Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the distribution of your content. You said you cover all the way from K-12 to higher education. What is then the breadth of the content? Where do you have more concentration versus others? Where is the interest of your customer base?

Adrian Ridner: We experimented with a lot of formats for our videos. Given that we have 25 million users to the site every month, we can test a lot of different things. We tested the one-hour lecture; we tested short animated videos. We landed in the current format because it was the most engaging for our users. We didn’t want to just develop courses for the sake of courses. We wanted an end goal for that user.

To that end, we decided to focus on college credit. For a lot of our users, the problem we solved was college credit, but they wanted to do it in an affordable way that didn’t necessarily require them to be enrolled full-time at a university at this point in time. That’s one of our biggest use cases today – college credit and test preps. We offer over 75 courses that have been recommended for credit by the American Council of Education. Think of your first two to three years of college courses, such as psychology, math, and microeconomics. Now you can take those courses on our site, and if you pass the proctored exam at the end, you can transfer that college credit to about 2,000 colleges and universities.

Another had to do with the pace. If you think about it, a lot of students do test prep studying for the SAT. We have a lot of depth of content there. Our platform is very well set up for you to be able to figure out what you know already and what you need to learn to be able to ace that exam. We have a large number of students looking to solve that problem that use our platform. One customer use case, though, was a total surprise. When we started building the library, we were very student centric.

There were two use cases that shocked us. Since our site involves visual learning, we had a large population using us as a supplemental. They were in class, but they were using the video platform to understand the concepts. It makes sense. Some of the most popular areas are unexpected. If you think about reading a history book versus visualizing, you get better retention and understanding for certain types of students with each method. A large amount of the adoption was that supplemental learning aspect. The goal was not necessarily to earn credits or test prep. It was just to understand the material better.

The other customer use case, though, was a total surprise. When we started building the library, we were very student-centric. We didn’t prepare for teachers. We started developing, what I would call, high school to college level materials. All of a sudden, we started getting emails from middle school teachers, “My students are so engaged. They’re asking questions now.” When we first built the platform, we didn’t have things like assigning a lesson or quiz. We built that in now. Teachers can assign different videos and quizzes to their whole class, see what the students did on the quiz, and figure out the lecture of the next day based on the results.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com
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