Thought Leaders in Online Education: Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very interesting topic that you bring up. There are some observations I have on that. One is that some of the rock star teachers at top universities have their very popular courses on edX and Coursera. Then you have platforms like what LinkedIn is doing. Soon after they named me one of their top influencers, they invited me to do a course on entrepreneurship.

I did a course on bootstrapping. This course has been distributed extensively. In the bootstrapped entrepreneurship audience, it’s a very popular course. It’s got well over 100K views. People who know how to teach a subject well and are good performers – this is now changing a teacher to not just an educator but really a performer because it’s entertainment almost. But it’s not entertainment. It’s delivering education in a highly engaging way.

You have to be able to do that to be able to gain that kind of notoriety in any domain whatsoever. Where is the business model for that? For us, we’ve built One Million by One Million around my ability to do that. I have a certain personal brand that has drawn a lot of people to learn from me. There are similar models. You’ll see other people doing similar models. Then there are all these teachers and professors on the MOOC platforms. Are you seeing any other kinds of business models that I have not talked about?

Andrew Grauer: I think that’s generally right. The way we see the world is that intersection between individuals that have been recognized as a leader in a particular topic or space. Then I think there’s an opportunity to discover unknown talent and do that through a community or marketplace platform approach.

Sramana Mitra: Which is the edX approach.

Andrew Grauer: Yes, that’s the perspective that we know most about.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of entrepreneurial opportunities, what are you saying? Are you saying that entrepreneurial opportunities are in building other equivalent platforms or to become an educator in one of those platforms?

Andrew Grauer: I think what I’m indicating without a proposed solution is that there’s an opportunity where, let’s say in the post-secondary, there’s about one and a half million teaching faculties. 70% of those teaching faculty are adjuncts. It used to be 50% of teaching faculty who are tenured or tenured track. We are asking so much of these teachers. Many of them are so great at what they do that there is an opportunity to amplify their impact and also have real benefits to both the educator and to different companies. That is an amazing opportunity that not only one platform or one institution should address.

Sramana Mitra: What you’re pointing out is that these adjuncts are very underpaid. They have skills and they have value to bring to the mass of people who are trying to learn. They themselves are terribly underpaid. There needs to be a solution for that.

Andrew Grauer: Absolutely. In my example, I only addressed US higher education. There’s a US K through 12 education. There’s professional and corporate education within different companies even. Then internationally, there is an analogous opportunity in categories of educators. That’s a massive world of disconnect and gaps. Therefore, it’s an amazing opportunity to make a positive impact in a way that we say we want to do but don’t necessarily live up to.

Sramana Mitra: It’s wonderful to catch up with you. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero
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