Over the holidays, I was thinking about the connection between online education and the fiscal cliff. In the context of America’s current economic challenges, it’s more important than ever before that we develop a productive and inspired workforce. Sure we need to create millions of new jobs. But we also need to better educate millions of people so they can step into these positions and deliver. The question is: how can we accomplish this in a scalable way?
I love what Sal Khan has done to make us all think differently about education. Khan Academy is an important new vehicle for K-12 and college education and is providing students with a new way to learn. Its critical that we also take steps to transform access to high quality professional and continuing education. We’ve seen an unprecedented wave of entrepreneurs now aiming their sights on the online education market. The best of these startups have a role to play in helping our country get on the right track. Its not just that these companies will create new jobs for engineers, or contribute tax dollars. Its something bigger than that. Providing on-demand access to high quality education at massive scale can expand human potential and drive growth in our economy.
One of the new investments we made in 2012 was in a company called creativeLIVE, which delivers continuing education through the internet. The company was founded in 2010 by two entrepreneurs, one of whom, Chase, is a renowned photographer. Chase and his co-founder Craig launched an online photography school by inviting top professional photographers into a studio to broadcast live video instruction to aspiring photographers. They connected the classroom experience with Twitter, so that students could tweet comments to each other while watching a class, and could also ask questions of the instructor. Students could watch live broadcasts for free, and then if they wanted to own a class to access it on-demand at a future time, they could pay to do so, typically for about a hundred bucks.
Sounds simple enough? Simple, but powerful. In the two years since its launch from a small office in Seattle, creativeLIVE instructors have taught more than one million students through their platform. Their average live class draws 60,000 students. The most popular ones attract more than 150,000. creativeLIVE has paid out millions of dollars to its instructors, has been profitable since inception and is on a growth spurt like Yao Ming. Most importantly, open access to these courses is helping to change students’ lives. creativeLIVE is now expanding their curriculum beyond the field of photography out to other professional and continuing education topics.
Some of America’s traditional universities have been re-thinking how they deliver education, and that’s encouraging to see. For the sake of America’s economic future, the transformation needs to happen faster. Below is a list of five ways that top graduate schools—and actually all professional and continuing education providers—should re-invent how they operate.
1. Mission: Inspire students to translate their deepest passions into their day-to-day jobs
creativeLIVE is focused on helping creative entrepreneurs fulfill their potential. The company helps existing and aspiring professionals enhance their skills. Ultimately, it’s about enabling people to make a living doing what they love most. We should all aspire to that.
I don’t see a lot of evidence that our top universities have the same focus on encouraging students to pursue their passions. The stated mission of Harvard Business School is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. Leaders are far more effective when they are deeply inspired and passionate, at their core, about the work they’re pursuing. Unfortunately, most people in the workforce, even those with choices, don’t do what they truly love. There’s not enough focus at most schools on guiding students to introspection, to encouraging them to translate their deepest personal passions directly into their job choices post-graduation. The result is that top business schools turn out too many management consultants and not enough passionate creators.
2. Team: Hire the world’s best doers as teachers – and then set them loose
creativeLIVE’s teachers are among the best practitioners in the world at the subjects they teach. There’s a different expert teacher on wedding photography than there is on landscapes. The instructors are actively engaged across social media, so students can connect with them and learn from them before taking a class as well as long after a class is over.
I think highly of many of my former graduate school professors, and I did learn some important things in their classrooms. But for the most part they were academics, not practitioners. It’s odd to learn marketing from someone who has never done a marketing launch, or learn product development from someone who has never built a product. Think about it: Would you let someone who has studied and written extensively in theory about swimming, but has never actually swum, teach your toddler to swim in the deep end of a pool?
3. Product roadmap: Restructure the curriculum to teach 21st century skills
creativeLIVE teaches practical skills to help creative professionals develop their businesses. If you’re a photographer, you can learn specific photography techniques. But you can also learn about marketing yourself through social media, managing your time or money more effectively, or using software programs to improve your business.
At leading business schools, you read case studies. Lots and lots of case studies. Afterward, you participate in moderated discussions with your peers. This develops a couple of skills: First, you get used to processing tons of information and coming up with a coherent analysis. Second, you learn to communicate crisply and persuasively in front of other smart people. These are both useful business skills, and will come in handy someday if you are leading a large organization. But there are lots of practical skills business students should learn in the earlier stages of their careers that are less about analyzing and talking, and more about doing.
4. Technology: Launch a platform that provides truly open access to the classroom
Students tune into creativeLIVE broadcasts from around the world through a live, social, online video platform. They learn from the best instructors, they exchange comments and questions through Twitter, and they spread their passion for creativeLIVE to others around the world.
Leading graduate schools should develop live video streams from their classrooms out to the world. A teaching assistant could be responsible for scanning the Twitter feed for the best external questions or comments to share with the live in-person classroom. For any given classroom topic, the diversity of attendees from different countries and professions could further enrich the discussion. If a case is about doing business in Africa, there might be hundreds of students drawn into the extended classroom from Africa. Or if it’s about agriculture, there might be hundreds of people who are actually working in agriculture who could weigh in with their opinions. There could be polling to see how the broader remote audience responds to the comments of specific students in class. This would bring a whole new energy and dynamic – and greater collective knowledge – to the discussion.
5. Business model: Establish a freemium model to scale broad distribution and extract additional revenue from those who can pay.
creativeLIVE students tune in to live content for free, and then some of them pay to have on-demand access to the content after the live course ends. creativeLIVE has shown that people are responsive to paying for education if the content can enhance their careers. The result is a global business that is profitable and scaling rapidly. Pay-walls for content are falling all over the place, and for good reason. In the long run, facilitating open broad adoption is a better business model.
Top graduate school programs operate the ultimate pay wall, to the tune of up to $50,000 per year per student in some cases. The on-campus experience should continue as a super-premium tier for those who can and want to pay for it, and it would include today’s benefits of in-person instruction, direct network building with classmates and alumni, and the official graduate school credential. The broader external audience of students could tune in remotely for free, but could then also pay to own content on-demand. The revenue from this freemium tier might actually be larger than that produced by the current in-class students. This could lower the price of tuition for the super-premium tier and back to point number one above, could further free up more students to pursue their true passions post graduation.
Established graduate schools have so much to teach the world, but they also have a lot to learn. Higher education is itself a fascinating case study. Will it survive in its current form with its existing financial model, or will it aggressively embrace change? It is an innovator’s dilemma for sure.
James Slavet is a General Partner at Greylock, a leading venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley. His current companies include Coupons.com, One Kings Lane and Redfin. His most recent investment is creativeLIVE. James was named to the Forbes Midas List of top technology VCs in 2012. Prior to joining Greylock, James spent a decade in operating roles in consumer technology companies. He graduated from Brown University and Harvard Business School.
