Thought Leaders in Online Education: Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific (Part 4)

Greg Smith: Another trend is the mass adoption of online learning. People
across all socio-economic demographics are going to online learning as the first place to look for things. It’s becoming more and more acceptable.

In fact all the marketplaces out there for online learning have helped build this trend. That is the pull behind the whole industry. If everyone is going online to learn, that creates this massive demand. That allows companies like us to go and say, “I’ve got something I want to teach these people. Let’s put it online.” I see that continuing to grow.

There are a few other trends around using education as a customer engagement tool and the rise of the entrepreneur that are driving this as well. I see bigger companies adopting education as a tool to either attract customers or better engage with them.

Pretty much any software company provides education as an add-on to their service. They do it in three ways. They build it as its own standalone product where they can sell it as an additional revenue stream. They give away free education related to their software as a marketing channel to bring new users in. They also give away education alongside their software in order to reduce churn and increase customer engagement.

I saw a ukulele manufacturer the other day that was providing free education with ukulele.

Sramana Mitra: My last question is about white spaces and open opportunities. I’m going to ask you to answer this from two different points of views. If you look at the space of online education vendors and platforms, what are the gaps? What are the white spaces where you think people should look into?

Question number two is on your platform, what are the categories of learning in which people are building significant businesses?

Greg Smith: There are a few ways to look at this. We’re trying to surface these white spaces and then create an opportunity to take advantage of them for other entrepreneurs. One way we’re doing that is with our app store.

It’s very much like Shopify, but it also gives people the opportunity to tap in. We have this platform now with over 40,000 active sites on it. We can open that up to other entrepreneurs to create their own app or services to help those. We see white spaces in a few areas.

In areas of improving the learning experience, if you rewind 10 years, a lot of what people were doing was pay some money through PayPal and get to a page with a zip file. That’s now a great learning experience. Now we’re getting much more interactive and engaging. There’s still so much further to go. There’re a lot of niches within the student engagement side.

Content creation is getting easier and easier, especially with our smartphones. There’re still a lot of challenges for people in content creation for courses. How do I create good content for learning purposes?

The last one is quite crowded, but there is always a need for more help there. If you do a good job, there’s an opportunity. Marketing educational products is a huge opportunity.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific
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