Delivering practical and authentic lessons - Issue #5
In the middle of November, news came out about Gagan’s new startup, which he co-founded with Wes Kao with a yet-to-announce name. He mentioned launching a new company a few months before through his tweet. Some of the biggest names in tech, like Li Jin (coined the term “passion economy”) and Lenny Rachitsky, already launched their courses with a focus on creator economy and product management, respectively.
For those who didn’t know Gagan, he was one of the guys who was responsible for bringing out university courses at scale to users outside through the Massive open online course (MOOC) pioneer company - Udemy. The company was founded back in 2009, and it has then enabled hundreds of millions of users, primarily students, to learn at their own pace at their comfort. On the other side, Wes was the co-founder of altMBA - an online cohort-based leadership program with an over 95% completion rate.
They have experienced scaling learning platforms close to completion rate and hundreds of millions of users. They see enormous room for improvement in creating a better learning experience. Here’s why:
MOOC platforms have democratized access to learning at a fraction of cost and time, but it's just not efficient enough.
“Sea of topics” - which everyone can learn anytime and anywhere but be constrained by the depth of the way it’s being delivered.
Education isn’t well-suited for the aggregator model.
Massive open online course (MOOC) platforms have democratized access to learning at a fraction of cost and time, but it's just not efficient enough.
In an article published by MIT’s Justin Reich and José A. Ruipérez-Valiente titled “The MOOC pivot”, they seek to decipher the rationale for the failure of MOOC in achieving their professed goal of remodeling the learning experience for higher education worldwide. What happened to be the revolutionary way of learning turns out to be a dead-end as they struggle for sustainability.
Coursera is a great example, to begin with, for MOOC. The model sought after as a potential disruptor to education learning by bringing down the courses to mass audiences saw a big challenge - a low completion rate. Only a single-digit percentage of 26 million students completed the course they started in Coursera.
With quantitative evidence that backed up what many people reckoned, both the MIT researchers outlined the data analysis that they’ve collected from 2012 to 2018 from all courses taught by MIT on edX
Despite a high-flown interest in homogenizing the way into higher education across the globe, the idea of bringing the courses to a mass audience seems to be inversely true. The populated data set forth the geographical location of most of the students are from developed countries.
A third came (15.9% and 14%) from countries categorized as “medium” to “high” human capital development, respectively, while over two-thirds (68.7%) are categorized as having “very high”. Only 1.4% (55,000) came from the considerably “low” segment.
Besides, the consistently low retention and low enrollment rate explain the rationale of why MOOC is not working.
Despite having as high as over 1 million users who had their first-hand experience in the MOOC platform in 2015-2016, only 51,996 ended up retained in the platform following 2 years of using it. The downward trend applies to every registered year from 2012 to 2018.
“Sea of topics” which everyone can learn anytime and anywhere but be constrained by the depth of the way it’s being delivered.
MOOC platforms are great for learning new things. However, learning a particular syllabus quickly is not something that they would make easy. There are tonnes of available resources on the internet, but qualifying and constructing them into a branch of the connected web is difficult.
In the classroom, the syllabus serves as a roadmap for learning. It tells you what you should learn, in what order, and what the overarching theme should be at each point. It even shows you how long the whole process will take. But transferring the approach into an online premise isn’t a piece of cake.
Today, we can rely on Mr. Google to resolve almost every unknown. However, as we go deeper into our questions, the answers don’t seem to be very helpful, and we start to question ourselves, “There are millions of published books out there which could easily be shared across the web, but why don’t we see much?”. This is due to the copyright infringement between publishers and Google. As a result, our queries left us with little deep and quality content, such as online moderators (Quora, Reddit) and blogs.
Education isn’t well-suited for the aggregator model.
Tech-facing education companies have been in the news with multiple accolades of significant transactions and newly-minted business models. BYJU and Unacademy, arguably the most competitive EdTech companies in India, acquired a few startups such as:
WhiteHat Jr (founded in 2018) sold to BYJU for $300 million.
Doubtnut (founded in 2016) acquired an all-cash deal with a valuation of $100 million.
PrepLadder (founded in 2015), sold to Unacademy for $50 million in a cash and stock deal.
Meanwhile, in a more developed internet economy like the US, Lynda has made the largest transaction with over $1.5 billion in sales to Linkedin. In comparison, General Assembly sold to Adecco Group for over $400 million, marking them as the largest online coding boot camp acquisition to date.
Yet, building an aggregator education company is still *hardly* impossible. Here’s why.
Completing the job to be done is a sticky wicket.
A series of customer data doesn’t always make up the right decision. Let’s take the example of John. He’s a 45 years-old banker with a family of six and works across 1st Avenue. Ride a motorbike to work and like to have coffee in the early morning. However, this doesn’t make him subscribe to a monthly Wired magazine due to more specific information needed to understand his motivation to accomplish a particular task - hence the birth of the “job to be done” framework.For the aggregator model to succeed, the user needs to have a specific task that they want to accomplish. Simply put, Uber passengers are an example: “Getting from point X to Y” or Youtube, “Searching for XY video”. However, this situation could not be applied to the case of education.
Credentials of the instructor matters (a lot!).
With the “Uber for X” or “Airbnb for X” model, we don’t care much what’s the profile of the drivers or host; as long as it is convenient, safe and affordable, that’s all that matters. However, imagine if the instructor is somewhat from a random institution with an inexistent teaching record. No one would want to have that in their completion certificate.