Can Universities Expand Student Enrollment While Cutting Operating Costs?
Yes — and Campuswire CEO Tade Oyerinde shares how.
The future of Higher Education depends upon innovation within the EdTech sector. This has never been more apparent than now, as schools around the nation stumble to start the Fall Term amidst a seemingly un-ending pandemic.
Tade Oyerinde, founder and CEO of EdTech startup Campuswire, is a serial innovator with big plans to disrupt the traditional university experience using technology.
He joined MarketScale’s JW Marshall on the Voices of eLearning podcast this week to discuss how the pandemic has accelerated trends in online learning, ‘unbundling’ the undergraduate academic experience, and how universities can use technology to expand their student enrollment while simultaneously cutting their operating costs.
Their conversation is transcribed below. You can find the Voices of eLearning episode on MarketScale’s site.
Hello and welcome, everyone, to today’s podcast. My name is JW Marshall with MarketScale, and we have a great guest lined up today: Tade Oyerinde is going to be talking with us on a number of topics, including the bundling and unbundling of higher education.
Tade, thank you so much for joining us today.
T: Thanks for having me.
Absolutely. And just before we get started with some questions, it’d be great if you could give our audience a little background on yourself and your company.
T: I’m the founder and CEO of Campuswire.
We started the company in 2016, and essentially the main thing we wanted to solve with the company was that there didn’t exist great software for teaching online. It was fairly clear that higher education was going to move progressively online and we thought, “well, Higher Ed deserves its own purpose-built tool”.
There are two classes of pre-existing incumbents — you have your Blackboards, your Moodles, your Canvases — and it was fairly clear that they weren’t talented enough, or product-focused enough, to build great software for teaching online.
And then you have the really talented, Silicon Valley-based, big company-type tools like Slack or Zoom. But they were never really going to tailor their products for the needs of higher educators.
So we thought, “well we should have a Silicon Valley-type company that knows how to build beautiful, easy-to-use software that also focuses specifically on the needs of professors and students.”
Today Campuswire is used in hundreds of schools all over the world — we have hundred of thousands of active users. Professors tend to adopt us individually; we don’t usually try to sell top-down through an administration. Typically professors find us and adopt us like a SaaS tool, the same way that Slack and Dropbox grew in their early days.
And it’s worked really well. Millions of content bits —messages and posts — flow through our system every single day, and we’re growing really quickly. Obviously COVID-19 has been an interesting accelerant — but I’m sure we’ll get to that later.
You beat me to the punch there. I’m sure you were on a high growth trajectory before COVID, but really what have you seen — as major infrastructure changes have started to happen in the Spring semester and are now taking place in the Summer, with some universities opening as soon as next week — what have been the major changes that you’ve seen in the landscape of this market?
So it’s been both super positive, and also a bit negative. In March when everyone sort of switched to online learning overnight, it was extremely positive for our business. We had 600% growth in the middle of March as compared to January — and that’s just very abnormal, because our space is typically super cyclical.
Professors generally avoid making changes or adopting new software in the middle of the term. So you really only have two windows — three if you’re talking about schools on the quarter system — and those are typically just August and January. But we experienced tremendous growth in mid-March when everyone moved online. And that’s been great, and those users haven’t churned — they’ve persisted with us. I think this will obviously be a record Fall for us.
But, it has also become a bit more difficult in terms of…. well, I think a lot of these other tools — Zoom in particular, Slack to a much lesser degree, and Microsoft teams — have, in a meaningful way, become more well-known in our space.
Previously when people would look at using our video lecturing tool, for example, they’d look at us like we’d invented fire. Like, “I did not know this was possible! This is so much better than Skype!”.
And now we get: “okay, this is great and it’s tailored to education — but does it have the three hundred features that Zoom has?”.
And no, we don’t. We focus on building for specific use cases. But if your school is doing trainings on Zoom, and maybe you’re required to use it, then we can get into some tricky conversations with faculty, where they’re like: “okay, I love that you’ve built X, Y, and Z that are specific to my needs as a higher education instructor, but I wish you had — some random toy — like cool backgrounds or voice modulation”, things like that, which Zoom does have but that we don’t.
And so it’s become a little more tricky, I think, as people have become more familiar with some of the generic tools, to get that initial reaction of “oh my God, this is amazing”.
Yeah, that makes sense. And really, it’s a matter of getting the right features to the right people. I’m sure that’s a big part of your messaging right now.
To back up a step — what would you say is the biggest mistake that professors have made in this transition?
I think a lot of the conversations I’ve seen — mostly from administrators but also professors, to a lesser degree — don’t make a distinction between asynchronous and synchronous online learning. And they’re very different.
The kinds of people who will be successful in an asynchronous online learning environment are very different from those who need that synchronicity, who need to be there with everyone else in real-time.
I’ll tell this story about my sister — I have a twin brother and an older sister. My sister is the smartest out of the three of us. If you put a book in front of her, she learns — it’s literally that easy. So my parents thought, “why put her in school? Why not yank her out and homeschool her, so that she can learn much faster?”.
And that worked really well for her. She went to high school in-person, was high school valedictorian, and eventually became a Harvard-educated dermatologist.
Didn’t work as well for my twin brother and I. We were way less focused, way less mature, and way less intrinsically motivated. We sort of need that external pressure –– maybe that kid in the class who think he’s smarter than you, so you’re competing with him, or maybe that girl in the class who you think is attractive, so you want to ask a smart question and impress her — all of that is really important to how we learn.
And much in the same way, as classes have moved online quickly, a lot of faculty and administrators didn’t appreciate how different the two modalities really are. I think that for the largest portion of students in America, they do need a lot of that interaction and synchronicity. You do need to have live lectures where students can raise their hand and ask questions, and have that back-and-forth, Socratic-style engagement in real-time. I don’t think that most people really thrive or enjoy their learning in a completely asynchronous lecture, where everything is pre-recorded.
So that’s the biggest thing that we’ve tried to help folks understand: that these are two very different styles of learning.
Absolutely. I know that a lot of instructors have tried to take the four hours of lecture per week they had before and record those, or deliver them to students on Zoom. What advice would you give to those professors as far as, you know — that’s not going to be as engaging as it would be in-person, it’s just different, and there are some setbacks, and some pros.
Could you maybe give some advice to professors as they try to ‘eat the elephant’, one bite at a time. How do they get started with converting the content from that live experience to online?
It’s a big problem. When you’re in an online environment you have to work to get people’s attention. When I’m doing investor meetings…. at least pre-COVID, I’d always try to do them in-person where it’s much easier to keep people’s attention. If you’re in an online environment and your phone buzzes, you’re more tempted to look. No one knows that you’re cheekily texting underneath the table. It’s much easier to disengage.
And so what I always do is try to shock them. Maybe say something a little risqué, or throw out a really interesting fact that maybe is a non sequitur, to make sure that people are listening and engaged.
Faculty needs to be doing that too. Obviously we [Campuswire] have been Evangelists for active learning for a long time. One of the cool features Campuswire offers is the ability to poll students on the fly, and faculty have been doing this for years while using Campuswire in class.
Now we’re bringing that experience online. Think of a question in a Political Science class: what do you think the probability is that Joe Biden picks X as his running mate, as opposed to Y?
You poll the whole class in real-time, you display the results, and then you talk about why. Those kinds of things, breaking up lectures every eight or nine minutes with student-driven discussion, is really key.
That’s great advice, and another guest in the past had talked about how when it comes to information intake, all of that can be recorded and put online. That foundational stuff. Then save the interactive time, that synchronous online lecture time, for the debates, questions, engaging students. Don’t get into the habit of mass-lecturing live. Even in the business world we don’t — it’s boring. Apply those same principles to online education.
I want to shift gears a little bit at this point to the concept of universities ‘bundling’ their services. This is kind of a bigger structural issue, but really the traditional university experience has been around this ‘bundle’, this nickel-and-diming of the student body. Right now, education technology has the opportunity to disrupt that.
What are your thoughts on that disruption, and how do you think it will play out?
I think it’s really important that now, as American families are questioning the value of a university degree, that we have a more structured way of figuring out what we’re paying for when we send our kids to college.
Typically you’ll see politicians or public-facing intellectuals say that we’re paying for “education”. But what universities and colleges are selling is not just education, it’s a bundle of things.
Education is just one component of that bundle. Internally at Campuswire, we call that the Four E’s:
- Curated physical & social experiences.
- Education — your access to subject-matter experts, the best people in physics, or who are doing the most interesting work. The highest concentration of those types of researchers is within universities. So you’re paying for access to that expertise.
- Employment is obviously part of why people are so willing to pay for an exorbitantly-priced university degree — it’s an investment. In theory, you’re supposed to get a return on that investment by getting a better job, that pays better over time.
- Then of course there’s eminence: the prestige that comes with going to the right school. And that can be localized. Growing up in Atlanta, if you went to UGA, you were a king. But almost anywhere in the world, a Harvard degree will make you king. So there’s this eminence, this prestige, this improved social standing that comes with picking a top-tier school.
So those are the Four E’s. I think that there’s an opportunity for technology to help students to access some of the components of the Four E’s that are critical for living a better life, towards earning more, towards achieving the American Dream, without some of the more expensive, or “nice to have” aspects of the traditional university bundle.
Just to dive a little deeper into that, you know that there’s a big push towards micro-learning credentials, trade schools, things that kind of fall more into the employment bucket.
What do you see as the future of those trends? Are we going to see higher numbers of students evolve in that direction? If so, at what expense?
I think that the education and employment components are the two E’s that should be unbundled. If you think about going to a four-year school or a state school, something with a lot of sports, like Syracuse, UGA, or LSU — you’re really getting a really great, amazing, four-year country club experience for young people.
There should be ways that people who just want to be high-earners and have fulfilling careers can access the education they need to be successful. We’ve already learned how to do some of this in theory: community colleges and trade schools have existed forever. I think that there needs to be a sort of modernizing of what they do, that can hopefully get rid of a lot of the stigma associate with community colleges and also improve the quality of instruction that happens there.
If you look at the transfer rates at American schools of students who come from community colleges, they’re abysmal. It’s a product that hasn’t really been updated. But I do believe that modernizing the community college or trade school route is the right path to providing access to the American dream, without the expensive components of the country-club experience. We just need to figure out how to use technology to advance those programs.
There’s a lot of theories about what may or may not happen this year, and next year, for a lot of universities. It’s hard to stay viable in this new normal, and a lot of folks that we’ve spoken to feel there is a possibility that those very prestigious schools — to speak to the idea of eminence — will probably be okay; they have large endowments, and they’ll probably even expand in their online offerings, because they can only have so many students on campus at Harvard. But an online experience can be expanded.
I know Purdue has a huge online initiative they began pre-COVID, which is really paying off for them now. But then on the bottom end, Community Colleges are probably going to thrive in this new environment, because students won’t be able to afford mid-tier schools. So these mid-tier schools have a lot of concerns that they may go out of business or be rolled up into bigger systems.
Here in Texas, University of Texas has quite a system. There’s a lot of systems out there that could roll up these mid-tier schools, that are charging quite a bit but not delivering on that prestigious value. So what’s your take on where the chips may fall as far as those different tiers of schools are concerned?
Let’s talk about inputs first. I think that COVID accelerates a trend that already existed, which is an increase on defaults and some of these schools going bankrupt. COVID also, I think, will continue to accelerate various trends around enrollment.
Normally you expect that when the economy does poorly, university enrollment increases. It’s typically inversely-related to the economy. That doesn’t appear to be the case this time around. It’s really hard to know whether or not the economy is doing well because the stock market is at an all-time high, but so is unemployment.
Doesn’t seem sustainable.
Yeah, I wonder how long this aberration can last. Generally speaking, I think that we won’t see that rush back to Higher Ed over the next couple of years. It just doesn’t seem like the practical thing to do. As a kid, you hear things about your parents’ friends’ kids going back to school to pursue a career change. It’s difficult to imagine that being the mindset of your average person who might consider a career change now — you know, maybe they were laid off due to the pandemic and its economic fallout.
So I think that we’re less likely to see that kind-of counter-cyclical trend continue, where enrollments go up as the economy does poorly. And a lot of ink has already been spilled about what that might mean for schools based on their tier. Yes, the Harvards of the world will probably be fine. They have so many mechanisms available to them that other schools don’t have.
20% of Harvard’s freshman class deferred their admissions this year — that was published last week.
Harvard could, in theory, admit all of the kids who were waitlisted to fill that 20% gap. And those kids may accept and pay an enormous sum for an online term, just to get their foot in the door.
But other schools don’t have that option available to them, and I think those schools will struggle.
Now struggle, I think, is often the precursor to massive innovation. My hope is that the silver lining to this whole situation is that innovation will come not just from the private sector — from companies like Campuswire–– but that these existing institutions will say, “hold on guys, we need a Hail Mary. We need something completely new. Throw out the playbook, and let’s figure out how to solve some of these problems that we’ve only spoken about solving for decades.”
What I want is for people like Michael Crow, the President of ASU, to say, “there’s no reason not to take risks, because we’re already running the risk of going out of business in two years just because our financial model was not designed to be pandemic-resistant.”
And so that’s the hope. That there’s some amazing innovation that comes from the university-side. There’s definitely a ton — and I’m happy to talk about some of the stuff that we’re doing, or that my EdTech founder friends are doing, on the private side.
Absolutely. You kind of beat me to my next question — there seems to be a willingness, probably by necessity, for colleges and universities to be open to partnerships with for-profit businesses, with some of the corporations they want their students to be employed by.
And those corporations have been complaining for quite some time. Research says that 75% of employers say they don’t feel that recent graduates have the skills necessary to be successful on day 1. So that does seem to have opened the door for a lot of change, and for really rethinking the whole system in some ways.
I’d love to hear a little bit more about what you and some of the folks in your network are seeing as these new opportunities, which wouldn’t have existed six months ago.
One interesting thing that everyone in the industry is learning is that there is a difference between synchronous online education and pre-recording lectures.
The logic flow is: because very few schools actually decreased tuition by a meaningful percentage, Harvard and other top-tier institutions are willing to charge the same amount for “Zoom University”, for synchronous online learning, as for in-person instruction.
Their argument is that their faculty members are still showing up to deliver lectures, so the students’ access to them is equitable to being in an in-person course.
But because there are two kinds of online learning, you may end up in an asynchronous online course where the faculty never learns your name, and your class consists of stale discussion boards and pre-recorded videos. And that’s just not the same level of quality.
Once we acknowledge that, there’s a really interesting opportunity — granted that the technology exists — to build an online university that is geared towards synchronous learning. And so if you think about all of the online schools — University of Phoenix, or Southern New Hampshire — they’re all geared towards asynchronous learning. And okay, maybe there’s an enrollment cap, or maybe there’s just not that many people who want an asynchronous learning experience.
So there might be a nice opportunity — and we’re exploring this, talking to various institutions, and will hopefully have an announcement to make in the new term on this topic — but there’s an opportunity to build educational technology that’s way better than Zoom, for synchronous-style learning, and then to actually build an entire university around that.
Just doing a one-off recorded session is not replacing a live trade show. But building the infrastructure that you’re talking about — where you can kind of walk the campus halls, synchronously and online, and have that environment and access to professors in a more convenient digital way — that’s a huge undertaking. It’s kind of a land-grab right now to build that technology in a meaningful way. And that’s really exciting.
Right now, three players— including Campuswire — have been thinking about this pre-COVID, and have a deeply-developed view on synchronicity and its importance in online courses, and have actually built technology that’s not entirely horrible for enabling those experiences.
So you have the folks at Minerva KGI — they built their Forum tool. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with them?
I am not, no.
Their idea was “let’s create Harvard, but synchronous and online”, and they built Forum, which is their platform for synchronous learning.
Then there’s the Foundry College guys with their platform Forge.
And then there’s us [Campuswire]. I think that we’ve built a really important software that’s enabled professors at more than 300 schools to move their courses online. They love it, and it’s growing extremely quickly. But I do think there’s an opportunity to partner with an organization and somehow actually build an entire university around our software.
That’s pretty much the three options today for EdTech companies which have built tools that are essentially Stack Overflow plus Canvas plus Zoom plus Slack, and designed them with a certain degree of elegance. And those are sort of the only three. But I hope that many more will emerge over the next year or two — I think that’s the last piece before we can have a real, scalable, synchronous, online institution. You need really well-designed software.
Absolutely, and that’s what the market of this new generation demands: software that is sleek, seamless, and easy to use.
I’ve been reading up on you — it seems like you’re a bit of a serial entrepreneur. Tell us about you and your roommate developing a campus-based video chat service. What’s the story there?
I’m 27, but this is the second company and third major project I’ve been a part of. I started UniRoulette when I was a student at Leeds University studying Aerospace Engineering, along with my flatmate, Patrick, and my twin brother, who was doing economics at Oxford.
There was a company called ChatRoulette that was started by some Russian teenager and went viral. You’d go to the website, press a button, and be dropped into a video call with a random person across the world. You’d click a next button, a Roulette wheel would spin, and you’d match with someone new. It was really fun for about a week.
So our thesis was basically, what if we limited this to university campuses by restricting access to only those with .edu email addresses? Facebook was initially limited only to students at Harvard and then expanded to the other Ivies. So maybe we could create a curated, clean, exciting, interesting environment if we started with university students who are looking to meet people or date.
So that part of the thesis was actually right. Patrick and I built UniRoulette over Easter holiday and then launched it. It grew extremely quickly. It approached 100,000 users in the first month, and nothing in the social space had ever experienced growth like that in the UK. A bunch of investors reached out, and I actually convinced my flatmate and my twin brother to take a leave of absence from school, move to London, and build it.
It didn’t actually last, our growth fell off of a cliff too. In hindsight — well it was written in Flash, which would make your computer explode if you used it for more than thirty minutes, and it didn’t run in lots of browsers, and we didn’t have a mobile app — but in hindsight, the idea was just a fad. It was exactly the kind of idea that everyone wants to try exactly thrice. By the third time, it’s old.
Eventually we pivoted the company into being a consulting firm for universities, where various schools would reach out and ask us to build a mobile application for students to see the dining hall menus, or see what activities were happening on campus, or see which companies are coming to a career fair. We did that for a bit, and then Patrick and my brother got bored. My brother went back to school, Patrick went to work at one of our other friends’ companies, and I kept at it a while…. then eventually decided to start Campuswire.
One last question, then. If you could get out your crystal ball for just one minute — where do you think we will land with this, in the next two or three years when COVID has subsided and we’re left with the ability to safely meet on campus again, albeit in a different landscape.
What is your prediction of what that will look like?
I think three major things are going to happen:
The first is that really great software is going to emerge that enables really high-quality online learning to occur. I think Campuswire is building it, and I think there are others.
That will then enable two things:
Great schools that have already decoupled exclusivity with their brand value — think of schools like University of Michigan or UCLA — they already admit tens of thousands of students each year — close to 50,000 per school. They could scale that student enrollment up to 75,000 or 80,000 students, and it wouldn’t diminish their brand at all. I think what they’ll realize that they can take this high-quality, synchronous, online teaching software and use it to nearly double their enrollment without doubling their infrastructure investment costs.
They don’t have to build new lecture halls. A lot of students can continue living off-campus, and maybe they never come to campus at all. Or maybe they build a few more dorms — but generally it won’t be a 1:1 ratio. Each additional online student would cost drastically lower to support than an on-campus student does.
There’s multiple ways they could do this: maybe they make all classes hybrid, doubling the utilization of the existing lecture hall infrastructure, or they could offer half of all courses only synchronously and online. Whatever the case is, their economics are going to change; they’re going to be able to admit a lot more students because of this technology, and without increasing their costs linearly. That will allow them to keep tuition at its current rate, or maybe even reduce tuition, while increasing profitability. And that’s going to be very big. I’m optimistic about the schools that have decoupled their exclusivity with their brand value.
And then the final thing is that community colleges have to be disrupted. There’s a much easier, better way to deliver high-quality access to just the education and employment opportunities which community colleges and trade schools already provide through the internet. And community colleges already don’t offer prestige. They don’t really offer a social environment. The idea is to go there, knock out your Gen Eds, and then transfer. And I think can absolutely be done in a higher quality way, and for cheaper, than a community college degree typically costs.
Those are some great insights. That’s all the time we have today, but thank you for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
Campuswire is the consolidated and customizable home base for your course communication.
Campuswire includes three features that professors can mix and match: a modern Q&A forum with chatrooms, an active learning tool that works in person or online, and live video lectures and office hours. This allows professors to get real-time feedback and incentivize engagement during online and in-person lectures and manage Q&A efficiently.
To learn more about Campuswire, visit us online: www.campuswire.com.
