Dive Brief:
- Outlier.org, a company that offers general education classes online for college credit, raised $30 million in a recent Series B funding round, raising its total amount to $46 million.
- The money will be used to add 14 courses by 2022, a move the company says will enable people to complete the equivalent of the first two years of a college degree on its platform. Outlier.org currently offers six courses.
- Investors are interested in companies like Outlier.org as the pandemic increases colleges’ use of online learning.
Dive Insight:
Outlier.org, which charges $400 for a three-credit course, bills its offerings as a lower-cost alternative to traditional general education classes. It launched in the fall of 2019 with courses in calculus and psychology, catching eyes with its high-gloss videos that harken to another project of its founder Aaron Rasmussen, MasterClass, a nonacademic online course platform.
Since then, the company has added astronomy, microeconomics, philosophy, and statistics courses. It offers transfer credit for them in conjunction with the University of Pittsburgh, an agreement it expanded late last year — though some faculty have been critical of the partnership.
The company is one of several organizations seeking to expand postsecondary options online, often working with colleges. Others include StraighterLine, which offers students online classes for transfer credit, and edX and Coursera, which offer a variety of styles and credentials online.
These types of companies have investors’ attention. Coursera raised nearly $520 million in a recent public offering after bringing in $130 million in a funding round last summer. StraighterLine raised an undisclosed amount from investors the previous spring. Last year saw a record amount raised in ed-tech deals, EdSurge reported.
Whether the presence of these programs will help or hurt colleges is unclear. General education classes are reliable sources of revenue for institutions, so they may be reluctant to outsource them. However, as competition for students grows, partnering with the companies could help schools expand their reach.
Outlier.org is making a move to that end. The company recently hired a former Coursera executive focused on university partnerships, Anjuli Gupta, to expand its work with colleges, high schools, and employers. Coursera announced in the fall of 2019 that it would provide courses for colleges to use in their curriculum.
Rasmussen told TechCrunch that colleges have been more interested in Outlier.org courses due to the shift online during the pandemic. When asked how many colleges Outlier.org is currently working with, a spokesperson cited “inbound interest from over a hundred universities” about uses for its courses. The spokesperson said the company has also offered two courses with Florida Polytechnic University, for which that university grants its credits.
