📊 Segmenting an Online Course Market

About this simulation

Every listing in an online-course marketplace can be described by a handful of numbers: its price, its duration, its average rating, and its popularity (enrollments). Plotted together, courses that look nothing alike on the surface — a $9 two-hour crash course and a $299 sixty-hour certification — turn out to cluster into a small number of natural buyer niches once you look at their numbers side by side.

This simulation generates a synthetic marketplace of course listings drawn from a handful of hidden buyer archetypes (budget crash-courses, premium certifications, hobbyist enrichment courses, and free intro tasters), then runs the k-means clustering algorithm on the normalised data to see how well an unsupervised algorithm rediscovers those groups from the numbers alone.

How it works

• Each point is one course listing, positioned by price (X), rating (Z), and either duration or popularity (Y — your choice).
• K-means starts with k random centroids, assigns every point to its nearest centroid, moves each centroid to the mean of its points, and repeats until the assignments stop changing.
• Point colour shows the cluster it currently belongs to; larger diamonds mark the moving centroids.
• Inertia is the average squared distance from each point to its cluster centroid in normalised feature space — lower means tighter, more distinct segments.

Controls

• Clusters (k) — how many segments the algorithm should look for (2–6).
• Listings sampled — how many synthetic course listings make up the marketplace.
• Vertical axis — switch the Y axis between duration and popularity to view the market from a different angle.
• Show centroids — toggle the cluster-centre markers on or off.
• ↺ Resample & re-cluster — draws a fresh marketplace and reruns k-means from new random centroids. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.

Did you know?

Real education marketplaces use exactly this kind of clustering to decide how to price, bundle, and market courses — sellers targeting the "premium certification" segment use very different messaging than sellers chasing high-volume, low-price "crash course" buyers, even though both can be profitable niches.