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? >>>

Building a Fat Startup in Corporate Training: Karl Mehta, CEO of EdCast (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This is funded by Menlo?

Karl Mehta: Menlo was one of the investors, but the round was led by SoftBank Capital.

Sramana Mitra: What, in a nutshell, is the premise of EdCast?

Karl Mehta: EdCast is a knowledge network for anyone to develop lifelong learning as a passion. We have a knowledge economy and things are rapidly changing. In order to keep pace with whatever field that you’re working on, you want to get smarter every day. You need a network that is going to bring you the most personalized content in your field. Let’s say you’re into learning Big Data or even non-technology, you can go to EdCast and follow a channel on architecture, for example. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Felix Odigie, CEO of Inspired eLearning (Part 3)

Felix Odigie: When you think about where we actually win, it is in the analytics. You’re training to be more security-aware. How do you measure that? You must be able to show this analysis to the customer and the customer will show it to their executives. That’s what we do. We have a very advanced analytics software in our portfolio. That’s a very strong differentiation for us.

Think of what we’re doing as an antivirus, if you will. We try to prevent hacking access through humans. The next stage of evolution which we’re doing now in partnership is to have a partner who can deploy endpoint solutions just in time. You have FireEye. We have the content and the training.

Now you have a partner who can monitor user activity. When you click on the wrong email twice and you’ve been trained before, it’s time to get trained again. That automatically triggers training. It’s like an antivirus check with more advanced analytics and better ways to ensure that. This is more of a complete solution. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Felix Odigie, CEO of Inspired eLearning (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How do you go to market? Are people paying for different modules separately or do you have an all-you-can-eat kind of subscription model?

Felix Odigie: It’s a SaaS business model. We have different types of customers. We have enterprise customers, small business customers, and even have individual smaller  business customers who purchase their modules on our e-commerce platform. In other words, you can buy the product by the library where you have access to all of the products and you can deploy it to your employees, or you can just buy specific sets of courses depending on what you’re trying to enforce.

I did mention the other categories that we have like sexual harassment and HIPAA. Security awareness is our biggest because it’s quite prevalent but we have other compliance areas as well. We host the courses on our LMS which makes it easy to deploy to the customer and optimize the user experience. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Felix Odigie, CEO of Inspired eLearning (Part 1)

Inspired eLearning is doing something very effective in Cyber Security education. Read on to learn more.

Sramana Mitra: Give us a little bit of introduction to yourself as well as to the company.

Felix Odigie: I have a background in Computer Engineering. I went to Northeastern University and did my Masters at the Wharton School. The company I run is actually Inspired eLearning. We’re into security awareness and compliance e-learning space. We provide education for the enterprise.

To make that a little simpler for everyone, what we stumbled upon is, it became very difficult for hackers and network intruders to attack network infrastructure because there was a lot of investment in securing networks. The natural place for them to gravitate towards was to hack the individuals who are already inside infrastructure. That was easy. We are susceptible to phishing scams. That was our mission. >>>