Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The last question I have from a trend point of view is, are you seeing this interest in lifelong learning translating into how long people subscribe to your program?

Adrian Ridner: It shows up in two ways. One is people who subscribe for longer but move around a lot of different subject areas. They’ll look at History. Then they’ll look at Math. The other way is, they will look up what they need to learn. Sometimes, they’ll stay for a few months. They’ll leave. Three months later, you’ll see the same person resubscribe. It shows up in two ways and it is not always like you expect.

For anyone thinking about running a subscription business, you really have to get deep in your metrics to understand not just your retention but also your reactivation rate. Really look at it as a zoomed-out long window for each subscriber and understand their behavioral patterns. That’s one thing that showed up. If you’re only looking at a window of three months or six months, you’ll miss it completely. You wouldn’t have seen the pattern.

Sramana Mitra: Slightly switching gears, if you were to advise entrepreneurs starting out today who have interest in doing something in education, what kind of areas would you advise them to look into for new entrepreneurial opportunities?

Adrian Ridner: That’s a great question. There’s a couple of areas we’re currently not working on, but are definitely open problems that I think someone should tackle. One is with wearables. We’re looking at data in terms of what people are doing in their devices. Imagine someone who develops a wearable where a P.E. teacher can get all the feedback on how I’m jogging in comparison to everyone else in the class. How do my stats relate to everybody else’s? Specifically, knowing that I’m stepping the wrong way and that I could gain a lot of momentum if I were just running slightly differently. That ability to get the context around the student into the hands of the teacher and parents is a complete open space. No one that I know of has actively looked into it. That’s one example of wearables, but there are a lot of others that are completely new opportunities.

The other one is virtual reality. As you can imagine, distance plays a huge role. To keep that classroom feel as part of the learning experience of K-12 today, they need to be in one location. Looking at virtual reality, it’s not that farfetched that you can have a classroom made up of students all around the country that are at the same level. You can merge virtual reality and adaptive learning and say, “You’re all level 15 Calculus.” That may not be a great level. It may just be your level of mastery.

From a virtual reality perspective, I’ll be in the same room with the teacher and be able to learn in a way that is very similar to what you’ll learn today if we were all there in person. Some of the other pieces are starting to get worked on like Road Trips where I would be able to go and visit the premise and learn. My favourite one is things that require a lot of experiential learning. One example is learning to be a doctor and a surgeon. That happens today by trial and error by going through a lot of surgeries. In the right context with virtual reality, you can create that training without ever having to put a patient at risk for the first 50 surgeries that a doctor does. That level of experiential learning is something that would really change education.

Sramana Mitra: This was an excellent conversation. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com
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