Thought Leaders in Online Education: Amesite CEO Ann Marie Sastry (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Now that I understand a bit better of what your technology is capable of doing, can you go back and explain to me what is the usage model of your customers?

Let’s say a university buys your product. You started off by saying that universities don’t always have enough faculty to build an alumni education curriculum. How much of what you’re talking about is done by technology? What level of faculty involvement is there?

Ann Marie Sastry: It varies. We can serve up content that a partner already has or we can create content using subject matter experts and artisans who are either faculty elsewhere, teachers elsewhere, or business people. This is really important because the business model around generalized employment has changed for the entire world.

The idea that you’re going to work for a company for 30 years and get a gold watch is laughable. Most millennials have a side gig. Increasingly, the more you advance professionally, the more likely you are to have multiple roles. It’s better for learners everywhere if people who are practitioners are able to help either deliver, create, or launch content.

We work with universities and businesses in programs that they may not have the human resources to do. We have a fully-staffed HR function. We hire people to create it. Sometimes, we’ll even hire the teachers for them. We try to be the easiest company in the industry to work with. We like the AWS model. We actually use AWS.

We like the model of just being a PO, having a license fee, and charging by the slice. If you create something, you have a fee for that. If you maintain a course, you have a fee for that. Our model is just to sign the papers of the institution we’re working with. The larger institutions have their own papers and we sign those papers.

Sramana Mitra: My graduate school alma mater is MIT. When I want to engage with the MIT curriculum, the draw is the MIT faculty. Within the MIT brand, I don’t necessarily want to be taught by non-MIT faculty created courses. Could you address how the loyalty of the alumni to the institution is addressed in your model?

Ann Marie Sastry: I was a faculty member for 17 years. I’ve been inside the system for a long time. The real value is not necessarily the frontline work of making a PowerPoint. I’m not the best person, even as a former professor, to create a PowerPoint for you.

It’s in curation, editing, and applying rigorous standards. It’s in applying your disciplinary knowledge. When we work with a university or college, we work with highly-qualified experts to create content.

Then the final review is always by the university or business. They look at the material and they apply their high standards to it. We’ve never had anything returned to us for reasons of insufficiency of standards. Again, you can use data to enforce those standards.

When you look at one of our lectures, we only use references of less than five years old for a tech topic except if they’re canonical. Then we do things like look at the number of citations. We utilize people who are frontline staff to do that administrative work and utilize people who are experts to create the outlines.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Amesite CEO Ann Marie Sastry
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