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Online Education Provider Coursera Is Now Worth More Than $1 Billion

• At Coursera, he’s put the company on a growth trajectory that includes expansion around the world.
• After the U.S., Coursera’s greatest growth has come from India, China, Mexico and Brazil, in that order.

Coursera, one of the companies featured on Forbes’ 2018 list of Next Billion-Dollar Startups, is worth well over $1 billion, says its CEO, Jeff Maggioncalda. The seven-year-old online education provider, based in Mountain View, California, announced this morning that it had raised an additional $103 million in funding. “This gives us the resources to more aggressively push on our mission of greater access to quality education and greater opportunity for people who are being left behind in this economy,” he says.

Since our feature story on Coursera last October, the number of registered learners on the site has climbed from 36 million to 40 million. When we published, the company had been valued at $800 million. Its revenue, which Forbes pegged at $140 million in 2018, is fueled in part by partnerships with 1,800 enterprise customers. They include Adobe, which paid Coursera an estimated $150,000 last year to provide machine-learning courses to Adobe employees.

Three months ago, Coursera signed a deal with the Abu Dhabi School of Government, an entity set up to train 60,000 government employees in digital skills like data science and artificial intelligence. Maggioncalda says that partnership is Coursera’s most extensive to date.

Coursera also offers 14 online masters degrees, in computer science, business and public health, from schools like the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And it just launched its first online bachelor of science degree with the highly regarded University of London.

Coursera’s news comes at a time when critics like Kevin Carey, director of education policy at the liberal-leaning New America foundation, have raised concerns about the high cost of online degrees. In a widely-read April article published in the Huffington Post, headlined “The Creeping Capitalist Takeover of Higher Education,” he wrote that online education should slash the price of a good degree. But instead, many schools use online program managers, known as OPMs, to produce and market their online courses. OPMs charge as much as 60% of tuition for the service. Students who earn online degrees offered through OPMs pay the same high tuition as they would if they studied on campus. “What this means is that an innovation that should have been used to address inequality is serving to fuel it,” he wrote. (Read Forbes’ story on 2U, a leading OPM here.)

By contrast, Coursera does no course production and takes only 40% of tuition. Its marketing costs are low, says Maggioncalda, because it already reaches a huge number of learners. One example of a low-cost Coursera degree: its online iMBA from the University of Illinois’ highly-ranked Gies College of Business, which costs $22,000. Out-of-state students pay $75,000 in tuition for an on-campus degree.

Though its partnerships with companies and its degree programs are growing, he says the $49 fee (or subscription fee of $49-$99 per month) learners pay to earn completion certificates for its wide selection of courses that are open to the public still account for the largest share of Coursera’s revenue.

Stanford computers science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng founded Coursera in 2012 as a platform to offer massive open online courses, known as MOOCs. Their vision was to give students around the world free access to college courses taught by professors from top universities. At first, Coursera charged nothing to students, who earned no academic credit. Princeton, Penn and Michigan signed on. Tremendous hype followed, with thought leaders like the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman writing about Coursera and its fellow MOOC providers Udacity and edEx, “Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s problems.”

The narrative soon switched to “the death of the MOOC,” after data from two University of Pennsylvania studies showed that 80% of people who registered for free MOOCs already had degrees and only half of them bothered to look at a single lecture. A minuscule 4% completed their courses.

In 2014 Coursera hired former Yale president Rick Levin and started charging $30-$70 for course completion certificates. In 2017 Maggioncalda took over the top job. He had a track record running a successful company started by Stanford professors. In 2010 he took retirement planning website Financial Engines, founded by Nobel prize winner William F. Sharpe and former SEC commissioner Joseph Grundfest, public. By the time he left, its market cap was close to $2 billion and his net worth was north of $50 million.

At Coursera, he’s put the company on a growth trajectory that includes expansion around the world. After the U.S., Coursera’s greatest growth has come from India, China, Mexico and Brazil, in that order.

The latest investment in Coursera was led by SEEK Group, an Australian company with stakes in online employment and education firms. SEEK was joined by previous Coursera investors Future Fund and NEA. It brings Coursera’s total funding to $313 million.

Coursera is the second company on Forbes’ 2018 Next Billion-Dollar Startup list to cross into unicorn territory this week. Read Amy Feldman’s story about trucking industry technology provider KeepTruckin here.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/04/25/online-education-provider-coursera-is-now-worth-more-than-1-billion/#7f0138a130e1

Bringing edtech solutions to the next half billion

As entrepreneurs ride the internet wave to build and provide disruptive edtech solutions, it is important to remember that we’re only just scratching the surface with its possibilities.

• Today, there are about 260 million students in K12 schools and 30 million in higher education institutions
• Further, there are 75 million children in the 3-6 year early childhood category, while at the other end of the age spectrum there are hundreds of millions of working professionals in need of constant upskilling due to the evolving nature of their jobs.

By Namita Dalmia

Today, there are about 260 million students in K12 schools and 30 million in higher education institutions. Further, there are 75 million children in the 3-6 year early childhood category, while at the other end of the age spectrum there are hundreds of millions of working professionals in need of constant upskilling due to the evolving nature of their jobs.

Families rely on education as a gateway to opportunity and a meaningful life. Hence, 40% of K12 students go to private schools and one-fourth students, from both government and private schools, opt for after-school tuitions. Despite this, learning and employability outcomes remain poor. Only 26% of Grade 5 students can do a simple division (ASER 2016), 38% of youth in age 14-18 can apply mathematics to the real-world problem of calculating ‘discount’ (ASER 2017), and 56% of employers continue to report talent shortage (Manpower Group 2018).

However, it isn’t all bad news. India’s increasingly mobile-first outlook offers the solution. In July 2018, 390 million Indians were consuming nearly 8GB internet data each month. Over the next five years, half a billion more will come online for the first time due to declining internet prices and improving connectivity. Given the education outcomes gap and India’s growth in mobile penetration, education technology or edtech provides us a tool to level the field. But in order to capitalise on this opportunity, edtech entrepreneurs will have to build trust with the users, just like many other sectors have—for example, bill payments, travel and online shopping. Over the last few years, we have learnt the following ways in which edtech can overcome some of these trust issues:

Rooting in sound, holistic pedagogy: Great teachers focus on deep conceptual learning, real-life applications, personalised feedback and continuous motivation. While most edtech provides some of these, they miss out on other crucial elements. These solutions then rely on successful implementation—at home by parents or in-class by teachers, which is often lacking. Vedantu—a full-stack, live teaching solution—bridges this gap by combining the skills of a great teacher with an AI-personalised platform for individual learning support and providing an academic mentor for motivational support.

Keeping users at centre: Any edtech solution must keep both teachers and students at the centre of the solution. For a decade, a large amount of content has been created and made available but has failed to see significant pull from users. Doubtnut, a learning app, on the other hand sees organic adoption and engagement with its doubt resolution feature that solves pain point of students when they get stuck solving tricky problems.

Linking & ensuring outcomes: Exam results and competitive examinations ranks are yardsticks that help parents and schools to measure outcomes. Offline players like tuition classes have created brands on the back of the outcomes. Edtechs have surfaced but need to accelerate outcomes in order to win in the long run. Similarly, upskilling programmes for working professionals, English language learning for vocational learners and coding boot camps for university students can demonstrate success through job placements or increased wages.

Going beyond ‘academic’ outcomes: Developing competencies like critical thinking and creativity, and mindsets such as grit and empathy are vital to quality learning and crucial for learners to succeed as the workforce of the future. There is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to build solutions that focus on building 21st century skills and integrating these in the pedagogy of academic subjects. Code.org is an example of a platform for building logic, creativity, algorithmic thinking skills by teaching students how to code.

Optimising pricing: Edtech sold direct to learners will eventually need to replace offline purchases and not just remain supplemental in order to create value through monetisation. It must reduce the burden on both parents’ wallets and students’ time and so a full-stack solution has higher potential than a fragmented offering. Moreover, offering trials or small-size purchase options before a full purchase is a useful strategy to break trust barriers with first-time customers.

Building cultural relevance: A majority of learners are comfortable in vernacular or bilingual medium of instructions, even when they go to “English-medium” schools. Platforms like Khan Academy, DIKSHA, Doubtnut cater to this need. Besides localising content offerings, edtech entrepreneurs should adopt relevant UI/UX and product flow strategies that will work with their target segments.

As education entrepreneurs ride the internet wave to build and provide disruptive edtech solutions, it is important to remember we’re only just scratching the surface with its possibilities. But there’s no doubt that the education sector is ready more than ever for disruption at scale.

The author is principal, Investments, Omidyar Network India, an investment firm focused on social impact

Source: https://www.financialexpress.com/education-2/bringing-edtech-solutions-to-the-next-half-billion/1554971/

Chegg eyes India for next level growth, aims to cash in on edtech boom

• Santa Clara-based education technology (edtech) major Chegg is eyeing India for its next level of growth.

• Company is studying the market, including other edtech firms, to gauge the feasibility of starting operations in the country.

Listed on the New York Stock Exchange, it is a major player in the connected learning or online education space.

It has a subscription-based model for college students, offering study help, writing and learning tools, tutoring and text book rental.

Currently, India is one of the biggest markets for Chegg for talent and content acquisition, and is employing more than 500 people for the same. In addition to its full-time employees, they also have a network of 80,000 qualified experts and students.

“For us, Chegg India is the hub of content and talent. Also, a chunk of our back end engineering teams that power our technology platform are based out of India. It remains one of the most attractive markets beyond the US, and we will continue to evaluate options,” said Nathan Schultz, president of learning services at Chegg.

The company said that it has over 3.1 million paid subscribers in the US, an increase of 38 per cent year-on-year.

Source: https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/chegg-eyes-india-for-next-level-growth-aims-to-cash-in-on-edtech-boom-119040600808_1.html