Is Alison The Answer To The World’s Education Needs?

With nearly 12 million registered learners, 1.5 million graduates, and 1,000 free courses, the first ever massive open online course (MOOC) Alison has become one of the world’s largest players in online education – and one of the world’s largest certifiers of educational and skills attainment. Founder Mike Feerick’s model for equal access to learning is gaining traction, not only in the United States, Alison’s largest market, but also across the world, not least in developing nations.

To hear Feerick talk about Article 26 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights Resolution that asserts that “Education will be free”, his passion and belief in the idea is evident. He believes he has found a way to make all knowledge and skills training sustainable and available at scale to everyone via the web, and, as the statistics above make clear, he has the data to prove that he is making serious progress.

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Peter High: It has been said by some commentators that the MOOCs have not lived up to their potential. What is your perspective?

Credit: Alison

Mike Feerick: For sure, the “MOOC” concept has moved on. The Alison business model of largely advertising supported education has endured and flourished, whereas other large free learning platforms still struggle to find working business models. A difficulty of some platforms is being tied to traditional educational institutions who resist high level disruption to protect their old self-serving ways of doing things. Understanding the need to break from the past, some free learning platforms / MOOCs are hiring professionals from outside the education industry. Coursera just hired a fintech guy for instance. Unless they break those ties completely, I don’t see how they can take full advantage of the huge opportunity before them. Similarly, other platforms, like Udacity, have gone small, refocusing on specific types of training. Another challenge is the high costs of creating content some MOOCs have embraced. Having spent millions, some platforms are realizing that you can publish very high-quality content more cheaply. Deep pockets are only so deep – and it is an issue when you will have to publish many tens of thousands of courses in the years ahead. Having said that, these organizations, along with Alison are pioneering a new world of educational access, and there is a lot of room for various channels of success to deliver social impact.

As for Alison; Are we really a MOOC as some people now define it?  Well, we are massive, open, online, and we are courseware.  What Alison certainly is, is a free self-paced online learning platform focused on the workplace. The search is on for a workable acronym here; “Universal (Free) Learning Platform” or “ULP” might the better!

High: Your focus at Alison is different from university content is it not, correct?

Feerick: That’s right. The workplace is our sweet spot. Globally, the workforce market is far larger than the academic market will ever be, and that distance is set to increase. We want to continue to be the global leader in the workplace skills & training space and that will include providing free learning more traditionally provided through the university systems.

High: Alison is 11 years old now. Are you still completely self-financed?

Feerick: Yes, we have been profitable and self-financed since 2007-2009. Having said that, we are planning a fund-raise in Q1 2018. The execution demands within the business are growing, such that we simply need a bigger management team that organic growth won’t allow us to fund in a timely manner. We are doing well and getting a lot right. All the sane, as an old Navy friend of mine says, we need a “Bigger Hammer”!

We started out 2017 phenomenally – signing up a half a million people in January alone. To position ourselves for future growth, we did a complete technical overhaul of the platform in April – and just about digested the impact of that now. Our first App is in Beta. There has been a huge growth in mobile – approaching now 50% of our traffic worldwide.

High: How does Alison compare to other online learning systems?

Feerick: Alison has its own unique free learning ecology: It is self-paced; you complete your course, at Certificate, Diploma or Learning Path level, at a time of your own choosing, and then take an assessment of 30+ questions. If you get an 80% grade, you are an Alison graduate. The tough part of holding an Alison award however is that you must to be ready to take a similar online test whenever anyone wishes to challenge you. When applying for a job, if you have written down you hold an Alison Certificate or Diploma, as many do, you better make sure you have retained that knowledge at an 80% pass rate level in case you are subject “here and now” test, on a laptop, tablet or smartphone. The huge benefit of the Alison Free Learning Ecology is that both the learning and certification is free.

Most people realize that you can LEARN anything, anywhere, anytime via a smartphone. People forget you can also be TESTED on any subject, anywhere, at any time. The ubiquity of the internet and the smartphone will change the world of education as we know it. There is a new way to educate the world, and Alison is leading this. Many “MOOCs” are not self-paced, requiring you to turn up online at certain times each week. The truth is learners today are much more demanding about when they want to learn. Another differentiation is that Alison is a social enterprise, albeit a for-profit one. We are determined make an excellent return of investment for our investors, but we will do that while still putting free learner access first. It forces us to be more innovative. My belief is long term, free will be the winning model for the universal scale we aspire to. A free education strategy is not only socially powerful but simply good business strategy.

Credit: Alison

In scale terms, Alison is up there with the tens of millions of learners with Coursera, Udemy and the Khan Academy, but bear in mind we have done what we have done on less than $2m in original investment over the past 10 years+. When we plug in serious capital and management expertise through 2018, it is going to interesting to see what happens!

High: So, it looks like you are primed to sell out then?!

Feerick: No, not at all. We are in this for the long haul. I want to see billions of people empowered by Alison. We have a mission and vision to deliver on. If you could see what we see, you wouldn’t be going anywhere either!

High: Let’s get back to how Alison works: What are Alison’s completion rates?

Feerick: For me to answer this question, you must first understand that Alison is a free learning platform. Anyone can pop into a course, look around, and leave, at no cost. Like any window shopper, they are not yet customers and should not be recorded as such! If you look at our completions rates AFTER someone has spent more than 10m on a course, our completion rates are about 35%.  Considering its free and you can leave at any time to another course, we think that is impressive. Try swapping your course for free at your paid local community college or university. Some stats suggest that community college completion rates are around 60%. While our figures are lower, given our offering is free, we unquestionably deliver phenomenal value. As most education and skills training is government funded or subsidized in the USA, we have the potential to save the Government at Federal and State level billions of dollars of expenditure in the years ahead.

Alison Graduates from West Palm Beach, Florida proudly sport their Alison Graduate T-Shirts!

High: Where have you seen growth with the number of overall users?

Feerick: Our most important market is the United States of America, but the UK and India are not far behind. We have over 2m learners across Africa, (approaching 300,000 in Nigeria for instance). There is a huge need for what Alison provides and how we provide it. As someone can learn and certify for free, it opens opportunity to the very poorest communities like no other learning platform. Acceptance of Alison Certification is also becoming more widespread worldwide. We have only 1,000 free courses now, but we aim to provide learning on every subject, establishing universal standards of learning on every subject. As our reputation has grown, the percentage of our revenues represented by graduates buying certificate parchments has increased, a strong validation in our view of who we are, what we do, and how we do it.

One of my favorite things to do when travelling around the world is to meet Alison Graduates, recording their stories of empowerment – how they have got new jobs, promotions, college placements, started a business, or simply gained new confidence as a result of learning for free online with Alison. It’s a wonderful privilege to meet some amazing people. It re-enforces our determination, indeed our responsibility at Alison, to make free education available to everyone. Not just the few.

High: This all sounds so ambitious?

Feerick: Well, it simply must be! Only 6.7% of the world have ever completed third level tertiary education worldwide. The other 93.3% cannot be left behind, but neither can we education them like we ourselves have been educated in the past. We need new methodologies and new online systems, and our view at Alison is that for the world to engage all 93.3% in our lifetime, education and skills training MUST be free. Piecemeal solutions are not good enough. We need a universal solution to offer education at any level to everyone, and the ubiquitous internet and smartphone allows us that opportunity. According to phone maker Erickson, 6 billion people will have smartphones by 2020. What an amazing opportunity to educate people directly. Smartphone and broadband costs across the world are going down, and will continue to decrease. A friend from India was telling me the other day of a village in rural Gujarat where she knew of ten families sharing one smartphone. Everyone gets their turn to access. Nothing can stop this momentum.

Alison CEO Mike Feerick with Alison Graduates in Lagos, Nigeria – Nov 2017

High: So, I hear of Alison’s impact, but tell me again how the business model works?

Feerick: We make money in two ways: advertising and certificates. Because we are a social enterprise, we don’t insist graduates buy the certificates, but about 10% of graduates do – either PDF or parchments. While some MOOCs are trying to charge more and more for what they do, we are going the other way. We are consistently reducing costs to our learners. We recently reduced our certification PDF and parchment costs worldwide by 50%, and introduced free delivery. We also introduced a way for learners to pay via referral of new learners, as some people simply have no money at all to spend on educating themselves.

More and more, we are finding that by embracing FREE more people come to you to study with us, and work with us, like governments and large NGOs. Our business model is volume-based; the more people we have online, the less revenue we need from each person to thrive.

High: Tell me more about creating new standards on every subject?

Feerick: Currently, around the world, because education has been so politically connected in the past, there are different standards for everything, from Math to English. We can disrupt that by creating universal free standards on every subject. For instance, for the English language as an example, the big standards are the Cambridge English exams and The International English Language Testing System (IELTS). Millions of people complete these certifications every year. We have just created 140 courses that go from beginner, to elementary, to intermediate, advanced, and on to proficiency to meet those same standards. If you want to learn to speak English for free, or if your employer wants its workers to learn English, or speak or read English better, you can introduce them to Alison and they can potentially go all the way.

Is Alison likely to be as good as solution to teach them to speak English as someone teaching them one to one? Unlikely. Can we bring people a very long way however, the whole journey to English proficiency? Absolutely. We can, and at no direct cost to the learner, OR the employer. Costs are the learner’s time and the cost to get online.

High: Alison is free to every learner, even for the employer?

Feerick: Yes. Our strategy is that anything that is need to have is free, while nice to have is paid. When companies start looking for a lot of volume online, we start to charge. We also charge for extra things like detailed reporting. Empowering the world to learn is not only about individuals, it is also about companies. Huge companies with thousands of employees often provide training to their employees, but smaller places like the corner bakery, probably do not have any online learning. The employees suffer for this. Today however, that “suffering” for the lack of workplace training is no longer necessary. If you can go online and complete courses, you will empower not only yourself, but also those around you.

High: If everyone has the potential to learn the same skills, are you not devaluing the value of knowledge, and indeed, the cost of labor?

Feerick: That’s not the way to look at it in my view. Think about it in another way: why not educate and upskill everyone so the value of the work they do is higher, and naturally commands a higher price?   With free learning and skills training, we should be about empowering people to earn more because they can do more, and add more value to their work. It is all about empowerment.

High: You say that the world’s response to the growing “Skills Gap” is that we should “automate learning”. Explain.

Feerick: The essential problem with traditional learning is that it is too slow as it does not create new courses quickly enough. It is too shallow in terms of the breath of learning it can provide, and everything simply costs too much. We need to change all of this. We need to take down the barriers to learning such that basic workplace knowledge and skills are not held back for ransom to be paid for release. Where sharing knowledge is economically incentivized, with courses rapidly produced, and quality assured, we can create a system of upskilling available to anyone, anywhere, once they have the will and determination to empower themselves by learning.

At the end of the day, if there are a hundred experts in a room, you only need one to step outside to share what they know to educate the world. To make this happen, there are four solution elements required: These are free learning, free certification, free learning management (so you can manage groups of learners), and finally, free publishing. These features are freely accessible on the Alison free learning platform. The Alison team are not subject matter experts on every subject. What we are experts at is two-fold; firstly, as engineers, we have the expertise to run a very large free learning platform/website, and secondly, we have make sure that while we may not be the subject matter experts, we do have the pedagogic (Science of Learning) expertise to be able to assess whether a new course is structured for learning properly.

High: Can you explain how someone becomes a publisher and the payment structure?

Feerick: When subject matter experts publish content on Alison, we share the revenue 50/50. If the learning content is popular, publishers can make tens of thousands of dollars a year, as some do. There is a simple application process via the website. The most successful publishers are the ones who don’t rely exclusively on Alison to promote their courses online to it millions of learners worldwide, but bring their own marketing network to the platform also.

High: I have heard you say that education is ripe for disruption. What do you mean by that?

Feerick: I read an interesting piece of research from McKinsey that was published recently. It listed the industries that are ready to be disrupted by automation, and education was at the bottom. The thinking is that because education involves a lot of judgment, it is less likely to be disrupted. I disagree.

We can compare education to Uber and Airbnb. With Uber, there are people that need to go places, there are people with cars, and there is a platform that matches them up. However, what Uber really does is pull latent supply into the industry that was not there before, and provide extra service. It is the same with Airbnb; There is a spare room out there, there are people that need a place to stay, the platform draws them in. Similar possibilities exist with education. There are an awful lot of people who know stuff, and who can teach, but who are not teaching. They need to be brought to the marketplace.

High: And you see this as being relevant within corporations too?

Feerick: To retain competitiveness, we need to help organizations become much more agile by putting in the hands of many more people the training and tools to enable them to teach. We can greatly increase the knowledge flow and skills transfers within organizations if we can convince more people to publish what they know and give them the skills and tools to do it. Our free publishing tool assists this learning transfer.

Our tools for learning are so accessible that you have what you need to create a vibrant agile organization where everyone is a learner and a teacher. I like to use the analogy of the human body. The human nervous system is sensory and responsive. It has constant inputs and outputs. We need to create a learning culture across all levels of our organizations where instead of learning going one way, it has to be like the human body, it has to be coming in and going out. There must be a purer flow. With free learning, certification, learning management systems, and publishing, organizations can allow knowledge and skills to flow within organizations like never before.

High: You talk about introducing the “Power of the Crowd” into education?

Feerick: Yes, this is how we can guarantee high quality learning, even if millions of courses are being produced, i.e. run the learning content through a rating system between the service provider (Publisher/Teacher) and the consumer (Learner). With Airbnb, the lodger rates the host and the host the lodger. Same with Uber, between the passenger and driver. With Alison, the publisher puts up a course, the learner rates it, as well as a peer group, as well as the pedagogic team at Alison, Collective assessment of various stakeholders filters the quality to a higher and higher level. When many people become involved, you get this powerful crowd dynamic.

When you visit a new city and you want to book a hotel, what do you look at? Do you look to see if the hotel is part of the local Hotel Federation, or do you look at the recent reviews on TripAdvisor? When I ask this questions at talks, the audience invariably nods that Trip Advisor is where they go to get a trusted assessment on a place to stay. What are people doing here? People are ditching the old accreditation models for an informal “power of the crowd” endorsement. The “Power of the Crowd” or “Distributed Trust” model is being introduced into education – and Alison will lead the way on this.

High: You talk about the rise of Corporate Certification in terms of competition with universities. What do you mean by that?

Feerick: Well, I am not predicting the total demise of the university sector. There are some things that need to get done locally, like providing the laboratory for your chemistry experiments, providing face to face engagement with professors, or team exercises for instance. However, where universities don’t add much unique value anymore is at the core of their current offering which they charge most for, i.e. the distribution of subject knowledge.

In a world of free learning, anything that can be learned online for free, will be learned online for free, and it will be hard to charge for that sharing of knowledge or skill. With this view in mind, I can see many more corporations creating certified learning around their own products and services, because frankly, they can. Who are the experts in electricity generation, Siemens that build generators, or the electrical engineering professors who take an academic view of the subject? Who is closer to the new knowledge and skill sets in any industry, industry or academia. You know the answer.

Now that people can access learning, certification, learning management systems, and publishing for free, a corporation can build suites of certifications for every product and every service they offer. When you sell a product or service that is worth more than $5,000 – or perhaps even less, you want people using it to use it well. In fact, if your customer who has paid a lot of money does not know how to use the product correctly, you the supplier are going to be hurt in the long term because they are not going to get the full value out of it. You can make sure they know how to use your product by encouraging them to complete a certificate course – perhaps by giving a rebate for the company agreeing to do so.

I often ask CEO’s and CIO’s of corporations, “Does every employee in your company know what products and services you sell? If not, why not?  Have you tested them to find out? Does your staff know how your products and services have changed over the year? Why not?  What if creating courses to internalize this information and knowledge was much easier and more efficient? If you have thousands of employees, they should be thousands of salespeople. If they are going home for holidays, they should know what you sell. Reducing the barriers to sharing knowledge helps this knowledge flow. In fact, from an economics point of view, with a more perfect flow of knowledge and skill out there, competition is going to get much tougher. Either you do this or someone else will do it for you – and take your customers.

High: You talk about formal education becoming weaker – and informal becoming stronger -what do you mean by that?

Feerick: Particularly in hiring, people are moving away from focusing on a college degree and toward aptitude tests. If you ask everyone in a room what they put at the top of their CV, they will say their formal education. If you ask them how many would like to be tested on those qualifications here and now, all you hear is nervous laughter.

Because the knowledge we need to know for the work we do is changing faster and faster, traditional education earned expensively over a long period of time is delivering less and less value to those who invest in it. More and more companies are abandoning the college stuff. Then can test what you now on any subject at any time, and through psychometric testing, can figure out just how smart you are and how quickly you might learn new things and ways of working.  The idea that you managed to pass a degree ten years ago is becoming increasingly irrelevant. What do you know now? What you can do now? That is what matters.

High: So informal learning is on the march!

Feerick: You better believe it! The education and training systems of today provide too little value and cost too much. Increasingly, you can learn what you want, when you want online. What you need at the end of the day is a platform, an arbitrager or collector of the world’s information and an entity to be the arbiter of quality – and that’s where the likes of Alison comes in, led by someone like me!

What is most exciting about this is that this way of measurement of someone’s talent and capability is a lot more equitable than taking someone into employment because they graduated from what once was a “top college”. Among the 93% of people who have not had the opportunity of third level education are some of the brightest and most talented individuals on earth. Many of these people live in developing countries. In fact, statistically, most of them certainly do. Giving these people access to education in this way is not just good for them, but good for all of us.

High: Is American Industry in real trouble of being passed by?

Feerick: If American industry does not respond to use these powerful new knowledge and upskilling tools creatively as good as the next country, then yes, its in deep trouble. I am hoping that that will not be the case. The one thing that the United States has – as good as any country I know, is that its people are innately competitive. Americans like to compete. It is an insurance policy, but then again, it is only so strong. There is going to be a much more level global playing field in the future – and the USA needs to appreciate it is just 4% of the world’s population! There is a lot of competition out there.

High: Why do you think Informal Learning is going to become “Mandatory”?

Feerick: What I am saying is that informal learning is in reality how most of us learn, and we now have a better was to qualify that learning. When going to work in a company, why shouldn’t every prospective employee have done and passed basic courses about working in a business – understanding basic accounting, human resources, marketing and so on – and why should they learn these basic business subjects on the dime of the company that is about to hire them?  They should come with these courses already completed. It costs time, not dollars to learn. In that sense, with free learning, others can expect you to know stuff that in times past, you would get a bye on.

Free learning empowers people and the people around them, so it’s in the interest of government everywhere to encourage it. Studies shows learning online successfully improves personal confidence – and encourages people to learn even MORE.  Hence, government should insist in interviews that people are not just asked about formal learning but informal learning also.

Informal learning provides an opportunity for learners to differentiate themselves. When hiring, employers should be compelled to ask – we know you might have done a degree – but what have you learned lately?

Recently, I spoke at a conference in Estonia with many ministers of skills from all around Europe. A concern that was voiced is that there are 70 to 80 million people in Europe that are not digitally literate. Governments are getting frustrated with this. They want to help but some people need to be gently prodded to see the benefits of learning. Legal and tax incentives are being considered to nudge this movement along. In that sense, you are going to see mandatory learning – made much easier because access to the learning – and the development of digital literacy content of course can also be free.

High: So, the world of learning is about to change beyond recognition?

Feerick: Not just the world of learning, but the world itself. Education underpins all social progress. We have many great societal issues of inequality, ignorance, poverty that can be profoundly dealt with if we use the gift of free learning to its fullest extent. The biggest threat we face may well be global warming, but how well we deal with that threat is again profoundly linked to how well we explain the risks and teach everyone how best to navigate the troubles that lie in store. Politically, what if people could be taught to discern much better what news sources to give credence to?  Yes, we have the potential to change the world by making access to education and skills training available to all. The question your readers must ask themselves is what are they doing individually, within their workplaces, to allow the free learning revolution impact the world around them?

Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book is Implementing World Class IT Strategy. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. Peter moderates the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. He speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.