Thought Leaders in Online Education: Blake Garrett, CEO of Aceable (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are the trends in your space as it pertains to online education?

Blake Garrett: We are seeing this macro-trend from people moving from the classroom to online education. When we started three years ago, about 150,000 people took online driver’s education in Texas. Those numbers would be closer to 200,000 if normalized for differences in population per age. We are definitely seeing a trend where as they become more familiar with online learning and mobile-based learning, we’re seeing that market move that way.

Sramana Mitra: What is the size of the market for license training? What percentage of that market do you think has moved to mobile or online education?

Blake Garrett: We look at our market in a few different ways. Our bigger vision is a vertical by vertical market play, all under the umbrella of online certificate and license training. Just online driver’s education and driver’s safety courses is about a $300 million market. That is probably about 30% of the overall driver’s education market. We still see a trend.

It’s interesting. Today, only 13 states in the United States allow for online driver’s education. You have to go to a classroom for the other 37 states. In Louisiana, there’s a bill in the house that will open the option for online training. A lot of states are slow to adopt online training.

Sramana Mitra: There’s a regulatory issue here?

Blake Garrett: Definitely. Everything we enter into is regulated at the state level for the most part. Some areas of this type of education are at the federal level. State has to adopt online learning as a replacement for brick-and-mortar learning. A lot of states are slow to that even though it’s been shown that it’s in the best interest of the consumer from efficacy, accessibility, and price point.

Sramana Mitra: What states have you already started offering this in?

Blake Garrett: We are in California, Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Illinois. We’ll be launching in six more states in the next year. There is a bit of a regulatory hurdle we need to get over.

Sramana Mitra: Are there open problems that you see in the online education space that, if you were not doing this venture, you would start today?

Blake Garrett: That’s a great question. It’s not really contrarian because it seems common sense, but I think one of the things we see is that the quality of content in online learning is pretty sub-optimal. You have companies along the lines of Udacity that are creating great content but there are a lot of online learning companies where the content is stale and not responsive to mobile. It’s on LMS that are pretty antiquated at this point.

A lot of people just aren’t making the investment and creating great quality of content. What we’ve been able to find is high-quality content that engages the user is so important to creating a great user experience. It’s expensive to create great content. You see a lot of education out there that’s just frankly bad.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Blake Garrett, CEO of Aceable
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