StraighterLine

On May 15th, SMARTHINKING launched a new product called StraighterLine. In many ways, this is the product that SMARTHINKING has been building toward for 9 years. While this may seem hyperbolic, I think this product has the potential to transform the cost structure of higher education. Here’s what it is, why SMARTHINKING is the one to bring it to market, and why it has so much potential.

StraighterLine provides general education courses – the ones that everyone takes in the first or second year of college – that are more affordable, better supported, and more flexible than most other online courses. Regionally accredited partner colleges agree to award credit to students that successfully pass these courses. Each course is $399 (without a government subsidy), comes with up to 10 hours of live one-on- one SMARTHINKING instruction, and can be started and stopped at the student’s convenience. McGraw-Hill (one of the world’s largest textbook publishers) provides the course content and Blackboard (the world’s largest Learning Management System provider) provides the course infrastructure. By inserting MH’s content into Bb’s LMS and integrating with SMARTHINKING’s online tutoring services, we have a course that is better than most of what is out there today. Partner colleges work with us because students taking StraighterLine courses will need to complete their degree somewhere. This becomes a lead generation engine for our partners colleges.

Offering online courses may seem a little far afield for an online tutoring provider like SMARTHINKING. However, when you take a closer look at the course ingredients, you realize that all of the course elements are, more-or-less, commodities except for the labor. For instance, college algebra course content is readily available. There are dozens of LMS providers. However, there are very few companies that can provide on-demand instruction. For the provision of online general education courses with on-demand instruction, SMARTHINKING is the only company that has the industry credibility to do this.

As I mentioned earlier, I think StraighterLine has the potential to transform higher education. I believe this because StraighterLine overcomes the three largest barriers to cost reduction in education. These barriers are
1) The deployment of an alternative academic labor model
2) The creation of a legitimate course provider outside of the traditional accreditation model
3) The delivery of cost reduction benefits to students (instead of to the institutions)

As I’ve noted in other posts, technology has the potential to dramatically reduce the cost and increase the quality of education. However, evidence to date points to the opposite. What technology should be able to do, in theory, is to reduce the price of content production and distribution to close to zero, the cost of software to close to zero, and the cost of communication to close to zero. In theory, the cost of course should only be the amount of academic labor consumed during the course. However, such a radical pricing model has never been tried because there has never been a labor model that could be implemented like this, and colleges are accredited at the degree level, rather than the course level. Enter StraighterLine

The StraighterLine model incorporates SMARTHINKING’s tutoring as instruction, thereby offering an instructional model that provides greater availability, better service levels, more consistency, and greater record keeping. Further, the amount of instruction is limited by how much the student wants or needs, rather than by how much the professor is willing to give.
The StraighterLine model only provides general education courses. By working with partner colleges, StraighterLine can carve out these high enrollment courses. The courses that are the best candidates for standardization and commoditization at volume. In this way, students that successfully pass StraighterLine courses can receive real college credit at a fraction of the cost of traditional college courses. If students buy these courses like we hope, then the cost savings will pass to them, thereby reducing the cost of higher education.

If all goes well, in 3 years or so, StraighterLine will be a primary provider of general education courses. Students will contemplate coming to StraighterLine first, and then continuing their coursework at a college of their choice.