Sramana Mitra: I think there is a lot of interesting material out there. In this series, we talked to people like Thinkific. They’re operating as a Shopify for online educators. There’s a tremendous amount of teaching online going on right now. Platforms are enabling that process. If I’m running a continuing education program and I want to scale rapidly, a very effective way would be to find a curated set of high-quality courses from instructors who’ve already built these courses.
I have a global reputation in teaching entrepreneurship. I would be very interested on working with your 150 CE providers. We have no problem on the certification side because we don’t offer certifications.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Interestingly, we’ve covered Destiny Solutions in 2013. Let me double-click down on a few different pieces of what you’ve told me so far. The one that I find the most interesting is in distributing our technology entrepreneurship courses. Over the last 15 years, we have developed one of the largest collection of early-stage technology entrepreneurship case studies in the world.
On top of that, we’ve built our digital curriculum. We just did a partnership with Udemy where we have put 25 courses based on this material. Today, we distribute our program in two business models. One is the 1M1M Basic, which is our education program only. It’s $99 a month all-you-can-eat curriculum subscription. Then we have a $1,000 a year digital acceleration program subscription that includes online mentoring and introduction to investors.
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Brian discusses a gigantic white space in continuing education that colleges and universities have left open. Modern Campus is trying to address this gap, among other things. Very interesting conversation.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Modern Campus.
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During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Betsy Corcoran, Co-founder of EdSurge, for a lively discussion on EdTech.
We then went on to discuss another one of my startup ideas from 8 Startup Ideas for the Post COVID World:
Startup Ideas for the Post Covid World: K-12 Education
You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
Sramana Mitra: What is that customized IT environment?
Joseph Scuralli: We have a lot of systems that were developed to work together to cater to online. Many institutions host their own learning management systems. We used to do that. We learned that it was more reliable to be in the cloud.
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Joe discusses open problems in online education.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Berkeley College and yourself.
Joseph Scuralli: I am the Dean for Online Education at Berkeley College. I’m also Dean of the Larry L. Luing School of Business. I currently carry out responsibilities for both of those positions. I started at Berkeley College in 2007 as a full-time faculty member.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a little bit about the go-to market strategy. It’s all user-generated content. You have a great coverage of high school, college students, and post-academic learning. What is the go-to market strategy? How do people find you? Is it all word-of-mouth?
Matthew Glotzbach: We’ve been fortunate that all of our user growth has been organic. There are two facets of that. One is word-of-mouth and sharing. Users love the product. We have a very beloved brand. They share with their friends and their study groups.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Where is the scalable capacity to train large numbers of retail workers to become healthcare workers? That speaks to the kind of things that you’re talking about. If there were such a transition path with proper credentialing, that would be extremely valuable under the current circumstances.
Matthew Glotzbach: Absolutely. We see that trend of what I might call reskilling or upskilling. We’re already seeing that trend on Quizlet. It’s something that will continue to accelerate.
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