5 Thought Leaders in Online Education

Online education and training continue to grow in popularity. It costs less for students to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees online. Employers, too, save money by arranging for employees to take training courses online and on their own time. Through the following interviews with five leaders in online education, you will find a synthesis of the various trends and opportunities that I see at this point.

• Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com – Adrian started Study.com in 2002. Read how the trends in online education have impacted the evolution of a very interesting business. Excellent story.
• Felix Odigie, CEO of Inspired eLearning – Inspired eLearning is doing something very effective in Cyber Security education. Read on to learn more.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The last question I have from a trend point of view is, are you seeing this interest in lifelong learning translating into how long people subscribe to your program?

Adrian Ridner: It shows up in two ways. One is people who subscribe for longer but move around a lot of different subject areas. They’ll look at History. Then they’ll look at Math. The other way is, they will look up what they need to learn. Sometimes, they’ll stay for a few months. They’ll leave. Three months later, you’ll see the same person resubscribe. It shows up in two ways and it is not always like you expect. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You are expecting that somewhere in the near future, you’re going to be able to access some Federal funding to educate low-income students. You’re going to be part of the government’s resources to deal with the education of a large number of students?

Adrian Ridner: Absolutely. The pilot program is initially in the test phase. We were selected for that. Assuming there’s a monitoring agency associated with the program that’s going to look at the outcomes of the program for the students themselves, we expect that it will scale over time. There’s a lot of talk around free college and providing college access. I will say that this program is one of the first things I’ve seen where that’s doable when you look at the logistics part of it because it brings the cost of a degree to sub-$8,000 instead of $40,000. It’s the best path I’ve seen to convert some of those promises of accessibility and equal access to education into a reality. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now revenue-wise? How far along are you?

Adrian Ridner: As a privately-held company, we don’t share specific financials, but we’re definitely in the tens of million range.

Sramana Mitra: What trends do you see out there right now that you think are interesting trends that are worth discussing in this conversation?

Adrian Ridner: There are a few that tie in that I think are really important. One is the shift to lifelong learning. The idea that information is at the tip of your fingers and with smartphones’ unlimited access to anything you want, the world is evolving quickly. Anything you learn becomes obsolete very quickly. It’s no longer the way you need to interact with the world around you. In the knowledge economy, the ability to learn and learn new things quickly is the most >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: For eight years, you did the advertising-based model. What kind of numbers of users did you reach? What level of monetization were you able to achieve with advertising? As you know, content is very difficult to monetize with advertising.

Adrian Ridner: Yes, that is one of the things that we also realized, especially when we shifted to video. The investment into the advertising was not as good as it could have been to allow for continued scaling. We were probably at about 10 million to 12 million visitors a month. Even at that level, we were getting multi-million visitors per year. This is probably a lesson for me if I were going to go back in time. It’s far superior from that perspective. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You described a bunch of different use cases. Could you roll back and take me through the business models of these use cases? For example, if people are taking courses on your platform to make up for credits that colleges are accepting, are the students or parents paying for these courses to you? If so, what is the price point?

Adrian Ridner: All of the plans are monthly subscription models. Our basic package for basic access to our platform and not for test prep costs $49 a month. That inlcudes access to all 3,000 courses. You can have unlimited use of the library as well as our mobile app. For test prep for premium users who want the practice exams with the adaptive learning functionality, the price is $59 a month. The college plan is our high-end plan,which costs $199 a month. It includes all of our >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the distribution of your content. You said you cover all the way from K-12 to higher education. What is then the breadth of the content? Where do you have more concentration versus others? Where is the interest of your customer base?

Adrian Ridner: We experimented with a lot of formats for our videos. Given that we have 25 million users to the site every month, we can test a lot of different things. We tested the one-hour lecture; we tested short animated videos. We landed in the current format because it was the most engaging for our users. We didn’t want to just develop courses for the sake of courses. We wanted an end goal for that user. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com (Part 1)

Adrian started Study.com in 2002. Read how the trends in online education have impacted the evolution of a very interesting business. Excellent story.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Study.com. What do you do? Where is the company located?

Adrian Ridner: What we try to do is develop the simplest way to learn. We’ve created over 20,000 short, animated video lessons. We’ve organized them all in courses covering major subject areas, all the way from elementary school to college. We’re currently helping over 25 million students and teachers every month to improve their grades and even earn low-cost college credit. We’re located in Mountain View, California and have been bootstrapped since 2002.

Sramana Mitra: How does what you do fit into the context of all the other things that are happening in the online education segment, especially K-12 and college? For example, how does what you offer compare with Khan Academy? >>>