Thought Leaders in Online Education: Amesite CEO Ann Marie Sastry (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about adoption trends you’re seeing in terms of colleges and universities working with you as well as alumni or those institutions adopting these kinds of courses.

Ann Marie Sastry: It’s been fast. I banned any design folks looking at existing online platforms for EdTech. My feeling was that they were woefully behind.

The reality is it’s zero minutes of training to learn Netflix and yet for commercial platforms, there was a presumption of long training times. We set out to build out a platform that had as close to zero minutes of training as possible.

We looked at the best commercial platforms as best practices. We tested, tested, tested. When we launched our first generation platform, it was pretty good except that for about half the front page, our users didn’t do what we anticipated.

We guessed wrong. We spent three weeks revising the entire front-end to use it the way our users wanted to use it. We were rewarded with very high reviews.

That’s our culture at Amesite. We don’t just read a research paper, study or, look at best practices. The user is the only one that matters. About 40% of our users never even watched the instruction video. They just went straight to learning. We’re very proud of that. 

Sramana Mitra: When you look at the space that you’re operating in that’s broadly defined as the applications of artificial intelligence in online learning, what do you see as open problems? Let’s say you were starting a company today and looking for a problem to solve, what looks to you like a problem that would be worth solving?

Ann Marie Sastry: I see finance as an important problem that requires solving and resolution. There is a real disconnect in finance. The bottom-line reality is that education is simply too expensive. Billing is inflexible because it’s tied to these objects called degrees and certificates.

Typically, it’s a large investment with speculative outcomes. You may make the investment and you may not achieve grades or marks that allow you to advance professionally.

There is a lot of white space in financing learning either for people who are not in the workforce or employers to share the cost of employee learning. The bottomline is it benefits the bottomline.

When we think about society, every dollar you spend on education, you get $8 back in social reward, reduced incarceration, reduced welfare, reduced programs to make up for the fact that people can’t function well in society because they’re not well-educated.

We’ll see universities and K12 schools restructuring their finances to be more responsive to the needs of equipping people to enter the workforce. I also think that you’ll see a difference between the federal government and the state in terms of financing innovation to support education but don’t violate the 10th amendment.

I also see white spaces in security and privacy. That’s not just for learning. Bombing meetings is an example of that. We, as a society, haven’t quite figured out how we want everyone to opt in but also execute the right security. We want to have a welcoming environment.

We want to have people be able to invite people to the discussion. Nonetheless, we want to have privacy and security. We haven’t quite figured out what our standards are for that. That’s the reality. There’s a lot of finger pointing, but the reality is we haven’t made decisions about that yet.

Also we haven’t made decisions about what we expect in terms of academic honesty – what we require in terms of proctoring, where we think that group work is acceptable, where we think that individual work is essential. There’s a high degree of variability not only in K12 but also in high school, college, and graduate school on those issues. Amesite works with our customers and applies their standards.

I think there will be a greater national conversation about this post-COVID when everyone is essentially learning remotely or not learning due to quarantine.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Amesite CEO Ann Marie Sastry
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