Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You described a bunch of different use cases. Could you roll back and take me through the business models of these use cases? For example, if people are taking courses on your platform to make up for credits that colleges are accepting, are the students or parents paying for these courses to you? If so, what is the price point?

Adrian Ridner: All of the plans are monthly subscription models. Our basic package for basic access to our platform and not for test prep costs $49 a month. That inlcudes access to all 3,000 courses. You can have unlimited use of the library as well as our mobile app. For test prep for premium users who want the practice exams with the adaptive learning functionality, the price is $59 a month. The college plan is our high-end plan,which costs $199 a month. It includes all of our college courses as well as two proctored exams. One of the things you have to keep in mind is, not only do you have to get through the course, you also have to pass the proctored exam at the end. You can take up to two of them per month.

Sramana Mitra: You’re essentially paying monthly subscription fees. You can do however many courses you like, but you can do a maximum of two proctored exams per month. That’s included in the subscription price point.

Adrian Ridner: Exactly. We made it all inclusive just to try to keep it simple. A lot of students are studying a couple of courses a month. It depends on the prior knowledge you have. It really optimizes that efficiency and learning that the data can help us optimize. From the perspective of comparison, it may cost almost $4,000 in tuition fees in a private university. In a public university, it’s a couple of thousand dollars. If you take two courses on our site, it costs $100 per month. The teacher plan is also $59 a month. That plan allows access to our entire library as well as assigning students lessons and quizzes and getting back all the repors.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to us about how you built this company. How long did it take you to find the business model that worked? You said you started in 2002, right?

Adrian Ridner: Yes. It’s really interesting. I was finishing my Master’s in Computer Science. My co-founder Ben Wilson had just graduated from college. When we met, it seemed like both of us shared this frustration of the lack of access to great teachers. A lot of times, classes were impacted. College tuition costs seemed to be going up every quarter. Books costs were going up every quarter as well. That was just normal life at that point because of budget costs. We were both frustrated.

Especially as a Computer Science major, I began to think that there has to be a way that technology can help solve and alleviate some of these problems. We both thought that if we put our minds to it, there’s a way to make education more accessible and more affordable for everyone. That’s when we set on to build the company. The challenge was how to get there.

One thing we started was creating research guides. One of the aspects was not necessarily about learning directly but about what degree and major to pursue. I was seeing friends who were music majors graduating with $30,000 in debt and not able to get a job. I graduated with a computer science major. I had a lot of options. We were very focused on giving that kind of advice. We started building guides to help students. It took several iterations to get to the point where we are today.

One of the things that helped us was the transition to broadband. Once broadband and mobile became mainstream, we were able to adopt our content from text to video. We got a lot of requests, “I want to pursue a Business degree, but I don’t have Statistics. Do you guys teach Statistics?” At that point, we didn’t have any learning content. We started to develop the learning content. We realized that text-based was inferior to a lot of learning styles out there.

Five or six years later, we migrated our production to video. Throughout that transition, we were supported, mainly, through advertising for the first eight years. After that point, we had reached a scale and breadth in our content where we realized we can actually figure out what segments of the functionality and content students really want. We could have a subscription model that’s going to be a lot less intrusive to the user experience and better matched with the value that the users are getting from the product. At that point, we switched to a subscription business which is what we have today.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com
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