannica is now exclusively an online subscription service, with updated content delivered always rather than once a year. More importantly, it can source content from experts around the world. It’s not too often that you have Nobel prize winners from whom you can draw inspiration as a sixth-grader.

BenchPrep: BenchPrep, an API-driven service that provides an online learning hub drawing on resources from a variety of sources, recently switched to a subscription billing model from a per-course charge. This was done primarily because the founding team realized that students thought of learning as a continual service rather than as discrete, one-time products. Lower pricing = greater access = more opportunity for student engagement, which was important given the price sensitivity of their target audience.

Junyo: Recently launched, Junyo’s mission is to provide educators, students and parents with real-time analytics on each student’s learning process across a variety of subject matters. Taking advantage of the Big Data trend in this subject, Junyo is delivering a whole new way to measure learning effectiveness, and its ability to process and personalize data in its SaaS analytics platform is critical to its long-term success.

These are just three simple examples of companies that are reshaping the learning and education landscape as a result of the benefits of SaaS and subscriptions.