Online Tutoring Still In Its Infancy: Sylvan Learning CEO Jeff Cohen (Part 2)

SM: Do the teachers recommend you to students’ parents?

JC: Sometimes. It is true that our service is a referral or word-of-mouth business. We have been and still are the largest private employer of teachers in the country. We have a special relationship with teachers, and there are thousands who come to Sylvan after school and teach for us. It is very likely that teachers get to know our system and see how it supplements what they are doing during the day. They can then refer us to parents whose children are struggling in a subject.

SM: What are your scientific processes for skill gap analysis? What technology do you have to do that ?

JC: First is a battery of assessments. We believe deeply that assessments should be used to diagnose and pinpoint where a student may be struggling. That is very different from your typical tutoring experience where the tutor asks the student which lesson she is having trouble with. We go backwards and go through an assessment process to understand in a fundamental way where there are skill gaps based on standardized assessments. Based on those results, we build a tailored learning plan. If you are paying for our service and are looking to supplement what your child is learning, you want us working on the skills for which there are gaps. We use assessments to diagnose that. That is in the case where we have students who are behind and need to catch up.

We also have many students who want to accelerate their learning. We still recommend assessments to know their baseline, although it is not quite as necessary as for students who have fallen behind in their learning.

SM: What is the format of the assessments? Are they computerized?

JC: We are moving to mostly online assessments. Years ago it was developed as a paper and pencil assessment, which we still have today. We have moved some to an online format and shift to digital form.

SM: Can you give me some numbers to give a sense of the scale of the business?

JC: Today we have about 1,000 centers throughout the United States. Over the years, we have served millions of students. From a service and scale standpoint, we are the leading provider of supplemental education in North America.

SM: What is your revenue level, and how has it changed over time?

JC: We are private, so we do not publish economic performance. We are also a franchise, so you can get a sense of things looking at our disclosure documents. The past couple of years have been challenging given the economy, but the demand characteristics of tutoring and supplemental education have remained strong. Despite the poor economy, children are still going to school, and there is more pressure than ever around college admissions. The knowledge economy and the flattening of the world from a competitive standpoint are all factors that drive demand for our service.

Our business has felt the effects of the recession; however, we also have seen a resiliency that you would expect. We are starting to see some stabilization in the economy, which makes us optimistic for 2010 and beyond.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Online Tutoring Still In Its Infancy: Sylvan Learning CEO Jeff Cohen
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