How to build a world-leading online school — top lessons from GetSmarter, Valenture and GSV

Deborah Quazzo is Managing Partner of GSV Ventures, a multi-stage investor in digital education and skills entrepreneurs disrupting the $7 trillion sector. GSV’s portfolio companies include Andela, Coursera, Degreed, MasterClass, and Pluralsight.

Robert Paddock is the Founder and CEO of Valenture Institute, the global private online high school, and Co-founder of GetSmarter, the online short course provider that has partnered with the world’s top universities to educate >200,000 learners worldwide.

Here is what founders will get out of this summary of our conversation with Rob and Deborah.

• Rob’s product insights on how to build a successful online school from first principles
• The biggest obstacles for building an online school, and how to overcome them
• Valenture’s approach to recreating the social aspect of school in an online environment
• The impact of covid on demand for online schools, and the post-pandemic outlook
• The top emerging market opportunities for online schools

What exactly is an online school?

RP: We’re talking about full-stack education providers that own the entire value chain. That’s everything from designing courses and delivering the content, to acquiring learners and ensuring their success. In the case of Valenture, students engage with us as a full school provider, parents pay us directly, and we also engage with accreditation bodies to meet their requirements.

What’s the story and big idea behind Valenture?

RP: Off the back of the experience that we had at GetSmarter, we were able to figure out what works and doesn’t when it comes to online education. Whilst there are a number of online high school providers, a lot of them focus on mostly static content and fairly unstructured teaching. The missing piece was a thriving community of students — I believe that a core part of education is the personal relationships that are built around learning. This is the basis on which we started Valenture.

From a student perspective, this is how it works:

• Students come into immersive tutorial environments and work in small groups
• The focus is almost entirely on solving the worlds biggest problems as defined by the SDGs
• We enable students to do this by working closely with expert teachers and their peers

“One of the biggest learnings for us is that today’s generation wants to solve the big problems — they don’t just want to do exams.”

At GSV, why did you invest in Valenture? What needs to be true for Valenture to become a unicorn?

DQ: We started with the concept that high school is one of the worst education delivery models in the world. Across the full landscape of high schools, there is a huge variance in quality between different regions and models.

As for Rob, we had known his reputation for a long time, and were impressed by what he had done at GetSmarter. We were excited by the idea of taking learnings from GetSmarter, and putting it into the high school market. If you can take great ideas from higher education and plug it into high school, this can create a smoother continuum for students, and reduce friction for the education providers.

For Valenture to be successful:

1. Rob has to deliver extremely high satisfaction for both students and parents, as well as Valenture teachers and mentors, to establish a virtuous circle
2. Students need to achieve great social outcomes in addition to academic outcomes
3. There also needs to be high satisfaction for the universities that Valenture will be partnering with in future — we are extremely bullish on the idea of universities aligning with Valenture to deliver new offerings

How do you deliver a better learning experience than ‘traditional’ schools and other online providers?

Right now, teachers are asked to do way too many jobs. They need to be a subject expert, instructional designer, mentor, admin worker, counselor, assessment provider… the list goes on.

If we have any chance of scaling high-quality education, we need to disaggregate the role of a teacher and put experts into each of those roles with clear accountability and measurability. This is one of the major features of Valenture.

In the Valenture context, we’ve unbundled the ‘traditional’ role of a teacher so that students are surrounded by a range of support functions:

• Expert teachers who guide small groups in specific subject areas
• Wellbeing practitioners who provide psychological and socioemotional support
• Trained specialists who provide one-to-one mentoring
• Instructional designers who design the online learning experience
• Product managers who build and maintain the technology stack
• Administrators and project managers who handle operations

A key point for people to understand is that the back-end engine of a school is so much more effective and efficient if you disaggregate the different parts of the student experience and assign this to specific individuals and teams. By doing this, we’ve been able to establish a thriving community of students who build close relationships with their peers and the Valenture support ecosystem.

How do you recreate the social aspect of school if you’re delivering an online experience?

RP: This does not happen by itself — there’s a fundamental need for purposeful design. We think really hard about intentionally designing every single minute of the student experience to meet specific outcomes, both academic and socioemotional. It’s critical to have experts involved at each stage in the course design process. With their input, we make sure that the full spectrum of academic courses, extra-curricular activities and social experiences come together to give a fully enriching experience for students.

For example, it’s essential that students work together to deliver projects. This is needed to forge deep relationships between students, and we make sure that this happens by design. Specifically, we have students work in groups of 4, and teachers provide limited support to guide them on the right path. This enables students to build close relationships, and become friends beyond the work that they’re doing.

We also have a range of student-led virtual clubs around shared interests like reading, coding and baking. This enables students to take the lead and form communities themselves. In some regions, we do meetups where students in the same geographical area can come together and build closer social connections. The intentional design of each activity is key to recreate the social aspect of school.

‘Community-based learning’ seems to be all the rage in edtech — why does it matter?

DQ: This starts with cohort-based learning which, of course, is not a new concept. Great educators have been doing this offline and online for decades. The benefit of a cohort is that it creates positive peer pressure, and being ‘in it together’ drives course completion to a whole new level.

When it comes to building a community around learning, what’s exciting is that you can establish long-lasting and meaningful relationships between learners. This is highly beneficial because everyone wins, and it’s no longer a zero-sum game. Traditionally, there have been winners and losers in our education system. Community-based learning is really questioning whether this makes sense — it’s a refreshing and positive evolution of how learning works.

What are the biggest obstacles for building an online school? How do you overcome them?

RP: The biggest challenge has been the culture shock for teachers, and helping them to transition from an existing context into a brand new modality. There is often a resistance to the sort of change that we’re driving, and as a school, we rely heavily on teachers to deliver a great student experience. Parents often look for teachers with 20+ years of experience and previously held roles in management positions. What we’ve found is that these teachers have become great at managing a wide range of roles, but it also means that they are less likely to be collaborative and adopt new methods of working where those roles are disaggregated.

We’ve put SLAs on everything that a teacher is supposed to do. For example, receiving assessment submissions on Wednesday, reviewing them on Thursday, and providing feedback on Friday. This is a huge cultural shock for teachers who are experienced in the traditional brick and mortar system. We’re solving this by hiring relatively younger teachers, and providing deep onboarding and training. We recently launched a ‘startup bootcamp’ that takes teachers through all of the training from first principles. Also, Covid has shaken up expectations of teacher education around the world. I’m hopeful that this will positively impact the skills and attributes of newly qualified teachers.

What has been the impact of covid on demand? How do you see this evolving post-pandemic?

RP: In March last year, when the pandemic first hit, we expected there to be a crazy surge in demand. At least initially, this didn’t come. The whole world was in a state of shock, and so the impulse was to not change anything else. Then, thankfully towards June and July, we saw a sharp rise in applications. We have seen a strong uptake since then in September and also January this year.

There has also been a major change in the types of students who are coming to us. In January 2020, we saw certain personas such as the children of parents who were travelling a lot, and students who faced bullying in brick and mortar environments. Now, we’ve seen a strong rise in new students coming in who have found themselves doing well in an online environment. Post-pandemic, they have chosen to join Valenture as an online school built from first principles.

How do you stand out in the market and attract students?

RP: In terms of providers, the market has exploded since covid. In South Africa, we were one of three when we started in 2019 — there are now 17 providers. Given the substantial noise in the market, if you’re relying on paid media alone, your CAC will become untenable very quickly. There’s an absolute necessity to think creatively across a number of fronts.

One key factor is that you need brand signals to elevate above the rest. Soon, we’ll be announcing partnerships with universities to launch new programmes. This will enable us to use their great brand reputation, and it also offers a new opportunity for school students to access university accreditation and bridging programmes even when they’re in high school.

The second piece is that we can’t just rely on paid media. A big part of our strategy is content marketing and free courseware. Deborah’s portfolio company CourseHero has done a great job here.

On average, we have 12 conversations with a candidate before they apply — this is a very involved decision and can take a very long time.

You are selling to 3+ people at any point. That is, the student, the parents, and even their friends too at times who need to be convinced to come on the journey. The decision-making process can be as long as three months. But here, there’s an incredible difference between Valenture and GetSmarter. There, we kept a student for 10 weeks and had a 15% repeat rate. Here, we keep our students for 5+ years. By partnering with universities, we can continue to provide value for students even beyond high school — this is really exciting.

How do you build a world-leading education brand?

DQ: The rise of globally-recognised consumer brands in education is one of the most exciting things coming out of the last decade. A strong brand can play a key role in building a sustainable business that doesn’t get sucked into a negative CAC battle.

Coursera obviously got a head-start by leveraging it’s brand partnerships with well-known universities around the world. Another great example is Byju’s — not much more than 5 years ago, he was a famous tutor teaching in auditoriums, and now he has an education brand known throughout the world. He was able to do this by: being a first mover, delivering high-quality content and outcomes, and making a series of smart acquisitions.

MasterClass is also a great example that has been able to build a massive brand by bringing in the most famous names in the world. In such a short period of time, they’ve been able to make the population associate a general term like ‘masterclass’ with their own platform.

What do you see as the biggest upcoming opportunities for Valenture?

RP: In addition to our new university partnerships, we’re also partnering with schools. For example, we’ve partnered with the #2 school in South Africa. We launched an online school with them at half the price, where all of the academics is done online, and the students get access to the physical facilities such as the sports grounds, auditoriums and so on.

We’ve started two physical campuses as parents kept asking us if they can drop off their kids somewhere during the day. In Cape Town and Johannesburg, we have created physical working spaces with mentors that are there to support the students. The partnerships with universities and schools, and our new blended learning offers are exciting opportunities going forward.

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