Thought Leaders in Online Education: Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you double-click on what you are doing to address this situation?

Andrew Grauer: We’ve evolved in building this learning platform. It’s a collection of millions of study resources. These are learning and teaching resources that are helping students in whatever they’re studying. The library has now grown to over 28 million resources. They’re either tagged as specific courses at school, specific subjects, or specific books.

We’ve grown to build this library now in collaboration with students, teaching faculty, tutors, and publishers. We are evolving the format in which we deliver the content from notes and study guides to practice tests. We created this platform where there’re different types of contributors who are contributing learning and teaching resources in different formats. Then we distribute that through online channels.

In 2018, we served over 300 million visits to the website now. It makes us one of the top thousand most visited websites in the world and one of the top 250 most visited sites in the United States.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a bit about in that 300 million visits, is it 100% college students?

Andrew Grauer: Great question. It’s high school, college, grad school, vocational, and trade schools. It’s both domestic and a growing percentage is international.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of this 300 million are content contributors?

Andrew Grauer: This past year, we had millions of members either contributing resources to the platform and/or paying to subscribe to the platform. At this point, we haven’t been sharing the actual breakdown publicly as a private company but it is in the millions.

Sramana Mitra: I guess the question I’m getting to is what is the incentive for the content contributors.

Andrew Grauer: The best way to think about it is a Netflix or Spotify-like subscription. You can access that library of resources instead of for entertainment, it’s for education.

Sramana Mitra: I understand the motivation of the content consumers. I’m asking for the content contributors. If you look at the trends in your space, we’ve been covering regularly Pluralsight for many years. We started covering them when they were at $10 million to $15 million revenue and then they went and did a roll-up in the space and went public.

The content contributor incentive there is that there is a certain amount of revenue sharing that they’re doing which incentivizes the content creators to come and create modules on their platform. Of course, it’s a subscription fee model for the consumers. I’m asking what is your model.

Andrew Grauer: I understand. For students, there’re a number of incentives. They can gain free access by contributing their own resources to the platform. Two is, they can contribute content to get help from tutors and educators. Three, they can contribute their content to practice those materials with our practice tools. Also they can contribute their content to help other students study as a way to educate others and help based on their own experience.

For contributing educators, they can also contribute to help educators in other classrooms. They can gain followings and reach. They can be recognized and celebrated for what they do which has turned out to be a huge opportunity for us as we’ve seen a dearth of recognition for our teaching faculty. I found that there is quite a commonality to be observed between students.

The median pay for a professor in the United States is between $2,500 and $3,200 for each class that you teach. Those are the people who are educating us. Educators have the opportunity here to actually build a following. We believe the product looks something like a LinkedIn for learning and teaching. They build out their profile. They gain their followings. They contribute resources and they connect with other educators and students.

We’ve had publishing deals where we co-create content with them whether it’s a set of videos or study guides. Finally, also for different professional tutors, we have a revenue share similar in concept to what you were referencing with Pluralsight.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero
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