Russians are ready to spend money on online education

Publication date: 29 January 2019

Online education market in Russia: 78% of expenses are spent on advanced training

In 2018, Russians spent 1,389,000 rubles on additional online education, and most often they chose professional development in economics, programming, finance, and pedagogics.

Professional development courses took 78% of all expenditures on online education Russians made in 2018. Business courses were the most popular and took 38% of all expenditures; the second most popular was programming with 14%, then followed finance, medicine, management, and foreign languages with 4%, 3.8%, 2.6%, and 1.9%, respectively. The least popular were online courses in accounting, pedagogy, marketing, design, and web design.

According to a research carried out by ATOL company, the segment of non-professional development courses increased from 19% to 27% last year. The most popular were painting courses (6% of the total turnover of online courses), beauty webinars (4%), and personal development courses (2%). It is worth noting that marketing courses generally cost much more than programming ones that is 32,700 and 9,000 rubles, respectively.

Mikhail Burmistrov, managing partner Infoline-analytics, noted that the Russian online market of higher and professional education (excluding language training, early childhood education, primary education, and secondary education) exceeded 18 billion rubles. Additional professional education accounts for about 72% that is over 13 billion rubles. The strongest growth is seen in the segment of amateur courses on online marketing and personal development, which are actively launched and promoted in social networks.

According to East-West Digital News, the global education market is equal to 4.5−5.0 trillion U.S. dollars and is about to grow above 6−7 trillion U.S. dollars in the coming years. The share of online education is about 3% (165 billion U.S. dollars).