Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch to a different topic. Our audience is entrepreneurs. Talk to me about what you are doing in the realm of entrepreneurship education – first at the undergraduate level and then at the graduate level.

Sher Downing: We currently have an undergraduate degree in Entrepreneurship and that includes coursework that allows them to work on tested ideas. We are in the process of rolling out our new Entrepreneurship Center. That will allow for more showcasing of those pieces. It also allows them to learn from each other.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 3)

Sher Downing: One of the things that we do is have all tenured full-time faculty teach our online classes. So you get the same award-winning faculty online that you would get if you came in to take a course. We have surveyed the students and monitored the course just to see what the students enjoy. Over the last two years, we’ve seen an increase in the use of mobile devices. People want the ability to access things easily through mobile devices. We have made an effort to offer online lectures that they can also download as an MP3 or MP4. What we have found from student feedback is that many times they listen to it on a first run while they’re commuting. Then, they go home and watch the video a second time -particularly if it’s a type of application that has to show them steps on how to do something.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When people are working on these online programs – specifically, we are interested in understanding your online offering – are they doing online only program or is everything an online/offline combination?

Sher Downing: Our online programs offer a real breadth of flexibility and ability to learn within a capsulated calendar. Students, at the graduate level, will take one course at a time. One course will be five weeks long. Within those five weeks, they do have certain deadlines each week that they have to meet for submitting case studies and working in a team environment. Within that, they have the flexibility of working on their materials as it fits into their lifestyle. For example, they may have a deadline on Friday. How they complete the coursework by Friday is truly up to them. If they want to work on it during the day, they can. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 1)

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Much is changing in the world of education. Universities are becoming large scale providers in online learning. Arizona State University is at the fore of this trend, running one of the largest business programs online.

Sramana Mitra: Sher, let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to what’s happening at the Business School at Arizona State University.

Sher Downing: The W.P. Carey School of Business, which is at Arizona State University, is one of the largest business schools in the nation. This year, we have around 11,000 students in various business tracks that are both face-to-face as well as online. We also have some pure online degrees that we are doing across the globe. We focus on developing the ideal that business is personal. We want people to come out of our school with a real sense of entrepreneurship and ability to do a lot of different things in their lives. >>>

Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What was the monetization model on that one? Were they monetizing well?

Blaine Vess: I don’t think they were monetizing as best as they could, but both of them were making money out of Google AdSense. Flash Card Exchange had a lifetime membership for $20 a month. If you paid, you would not see any advertising and you also got a bit of storage space if you wanted to upload images or audio to flash cards. When we bought it, we removed the premium membership because we’ve been focused on growth and getting people to love the site and the brand. Right now, we only make money on advertising. We’re eventually going to launch a premium membership where you can have the advertising removed if you pay, mainly because a lot of people have requested that feature.

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Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: But it did not pan out that way?

Blaine Vess: It did not pan out, but we learned a lot in the process – mainly about a lot of the things that we were doing wrong like not having employees. We had very high margins. We were making a lot of money and not really spending that money on growing the business. We didn’t have an office. It was a highly educational process for us. In 2011, after going through that process, we decided that we wanted to give it a try. That summer, we hired our first employee who was our office manager at that time. We hired some programmers and an in-house SEO person. We got an office. The process has continued since then.

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Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In 2008, you have got one acquisition under your belt. What happens next?

Blaine Vess: We ended up buying another site, which was called All Free Essays. It was another site that has been around since about 2000. It was not monetized at all. I had been reaching out to the owner for at least a year about buying the site. She wasn’t interested. I finally just made an offer of under $35,000 and she accepted it. The philosophy around that acquisition was the same as bignerds.com. We wanted the traffic and content. We were once again able to monetize it better than how it was monetized before we bought it.

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Student Entrepreneur to $10M+ Business: Blaine Vess, CEO of StudyMode (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I want to know precisely what happened in 2008. What are the significant things that you did in 2008 and how did those play out? This $1.1 million, was there a concentration of colleges you were getting this from?

Blaine Vess: In 2008, we launched in international markets and started the acquisition of our competitors. That year, we ended up doing about $2.8 million in revenue. We get visitors from all over the world so it wasn’t coming from a specific college.

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