Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: From everything that I have read about Khan Academy, they are also doing a lot of test analysis and skill gap analysis. What is your analysis of their work?

Rob Waldron: I don’t analyze their work. I see it out there and my kids use it sometimes. It’s been a remarkable asset for the world to have access to that content. I don’t spend all my time analyzing the competition. What we are doing is working with educators every day. We have a long list of things that they want and we just keep making that better and better. I don’t really worry about what everyone else does. I am super focused on what the teachers and administrators want. My understanding is that they don’t think there’s anything close. Again, we don’t have time to go look at each competitor. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 1)

Rob and I discuss the evolution of personalized learning, skill gap analysis, curriculum design, and much more in this excellent interview.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Curriculum Associates.

Rob Waldron: I’m the CEO of Curriculum Associates. We’re a K-12 ed tech company. We’ve actually been in business for a long time. We became a tech company five or six years ago but we continue to have a healthy print business as well. The pencil and paper still works in education, but increasingly a majority of our business comes from technology. >>>

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 >>>