Despite the boom of investment and innovation in educational technology in recent years, founder Julia Stiglitz, who broke through in the edtech world as an early Coursera employee, thinks there is a lot of room to grow. Her new startup, CoRise, sells expert-led programming to people looking to advance their careers. It’s a new piece in a crowded industry, with heavyweights like Udemy, Udacity, Guild Education and, well, her former employer.
“We haven’t solved the problems yet and they are growing,” Stiglitz said in an interview with londonbusinessblog.com. The edtech veteran is right: the next generation of edtech is still looking for ways to balance motivation and behavior change, offered at an accessible price point in a scalable format. There’s an inherent tradeoff between involvement and scale – an elephant that even the unicorns haven’t been able to completely avoid.
Enter CoRise, who wants to do everything. The startup, built by Stiglitz, Sourabh Bajajand Jacob Samuelson, matches students who want to learn and improve highly technical skills, such as devops or data science, with experts. CoRise defines experts as leaders at technology companies; For example, advertised instructors include a data engineering manager at Drizly, former CTO at Wikimedia, director of machine learning at ShareChat. some lessons, like this SQL crash courseare even taught by CoRise employees.
As for early adopters, it’s not going for the solopreneur looking to break into technology. Instead, CoRise sells to companies that need more tailor-made solutions for their talent. Speaking to learning and development leaders, the founder learned that organizations are either rolling out asynchronous education platforms for their entire workforce or engaging consultants to deliver customer training; “There wasn’t really anything in between,” she said, so she built it.
Stiglitz doesn’t want CoRise to scale up to where it hosts 20,000 courses taught by thousands of instructors. Instead, the startup wants to offer one applied machine learning course that teaches 1,000 or 5,000 students at a time.
By focusing on larger cohorts, CoRise takes a different approach than some of its competitors. For example, Udemy founder Gagan Biyani is working on Maven, which offers expert-led programming that divides people into small groups to promote collaboration and the exchange of ideas. Stiglitz, meanwhile, thinks smaller cohorts are driving up the cost of the program. Standardized courses with larger classes are the only way to ‘make programming really accessible’, she says.
Admission to a single course costs an average of $400, and students can buy an access pass for each cohort for about $1,000, she adds. By comparison, a single course on Maven – maybe this one about founder finances – can cost $2,000.
“We’re trying to figure out how to get results or student outcomes on this scale, and still make it really accessible, while still allowing instructors to earn solid revenues from it,” she said. “We need to figure out how we can have a lot of people in a cohort and still have a great experience.”
The challenge of large classes and standardized courses, of course, is the lack of personalization. CoRise created a ‘nudging infrastructure’ that looks at how an individual student handles a course, associated lectures and assignments. It is also checked whether the student has gone to the consultation hour or has handed in his work on time.
The back-end information helps CoRise to then send an automated “nudge” or push notification to someone who needs a reminder to seek additional support. The course manager also monitors a human response so students don’t feel like it’s all robots and automated messages, the founder explained.
Over time, CoRise may become smarter at supporting students who struggle before they even show up for office hours, a big vision shared by the personalized learning movement.
“A lot of what we’re trying to figure out is like what needs to be human to keep that motivational element? And then what can we scale up the backside to increase the scale and keep costs down to make a reasonable price.” , “she said. Stiglitz says the average course completion rate is 78%. The startup’s nudge framework is certainly attractive, but is only one step towards a more customized and engaging experience for learners. And while low costs certainly matter – a lot – there can be a race to the bottom if other competitors also try to lower the price to win customers.
While the startup hasn’t disclosed the number of students who have gone through the platform, it did say they come from more than 500 companies, including Spotify, Walmart and Lyft. It has a 68 NPS score.
The startup has raised millions to better understand the above. To date, CoRise tells londonbusinessblog.com it has raised $8.5 million from Greylock, GSV and Cowboy Ventures since launch, with $5.5 million in the first check and the next $3 million seeing recent traction. Other investors include Greg Brockman, co-founder Open AI, and Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder DeepMind.
My last question for Stiglitz was an annoying one: What about her focus on fewer classes and instructors with her investors? Wouldn’t they like her to always launch new classes?
“The pressure will be scale, scale, scale, but it’s going to be scale, scale, scale within the classroom,” she said. “We’re targeting large companies that want to roll out SEO training to 1,000 people, but they won’t want to roll out eight different versions of that class. That’s how we get scale.”
Image Credits: CoRise