Thought Leaders in Online Education: Achieve3000 CEO Stuart Udell (Part 5)

Stuart Udell: I have the pleasure to be one of only two members of the EdTech community who are part of the American Association of School Administrators’ new commission for student-centered and equity-focused education. The goal of that organization is to create a blueprint for the future of American education.

While there was a lot of good in the old model, it’s not good enough anymore. There’s a ton of investment coming in. There’s a lot of private equity investment for the middle-sized and larger companies in the space. It’s a really exciting time for us to take learning to a new level. That’s true in the school level and in higher education. 

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Achieve3000 CEO Stuart Udell (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We’re hearing a lot about going into accounts through the teacher network. It seems to be working really well. You’re reinforcing the point by getting products in the hands of teachers through some sort of a freemium model and getting people to start looking at the product. There’s a virality to this. It seems like you’re seeing a lot of that. Could you speak more to that trend?

Stuart Udell: That is a trend. Teachers do like to talk to each other. It’s not just because they’re chatty. When they try a product, they’ll usually talk to other teachers first in the same grade. Then the other teachers will try it too. Then they go to their principal saying, “We’re all trying this individually. We’d like to unlock more tools.”

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Achieve3000 CEO Stuart Udell (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When the teacher is assigning this reading through your product, is the student doing that reading at home?

Stuart Udell: Before COVID, about 46% of our reading was done after school hours. Since COVID, that number jumped to the high 80s and even touched 90%. The nice thing is, there are lots of flexible models that can really work here. The student can read individually at home. Then the discussion can happen in the classroom the next day. The classroom can mean physical or remote. Then there are lots of teachers who will tell kids to silently read for 15 to 20 minutes and discuss in the classroom. It’s a very flexible implementation model.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Achieve3000 CEO Stuart Udell (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to go in a bunch of different directions in the next part of the interview. One, let’s start with the product and the model of how students are using the product. What is the infrastructure? How are teachers engaging? How are parents engaging to come up with a good outcome?

Stuart Udell: Our flagship product is actually the name of the company – Achieve3000. It represents two-thirds of our revenue. What Achieve3000 Literacy does so exceptionally well is that it’s built to provide equity and access for kids. It does that by helping the teacher differentiate instruction in the classroom. That’s something that all teachers think about.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Achieve3000 CEO Stuart Udell (Part 1)

McGraw Hill has just acquired Achieve3000. Stuart is an EdTech veteran who discusses the pre-K-12 literacy gap, personalized learning, as well as open opportunities in B-to-C education models driven by Covid.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about your own background and introduce us to the company. Let’s get acquainted.

7 Udemy Courses on How To Build an Online Learning Startup

Online learning has exploded in popularity over the last decade. In Covid, the field has found a tremendous force multiplier.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Brian Kibby, CEO of Modern Campus (Part 3)

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. 

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Brian Kibby, CEO of Modern Campus (Part 2)

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.