Interview: Gagan Biyani, CEO, Udemy
by Douglas CretsApril 28, 2010
What makes Udemy competitive in this field?
Udemy is a website that enables anyone to teach and learn online. We empower anyone to create online courses by posting videos, presentations, blog posts and host live virtual classes with students. We provide a suite of educational tools that are not currently available on the web and let anyone use them for free. Similar to the way that blogging unleashed a horde of online writers, Udemy believes there are millions of smart people out there who know something really well and are willing to share. We want to unlock their power and enable them to teach over the internet.
What is the Udemy product?
Udemy provides educators with the ability to build their own “online course.” Basically, this is a series of content (divided into lectures) that deliver information to the student. Educators can teach about anything -
from Modern Civilization to Advanced
Photoshop Techniques.
Students then “subscribe” to the course and have the ability to engage with the instructor. They can ask questions in the forums or instructors can host live virtual classroom sessions via our Udemy Live tool.
What do you think of the notion that education institutions need to act more like media companies? Isn’t this just trying to convince universities and schools to be low hanging fruit, when that’s not really their thing?
It’s important to realize that we are not expecting educational institutions to immediately use the platform. This is a lot more about enabling anyone – like John Doe who teaches Sushi making in his local community – to teach online. That said, we have talked to universities who seem interested in publishing their content online ( like OCW Consortium – many of which are on the list of UdemyAcademic Courses now). Our long-term vision definitely is to provide institutions with the ability to publish their content easily, but they may take longer than consumers to start doing so.
Some would argue that the elitism of the degree is what makes the degree valuable and necessary. Not everyone can get it. What does making curriculum freely available do to this model?
Again, we’re not trying to change the way that students go to college. We’re trying to change the way you learn about the many hundreds of things you can’t learn in college. Career planning, project management, Excel training, photography lessons, etc.
What is the future plan for the lectures? Will other course material be added to engage the subscribers?
We will continue to add compelling ways for educators to teach. Video, presentations and blog posts are a great start, but we believe there are other tools that are valuable. For example, we introduced a tool recently
that enables educators to sync videos and presentations side-by-sideSee an example here.
We also let educators pull in videos from YouTube and Vimeo or presentations from SlideShare. These are features nobody else has and that differentiate us significantly from other companies.
Do you see Udemy being a piece of something larger in the future? What would that structure look like?
I see Udemy as evolving into a vast network for students to learn about a variety of topics. It’s clear that students are increasingly consuming content on the web and sites like Wikipedia are a key place for them to
learn. It’s about time for there to be a better, more multimedia-oriented place for students to learn.
Can you describe the 21st Century student? How do they behave?
I’m not an expert so please take this with a grain of salt. That said, it’s obvious that technology will dominate the learning experience in the future. While in college, 50% of students have their laptop open in class and are reading news or looking up key terms while the professor is speaking. We’re also becoming a more intelligent population and that means we’re going to want to learn more. Frankly, the current educational system (especially K-12) doesn’t cut it so I expect high-powered students to be learning more from other media. Finally, I believe that more people will have to do some form of online education – either for pleasure or for career development or for K-20 education. Every industry is moving digital, and education is no exception.
True or false: higher ed is a new platform for public relations, advertising and marketing. Why or why not?
I don’t think this is new, but definitely True. Higher education is just as much a recruiting and retention game as any other business. You have customers (students) and you try to convince them to come to your
institution instead of another one. The more interesting fact is that the rules of the game for all businesses is changing. The internet and technology are increasingly important mechanisms for PR, advertising and
marketing, and I expect higher ed to start to embrace that. If they don’t, they’ll definitely be left behind.
Your company seems to be a way of transporting brand name education out into the internet. How would this kind of company work inside a higher ed institution?
The first statement is definitely true. There are hundreds of incredible brands in education – from Jack Welch to The Learning Annex to Princeton Review to Yale University. Of course, we want to empower those brands to have a didactic online voice. I don’t think our company needs to work inside a higher ed institution at all, honestly. We’re focused on providing consumers with the ability to learn anything – Udemy may eventually have a tie to higher education, but for now we stay outside of that realm.
Do you have any news to announce that has not been posted yet on the internet? Anything that you are keeping under your hat?
We’re so open about our company and product that we rarely have “announcements” per se. So, we don’t keep much under our hat.
[...] we were doing. In fact, one of them was a blogger from EdReformer.com and they actually decided to interview me afterwards for their blog! It was great to see such a smart crowd of people find what Udemy was doing interesting. Look [...]