I hope this message finds you well. I am a long-standing subscriber to The Construct with a stable subscription for nearly two years now. I recently began the “Docker Basics for Robotics” course, eager to enhance my knowledge. However, when I logged in today to continue, I found that my access to the course was restricted, with it now marked as “Enterprise Access Only.”
I’m quite disappointed and puzzled by this sudden change. As an individual subscriber, the upgrade to an enterprise-level subscription is quite costly and feels out of reach. I originally subscribed to gain full access to your valuable resources, and limiting certain courses to enterprise users now seems a bit unfair to loyal individual subscribers.
Could you please clarify why this particular course as well others is now exclusively available under an enterprise plan? I would appreciate any assistance you can provide in making this course accessible again for individual subscribers or, at the very least, some context for this change.
Thank you very much for your attention to this matter. I look forward to your response.
@slek
Thanks for being a long-standing subscriber to The Construct for the last 2+ years. We really appreciate that! And thank you for reaching out to us about this.
I understand your disappointment with the “sudden change” in your ability to access some of the courses. The primary context for this is that we didn’t make this change recently; this course and others have been available exclusively under the enterprise plan for more than two years now. You probably didn’t notice this before now because the first unit of every course is accessible to anyone (even without a license).
Now, why are some of the courses available exclusively to enterprise clients? It’s the only way (as we know it) we can sustainably recover the cost of producing and maintaining these courses. It might interest you to know that the Web team has been working on something related to running the Docker course for over a month now, and we’re still on it.
We hope you understand our situation, and why the enterprise courses are not available on the Learner subscription. We are always looking for ways to improve our services, so your suggestions are welcome.
Thanks again for reaching out. We appreciate your time.
Thank you for your detailed response and for taking the time to clarify the situation regarding enterprise-only courses. I understand the challenges involved in sustaining high-quality resources and the reasoning behind this model.
That said, I hope The Construct will consider keeping access to knowledge-based resources open to individual subscribers in the future. While I understand the need for certain limitations, it would be more equitable if these restrictions applied to technical capacities, such as the number of users, CPU power, lab access, or other infrastructure-related elements, rather than knowledge content itself.
I share this feedback in the spirit of collaboration, as I deeply value the resources The Construct offers. Thank you for your time and consideration, and for the good work that you do in ROS.
Maybe we didn’t make it clear in the value proposition (and I’m sorry for not providing those details in my previous response), but the Enterprise license is not just about the knowledge content itself. For practical purposes, it’s a combination of the content, the resources needed to learn and practise the content, and some extra perks. Please see the image below.
Even if we were to open the Enterprise courses to Learner subscribers, they would not be able to run them reliably because they require access to premium capabilities like computing power (CPU, Memory) and hardware like Robonik RB1 robot and RPi4 farms (for some courses).
I hope this adds some perspective, and we’ll still appreciate further feedback.
