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hello I'm Don houman I'm the managing director of the Wharton schools Innovation group uh today I'll be
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speaking with Daphne ker Daphne is the co-founder of corsera the world's largest provider of mukes uh she's also
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a computer scientist at Stanford University Deanie uh discussed the corsera initiative with us two years ago
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and today we're looking for an update to find what's new what's changed and
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what's coming in the future thanks Stephanie for coming and talking to us this uh this morning um pleasure to be
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here it's been a couple years since we saw you last and uh 2012 when we saw you
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was according to the New York Times the year of the moo that's right and then a
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a number of people in the higher education press decided that by 2013 the Revolution was over so my question is is
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the revolution over no I think um the both the we're in the Gartner hype cycle
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and were just I think emerging from the trough of disillusionment partly what happened was that the hype was
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completely unmar it was based on a presumption that we're going to put universities out of business a position
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that we neither endorsed nor thought was the right thing to do um and then in 2013 we had the disillusionment because
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whoa It's been 12 months and we still haven't put universities out of business
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oh my gosh so I think neither of those two views are the right one uh what we're we're seeing as our target
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audience is people who are primarily working adults and are not currently candidates for um for traditional forms
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of Education that's the vast majority of our audience and they keep coming we
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have over 10 million users on the site right now and they're very happy with
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what they're getting and the rate of increases remain constant yes we're
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seeing a significant increase over time in both the number of users overall but also the number of active users on the
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site and also very significant increase in number of people who consider this sufficiently valuable that that pay for
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one of the verified credentials the verified certificates that we offer in terms of uh looking at the the metrics
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that some of those that you just mentioned wondering what the key metrics are for you in terms of uh uh addressing
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some of the critics of the moo landscape people have suggested for instance that
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the early demographic studies that showed uh that most participants are not who we imagine but are rather well
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educated uh from uh developed Nations uh disproportionately male um uh have those demographics changed or
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or uh is that uh a metric that you follow in terms of evaluating the initiative right so we definitely follow
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those metrics those initial studies were done on a subset of early courses that were primary primarily graduate level
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courses when offered at the universities that offered them and as such appealed primarily to people with University
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degrees um if you look at our current demographics um 75% of our users do have college degrees that in turn means that
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25% don't which is still 2 and a half million people so that's just an awful
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lot of people that are getting access to education that don't currently have that
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um however I think it's important to remember that even the 75% who do have college degrees that doesn't mean that
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there your wealthy yuppies working on Wall Street um there are many parts of the world where having a college degree
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is far from being guarantee of employability in some cases like um in the developed in the developing
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countries um many of the colleges offer a very um mediocre educational experience that in many cases is by is
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far from being guarantee of a of a good job in many other parts of the world um people are finding that the education
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that they got when they went to college 15 20 years ago is no longer adequate for the kind of jobs that the current
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economy needs and they absolutely need to have that kind of refresher in order for them to have access to the jobs that
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they like we're getting so many stories from people who say that by taking these
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courses even when they had college degrees it was a complete transformation for them in terms of their career
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prospects is there evidence from the employer side of the that that the or what evidence is there that the
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employers are valuing either the signature track certificates or or if you could speak to as well this new
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concept of a specialization so first of all um there is evidence from both the employer side and the employee side uh
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we're at something like 70% of people who earn verified certificates from a either a a course or a specialization
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are posting those credentials on LinkedIn we're currently the second biggest credential supplier if you will
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corsera on LinkedIn right after my Microsoft which is incredible for two and a half years that suggests that the
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that the prospective employees are seeing value in these credentials in terms of the employer side um we had one
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of our other university Partners Duke uh together with RTI did an interesting study of employers in North Carolina so
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this is not you know just high-tech Employers in Silicon Valley this was across multiple sectors and I think 73%
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of them said that they would value a credential from AO as a component in a hiring process so I think we're starting
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to see significant uptake on the employer side um with regards to corsera as an organization uh I have a couple of
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questions one is the uh last time we met we talked about various potential avenues for Revenue generation uh any
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updates on the business model behind corsera so partly as a matter of focus we have decided that we're going to
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initially really pay attention to the verified certificate for both courses and specializations as the primary
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revenue source for us that's worked out really well in the sense that if you
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look at the number of people of course completers the fraction of course completers who are opting to earn a
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verified certificate that number has climbed steadily from less than 10% when we started to to somewhere between 20 to
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25% um right now with some of the courses especially ones that are part of those specializations that that we
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talked about which are these larger units of learning where there's also a project at the end that demonstrates the
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ability to apply those learnings in the context of real world problem the conversion rate into the verified
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certificate in those courses is often north of 40% uh among course completers and
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that's a very significant fraction so we're very confident that this can be a
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significant Revenue source that will make us sustainable while still allowing us to continue to offer free
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education is there an appetite on the part of uh of companies who have HR departments and their own internal you
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know professional development processes uh to reach out to you to use your materials or the or let's say the the
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learning assets that are available through the corsera platform for their own internal purposes absolutely we've
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had contact with a relatively large number of companies including some of the largest and highest branded
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employers out there uh we have put this on hold temporarily until we build the current platform that is moving to an on
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demand model which would make the courses available to anyone at any time rather than at particular dates which is
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the model that we've had so far um this will help our Learners in the general
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public who are often working adults and would cannot structure their lives around their learning they need to
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structure their learning around their lives um but also it would be uh incredibly important as we've heard from
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these potential corporate partners because need their employers employees to have access to the content whenever
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they need it to be there as opposed to um you know at some particular start date that's arbitrarily determined by
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some a faculty member's calendar so that's going to be a key part of getting
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this into these corporate training programs I wonder how that uh uh syncs with uh some of the feeling around the
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cohort model that was so distinctive regarding what you had managed to accomplish at scale and the role of uh
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social learning in the process of uh of professional development and um remaining motivated and staying with a
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project through to the end aren't those two at odds that's a really great
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question and one that we spent a lot of time thinking about uh we are very committed to the social component of
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learning uh but I think what we realized is that when you have a very large course uh what matters is that there are
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people around you doing the same thing at the same time as opposed to it's the
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same people from the beginning to the end of the course so um if you're in module three what matters is that there
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are a few hundred or thousand people all working with you in module three that you can engage in conversation with
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doesn't some of them might have started earlier and are going slowly some of
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them might have started very recently and are blazing through the course but that doesn't really matter to you in
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terms of the social engagement that you have that being said we're also building
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out the capability to create preconstructed cohorts so for example a group of employees at a company or a
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group of uh uh Learners in one of the learning hubs that we have in US embassies around the world could come in
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and say we're going to take the course together as a group all of us on the same schedule and the ability of the on
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demand platform to accommodate the fact that they want to start today as opposed
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to in 3 months is going to be really important for enabling that while still allowing them to create that little
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social community of people who really do get to know each other and it really is
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a cohort in a way that 50,000 people isn't um I have a question about corsa's
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uh choices regarding uh its uh for-profit structure by comparison to most notably I guess Ed X which chose to
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go the 501c3 nonprofit approach does that difference in corporate structure uh change the way decisions are made at
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corsera uh we believe that by going this route it has made us more on Nimble and
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uh faster to move because we don't need to get approval from a governing board
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for every decision uh we believe that it's also given us um a sense of urgency
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which is not as easily obtained when you have you know $60 million and and the backing of two of the world's richest
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universities so I think we have been able to be very fast to execute while still I think remaining very true to the
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social mission that inspired us to start this in the first place so to be very concrete as an example when we launched
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the verified certificates um we realized that $50 might not be a significant amount to
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someone here in the US or in Europe but it is for someone in Africa or in India and so we launched it together with a
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financial aid option which uh allows someone who is who really can benefit from the credential but can't afford it
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to request basically a fee waver and we just grant it um I don't think edex has
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had that maybe they had it recently but they didn't in the beginning and I think
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it really speaks to the fact that we're sort of balancing the you know the commercial component of who we are but
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also staying very true to our social goals so the Venture capitalists aren't
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a problem for you no uh they have not been pushing us to monetize in fact I have to say that the biggest pressure
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for us to bring in Revenue has largely been that we wanted to bring Revenue back to our University Partners so that
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they can sustain course development because otherwise it's a drain on resources that might be hard to justify
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because it's coming at the expense of something else so we've started to bring
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in revenues early as we did primarily so as to allow our University Partners to increase their content Pipeline and just
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one last question is just looking into the future a bit mhm uh can you project where corsera might be in two or 3 years
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yeah well I think it's a really exciting question and I think there's different
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parts to it first of all today we're getting close to 900 courses I think that early in 2015 will be at a thousand
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I think in three years we'll have 5,000 courses um which is about the curriculum
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of your average medium to large University in terms of the breadth of courses that we're able to offer when
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you layer on top of that the very significant trend ation localization effort that we're currently undertaking
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that will be uh a time at which we can teach anybody anywhere anything they want to learn which I think is a really
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compelling Vision in terms of democratizing education and we all know that democratizing education can have
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profound impact on pretty much any problem that plagues the world and and making it a better
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place [Music] [Music]