CreativeLIVE, the startup looking to bring a live, online classroom to creative entrepreneurs, announced today that it has raised $8 million in series A financing from Creative Artists Agency, William Morris Endeavor, CrunchFund and Google Ventures. The new investors join Greylock in backing CreativeLIVE, which invested $7.5 million in the startup back in October of last year, bringing the startup’s total (series A) funding to just over $8 million.

Greylock’s investment saw James Slavet joined CreativeLIVE’s board of directors, with Mika Salmi, the former president of Viacom Digital, joining the startup as its new CEO at the same time. Today, as a result of its latest round, the startup announced that Flickr founder and Etsy chairwoman Caterina Fake would become the newest addition to CreativeLIVE’s board of directors.

Part of the excitement is due to the fact that CreativeLIVE is attacking a newly-hot space within education. Massively open online courses (a.k.a. MOOCs) were the most buzzed-about topics in EdTech last year. However, while the market for free, online education is potentially enormous, CreativeLIVE is hardly alone in its attempts to bring quality online classes and lectures to the masses.

Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, Udemy, EdX, StraighterLine, 2U, Instructure, SkillShare, Lynda.com and many more recognize the market opportunity. In fact, Accel and Spectrum saw fit to put a whopping $103 million into Lynda.com in January for this very reason.

Taking a page out of Lynda.com’s book, Chase Jarvis and Craig Swanson launched CreativeLIVE in early 2010 to bring the same kind of quality video instruction one would find on Lynda.com for Adobe products or technical education to the more creatively-inclined (and entrepreneurial) students. Like Lynda, the startup takes video quality seriously and has become a production operation just as much as a virtual video (hosting) library, developing its own studios in Seattle and San Francisco.

CreativeLIVE then uses those studios to film (and offer) live, streaming classes in HD video, which students can access for no cost. If students want to watch the class again or missed the live airing, they can buy the video for between $29 and $149, as we wrote at the time. The founders believe that this combination of live instruction and the ability to re-watch at any time via a pay-as-you-go pricing model will give them a leg up on the competition.

The startup has also been going in a slightly different direction from companies like Udemy or ShowMe, which want to make it easy for any teacher to put their own lessons or classes online, instead curating both its content and instructors — through a high-touch process akin to Lynda.com.

In October, the startup told us that its learning platform had been used by over one million students from over 200 countries, which was impressive considering the pace of its growth, which was completely organic. With its strategic investment from Creative Artists and William Morris — two of the largest talent agencies in the world — CreativeLIVE will have access to a sizable pool of talent from which to draw its instructors.

With new talent and seeing as it’s all backed by its simple revenue model, the founders want to make CreativeLIVE into the largest online classroom on the Web. Since October, growth has been encouraging in that regard, they say, with revenue increasing 400 percent year-over-year and a 500 percent increase in course offerings in 2012. The average class size on CreativeLIVE is 60,000, the founder said, and one class saw over 150,000 students participate.

That traction has allowed them to pay “some teachers up to six figures for just three days of work,” they said. Not bad for three days work.

Find CreativeLIVE at home here.

[Disclosure: TechCrunch founder and current columnist Michael Arrington is a general partner at CrunchFund.]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last year, the buzz around the potential of online courses (particularly MOOC platforms) reached new heights, and this year is already shaping up to be the one in which online course platforms and the startups that love them, make their big push for legitimacy. To wit: The year kicked off with the news that the largest university system in the world has partnered with Udacity to pilot low-cost, lower-division and remedial classes — online and, importantly, for credit — within the California State University system.

There is a growing list of institutions and startups that are on a mission to democratize education with affordable and scalable online course platforms, but the most familiar name in the world of MOOCs would have to be Coursera. Launched in 2011, Coursera has partnered with dozens of the country’s top universities to offer high-quality, Ivy League-caliber classes (on over 200 subjects) to anyone and everyone for free. For the sake of full disclosure, Coursera recently took home the “Best New Startup” award at The Crunchies.

In spite of a mission that nearly everyone can get behind, Coursera (and its ilk) haven’t been without their detractors. One of the biggest knocks against the startup in the early-going has been that it lacks an identifiable business model. Recently, Coursera has taken steps to fix that, moving towards revenue-generation with the launch of Career Services (an opt-in recruiting program that matches students with employers) and “Verified Certificates,” which allows students to verify the work they do on the platform — for a fee. It also marked the startup’s first foray into credentialing, which brings us to the second big knock against Coursera.

Up until now, the startup has not offered degrees or credits for its online classes, which has meant that Coursera classes have existed mostly as a way to pursue supplementary or continuing education — not as part of degree programs. But that changed today, as Coursera announced this morning that five of its courses have been approved for “credit equivalency” by the American Council on Education (ACE). This means that students who complete these five courses can receive college transfer credit at institutions that accept ACE recommendations.

So, importantly, Coursera’s new credit equivalency doesn’t automatically mean that every university it has partnered with automatically guarantees credit for the approved courses; instead, institutions have the option to accept or decline credit. In other words, it’s up to them.

The five courses include four undergrad courses and one vocational course, including Pre-Calculus from the University of California, Irvine; Introduction to Genetics and Evolution from Duke University; Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach from Duke University; and Calculus: Single Variable from the University of Pennsylvania and the vocational option, Intermediate Algebra from the University of California, Irvine.

Why is this important? Well, I’m glad you asked. For starters, Coursera’s accreditation victory represents another step forward in the evolution of online education. Platforms like StraighterLine have long offered online distance learning courses for college credit (ACE approved, by the way), but Coursera is the first among the fast-growing congregation of MOOC platforms to receive accreditation. Though it’s worth noting that Udacity is currently in the process of seeking approval as part of its partnership with California’s state universities.

This also opens the door for further evaluation of Coursera’s roster of courses, as the company plans to continue working with ACE to review and potentially approve more courses in the coming months. But, perhaps more importantly, offering courses for credit means that Coursera is moving closer to offering a real educational service. In other words, MOOCs have really been useful as supplemental learning tools, providing students or working professionals with the opportunity to brush up on subjects they’re familiar with or learn new skills to buffer their CVs.

But, with credit, Coursera is positioning its platform as one that can help students earn a degree — and not only that, but because it offers content exclusively from the nation’s top schools, that means students could one day earn an online degree from an Ivy League university. Or, at the very least, supplement their degree from State University X with credits from Princeton, Yale and the like.

Being able to take lower-level courses from elite institutions at a low cost has huge implications for students and, perhaps even on national graduation rates. As I said recently, “imagine being able to take a class at Princeton, get credit for it and not have to pay thousands to get it.” Let that soak in, and tell me that doesn’t have the potential to transform education, which is currently seeing record lows in acceptance rates at Ivy League schools and skyrocketing (trillion-dollar) student debt.

Online education offers students the opportunity to learn at their own pace, using multimedia tools, video and study resources that classrooms just can’t offer. This has huge appeal to move the needle on learning outcomes for the many intelligent students out there who fall behind because they don’t get an opportunity to practice core concepts and instead just go with the flow — the pace of which tends to be dictated by the faster learners.

What’s more, for those who have been skeptical that MOOC platforms like Coursera would be able to turn their free education model into viable, sustainable businesses, its new accreditation represents another big step in that direction. Coursera now has three revenue streams in Career Services, Verified Certificates and courses for credit. However, the former appears to be supplemental, while credited courses — tied into Certificates — will likely become the Golden Goose that brings Coursera to Monetization Island.

In order for students to receive certificates or credits, the platform requires students to sign up for its “Signature Track,” which provides verification for the work students do in their courses. Signature Tracks will be offered for the majority of its courses and students have up to three weeks from the beginning of the course to sign up, at which point they’re asked to take two photos with their webcam, one of themselves and the other of a photo ID.

This allows Coursera to create a “biometric profile of their unique typing patterns” by requiring them to type a short phrase. When they go to submit work for a course, they type the short phrase, which is then matched to their student ID. And while there is a fee for Signature Track, it pales in comparison to what these courses typically cost both in the classroom and online. Signature Tracks cost between $60 and $90 and proctored exams have a price tag of between $30 and $99. All in all, two or three college credits per course will cost between $90 and $190, Coursera says.

And while we’ve mentioned the apparent value in being able to take Princeton courses for credit, ACE approval also means that Coursera’s classes could be eligible for credit at 2,000 colleges and universities across the U.S. — for under $200.

While it’s hard to understate the potential significance of the startup’s ACE accreditation, it hasn’t been all sunshine, moonbeams and periwinkles for Coursera. The platform recently suffered its first big disaster — an ironic one, to boot — when one of its courses crashed just one week in and has subsequently been suspended. And what was that course, you ask? Why it was the “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application,” of course. Oh, the bittersweet irony.

In reaction, Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng told Forbes, “when someone first invented the book, someone had to invent the table of contents, the page numbers, the section headings … and we’re in the process of inventing those right now, and there will be missteps along the way.” Looks like it’s about time for Coursera to make its first investment in some CRM software, after all, Ng is right. While online education has been around for years, MOOCs are still in their infancy. Yes, it still seems hard to justify poor service with a “hey, we’re innovating here” excuse, but these are first-mover growing pains.

As Inside Higher Ed pointed out, students of the class reported that, as the professor scrambled to salvage the course, she did so “without an adequate technology infrastructure” to rely on. What’s more, the course “promised to teach students how to deal with these issues in their own online offerings,” as the description itself promised that students would learn how to design online courses, manage online classes and use web tools and Learning Management Systems. Again, the irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife.

Because MOOCs are, by definition, online courses offered at scale (potentially to huge groups of students), as How People Learn Online explains, the failure of Coursera’s course shows that when things go wrong on a MOOC platform, they affect a bigger audience than schools and educators are used to dealing with in their classrooms. These failures happen in front of the masses — online — where traditionally there has tended to be less empathy and tolerance of hang-ups than one finds in in-person contexts.

As word spreads about the growing number of affordable, quality courses (for credit) online — and the increasing ease of access — it’s easy to believe that millions of students could begin flocking to platforms like Coursera. While activity overload is a problem Coursera would love to have, solving these infrastructure and support issues now is critical — especially as MOOCs increasingly find themselves in the spotlight.

And you know what else is critical? Better authentication mechanisms and methods to ensure accuracy and prevent cheating. The potential for cheating in MOOCs is high, and some believe that Coursera’s keyboard dynamics (or stylometrics) are far from being a truly credible form of authentication. As students flock to online education platforms, this issue will become increasingly important.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

With the rise of massive online open course platforms (a.k.a. “MOOCs”) like Khan Academy and Coursera, a new model of online learning has emerged, promising quality, affordable education at scale. This new generation of educational platforms offer alternatives to expensive degrees programs and physical classrooms in the hopes of ushering in Education 2.0 by emphasizing interactive, personalized and skill-based learning.

Tapping into this trend, Chase Jarvis and Craig Swanson launched CreativeLIVE in early 2010 to bring a live, online classroom to creative entrepreneurs. Since then, the Seattle-based startup has flown under the radar, building a social learning platform that has quietly attracted one million students from over 200 countries.

Today, creativeLIVE is officially pulling back the curtain on its global classroom and announcing that it has closed $7.5 million Series A financing led by Greylock, with Greylock partner James Slavet joining the startup’s board of directors. In addition to its raise, creativeLIVE has also made Mika Salmi, the former president of Viacom Digital, its new CEO.

Other than its recent investment in Edmodo, Greylock’s investments in education have been few and far between. But Slavet tells TechCrunch that continuing education is a $100 billion industry and one that still lacks market-defining players. As a result, the right team and model stand to have a big impact on the space — and create a lot of value — and Slavek said he thinks creativeLIVE is well-positioned to do just that.

Cheerleading aside, creativeLIVE is hardly the first to attack this space. Khan, 2tor, ShowMe, Udemy, Udacity, Coursera, EdX, StraighterLine, TED, Knowmia, Educreations and many more are in a variety of ways using video and digital platforms to offer more frictionless access to continuing education and affordable learning. Collaborative learning platform SkillShare and PowHow, a startup we recently covered that is building a marketplace for live, webcam classes in subjects like fitness, cooking, music, arts, DIY, and crafting.

But the best parallel for creativeLIVE would be Lynda.com, which has been offering a virtual video library of courses taught by industry experts since the ’90s. The company hit $70 million in revenues in 2011 and now offers over 1,200 educational, how-to videos, providing paid learning content to individuals, Ivy League schools and companies like Disney, Time Warner and Pixar. In particular, one thing that has set Lynda apart from today’s emerging DIY online video models is the fact that it produces most of its content in-house.

Like Lynda, creativeLIVE takes video quality seriously and has become a video production operation in addition to simply being an online distribution platform. The startup has its own studios in Seattle and San Francisco, which allow the startup to offer live, streaming classes in cable-quality, HD video, which stands out when compared to, say, the pile of user-generated how-to videos on YouTube.

In addition, while Lynda.com users can unlock its videos for a monthly subscription fee of $25, creativeLIVE offers its classes for free. The startup’s courses are streamed live, all of which can be accessed for no cost, and if viewers want to watch the class again, or re-watch particular sections, they can purchase the video at prices that range between $29 and $149, depending on the course.

creativeLIVE co-founder Chase Jarvis says that he thinks the startup’s pricing model gives it a competitive advantage, as anyone can access its high-quality video-based courses for free and pay for repeat consumption. The model led the company to profitability early on, where it has remained since, so the co-founders’ confidence in the model seems to be well-founded. The incoming revenues have also allowed the startup to dish out “millions” to instructors.

While the co-founder wouldn’t specify what the platform pays its teachers, he did say that, typically, teachers can make the same amount teaching for a few days on creativeLIVE that they would make in a year. With the incentive of supplementary income, Jarvis said that the company has seen a lot of demand from teachers and is quickly adding to its current roster of 60.

CreativeLIVE’s instructors now include names like Tim Ferriss and Ramit Sethi, photography instruction from Pulitzer Prize winner Vincent Laforet and filmmaking classes by Gale Tattersall, the Director of Photography for House. But it’s less about finding celebrity teachers than it is about creating a highly curated experience with content provided by those who are best at teaching their particular subject, Jarvis said.

Because the co-founder is a professional photographer by trade, the startup initially focused on the creative arts and has since expanded its scope. As of today, it offers classes in photography, business, software, design and film and, with its new infusion of capital, will be looking to expand into other disciplines in the near future, along with tailoring content to its international users.

The startup also has a big leg-up thanks to its hiring of Mika Salmi, the former president of Digital Media at Viacom. Prior to Viacom, Salmi founded AtomFilms, an early player in short-form digital content, which he merged with Shockwave before selling the company to Viacom for $200 million. He also has an eye for discovering talent, beginning his career in the music business with an independent label where he discovered and signed Nine Inch Nails, among others.

CreativeLIVE is playing in a popular space that is gaining new adopters fast and furiously. With its new capital, the startup will be able to begin getting the word out to a larger audience, bringing new global learners into its creative classroom.

But the real impact going forward, Jarvis says, will be made by those that can empower people to learn real skills to enhance their career or hobby to help them move up in their field, or turn their true passion into a day job.

Find creativeLIVE at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When it comes to learning, BenchPrep believes that the most effective educational content doesn’t come in the form of books — or even eBooks. Instead, it’s interactive and cross platform. That’s why the Chicago-based startup is on a mission to build an adaptive learning hub for interactive courses, where students can study content from any publisher, on the Web or on any mobile device. The startup has already released 100 courses, which are being consumed by 250K students, but the team has bigger ambitions — they want to reach 500 courses and one million students within the year.

To help it meet this scale, BenchPrep is today announcing that it has closed $6 million in venture funding, led by New Enterprise Associates with participation from Revolution Ventures. This is BenchPrep’s second round of funding, following the $2.2 million it raised from Lightbank last year, bringing its total to $8.2 million. BenchPrep was one of Lightbank’s first investments and Eric Lefkosky and Brad Keywell continue to sit on the startup’s board of directors. As a result of the round, NEA partner Peter Barris also joins the board.

While reaching 500 courses and one million students by the end of the year may seem an ambitious goal, BenchPrep has come a long way in a short period of time. The startup launched its platform in July 2011 and grew its course library to 100 within 10 months. But the real key to its growth is that BenchPrep now partners with more than 20 of the industry’s top publishers, including McGraw Hill, Princeton Review, Wiley, Cengage Learning and O’Reilly.

Rather than developing its own educational content in-house, BenchPrep licenses material from these textbook publishers, mixing and matching the best content for each particular discipline. Of course, textbook publishers have traditionally been reluctant to partner with newcomers, especially when it comes to licensing agreements, but BenchPrep CEO Ashish Rangnekar tells us that they were able to convince publishers that they were not, in fact, competing for the same dollar.

Instead, Rangnekar asked publishers to think of BenchPrep as distributors — and distributors not of books or eBooks, but of interactive study guides. And as extra incentive, the CEO says that BenchPrep ensures that the royalties for their publishing partners are greater than what they find selling their content through Amazon or traditional bookstores.

What’s more, the fact of the matter is that technology really isn’t in the DNA of these publishing companies, and cross-platform distribution, especially mobile, isn’t something they do well. That’s why BenchPrep has become a sort of a middle man that takes licensed educational content from publishers, turns that material into interactive, gamified courses and study guides, and distributes it across the Web and mobile devices.

That turnaround process can happen in seven days, allowing the startup to convert Algebra and Chemistry textbooks that might sell for $40 or $50 into interactive courses that run anywhere from $50 to $150. For students, this is much cheaper alternative to paying the typical $1,000 or $1,500 for an online course and, for publishers, it’s a nice little source of incremental revenue, thanks to royalties.

Rangnekar also says that it’s become more and more difficult to get students to pay for textbooks and, while they might be more open to shelling out for an eBook or an app, they (like everyone else) naturally expect the price to be lower than a hard copy. If a textbook is $30, for example, they want to buy an eBook equivalent for $10, and, in the app economy, any mobile app that sells for over $5 is practically laughable.

This is obviously part of the reason publishers have dragged their heals in going digital, but BenchPrep is showing publishers that students are willing to pay for educational content — in fact, over 100K of BenchPrep’s 250K students are paying customers — they just want to feel they’re getting the whole course can access it on any device.

It also helps that the startup aggregates all of its courses into a single platform so that a high school student can study for a Calculus or Biology exam using the same interface they would to study for the SAT. Users also get to take advantage of analytics that help them focus on the areas where they need the most work and a sync function that lets them pick up where they left off in their studies — both of which extend across subjects and devices.

In pitching BenchPrep, the CEO tells us that investors were eager to see the startup validate its model in three areas: Ability to source content, that students are willing to pay for the material (that the economics make sense) and that the engagement is measurably higher on mobile than compared to traditional models. In terms of the latter, Rangnekar tells us that two-thirds of BenchPrep’s students access their courses on mobile devices and are averaging 78 sessions per month, while spending an average of nine hours in their courses.

Having been able to validate its model — at least initially — in these three areas, Rangnekar says that (with some relief) the team can now finally turn its focus to solving those interesting learning problems, namely, how to improve the learning experience on mobile (and the Web) to increase retention and performance.

In other words, going forward, BenchPrep plans to focus its efforts on developing better ways to make the learning experience more engaging. Beginning with game mechanics, leaderboards, and social features, the startup partnered with Princeton Review in May to launch GRE ScoreQuest, an iOS app that gamifies the study process for students taking the GRE.

While the audience is obviously limited, the team has been using the app to test the efficacy of social analytics and gamification and will soon begin rolling out select features to all of its courses.

Find BenchPrep at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

MapMyFitness is a veteran of the online health and fitness space, with the first iteration of its website appearing back in the summer of 2005. Since then, the startup has developed a suite of fitness-oriented websites (like MapMyRUN.com, MapMyRIDE.com, MapMyWALK.com, et al) to let users track and store their running, cycling, walking and hiking endeavors, along with accessing a database of international routes, fitness calculators, nutrition tracking, events listings and more. MapMyFitness has long had a stable community of committed users, but over the last year, things have been moving steadily north.

CEO Richard Jalichandra (who joined the startup from Technorati last year) tells us that MapMyFitness recently passed 9 million registered users, and that, collectively, its mobile apps have amassed over 30 million downloads, making it one of the biggest players in the fitness tracking space.

The good news for MapMyFitness, however, has been the recent telescoping growth in registrations (not downloads), with the latest 1 million registrations occurring over the last 40 days. That’s an increase from the 54 days it took for the site to go from 6 million to 7 million users, and the 47 days it took to pass 8 million users. All in all, that’s 3 million new users in the last 5 months, and the CEO says the company is today seeing 25K new registrations a day, significant when viewed against its nearly 7-year history.

It’s based on this recent uptick in activity that MapMyFitness is today launching one of the biggest feature updates the platform has seen since rebranding in 2007. The startup has completely rebuilt its portfolio of websites, and is now beta testing three big new features: Updated routes, personal challenges, and courses, with the main attraction, Jalichandra says, being the latter.

The CEO claims that the introduction of its new feature makes MapMyFitness the only online fitness service to have integrated Google Maps API v3.9 (the latest version of its API) and leverage its full functionality.

What does that mean? While MapMyFitness users could already plan, track, and share their routes, Jalichandra says that Courses adds a notable difference in performance and user experience, enabling users to go beyond the actual route. By incorporating realtime info on traffic, weather, safe routes, directions, realtime elevation, and custom markers, now users can go beyond the route, planning the best Segway route home from work, for example..

Really, the feature is intended to bring MapMyFitness into the gamification/Foursquare era, as it provides both hardcore and casual athletes with both leaderboards and check-ins. Courses offers an automatic “check-in activity” for every exercise logged to track the speed, distance, consistency, and intensity of workouts, ranking users by gender, age, and weigh on the platform’s new leaderboard.

There’s also a group segmenting feature that allows users to compare themselves, leaderboard-style, against specific groups, be they local clubs, friends, or fierce cycling rivals, backed by a points system that incorporates personal best times and monthly consistency, awarding badges to the users with the most overall points on climbing courses, those with the most completions of a course, the fastest time, etc., etc.

Courses will span MapMyFitness’ five primary categories, including cycling, running, walking, hiking and winter sports, as well as hundreds of subcategory specialties (like unicycling) and enables users to create new Courses directly from their iPhones, BlackBerrys, Androids, Windows Mobile phones and iPads.

It also helps that Courses leverages the startup’s database of more than 50 million routes, 1 million climbs, and 30K event courses through realtime processing, allowing users to measure fitness and track progress in realtime or over time.

With RunKeeper on a laudable mission to build “the health graph,” alongside an API that’s already attracted 50+ integrations, big funding, and a platform that’s quickly becoming one of the top destinations for tracking and sharing fitness routines, incumbents are feeling a little bit of pressure.

But, as its name implies, MapMyFitness does maps better than most, especially now that it is powering its new features with Google’s latest mapping technology. According to the startup’s CEO, other than Strava, MapMyFitness is the only platform that offers realtime GPS activity leaderboards, and he thinks that components of the service, like route mapping, the ability to send a route to your phone to route with directions, along with the ability to choose from over 40 sports give its service a leg up on the competition.

MapMyFitness also capitalizes on three revenue streams: Media, digital commerce and subscriptions, and enterprise software, with this diversity resulting in the startup’s revenue doubling each of the last four years, the CEO says, and is projected to triple in 2012. This has allowed the startup to avoid raising outside investment beyond its series A in 2010 and to grow, under its own volition, to a team of 78, giving it an advantage over its competition in terms of good old human capital.

With its a deep database of courses, routes and trails, some added stickiness thanks to leaderboards and check-ins, and some big data collection and storage capabilities on the back-end using postGIS, it wouldn’t be surprising to see MapMyFitness continue in its accelerating growth trajectory. And maybe even find a little funding waiting in the wings.

Also, don’t be surprised if MapMyFitness ends up being featured by Google at some point. My guess would be here.

Courses will be available initially through a private beta test for first 100,000 users
who sign up here. iPhone and Android MMF users will only see superficial changes reflected in its new site — now available to one and all — at new.mapmyfitness.com. Widespread access to Courses et al will be offered later this summer.

What do you think?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Online education has been around for years, but they were largely viewed as experiments. Over the last year, things have changed. Elite universities are not only taking online education seriously, they’re building it into their 10-year plans. Harvard and MIT’s EdX is one example, Coursera another, while startups like CodeAcademy, Treehouse, StraighterLine, Khan Academy, Lynda.com, Udacity, and Udemy (among others) are carrying the torch for the flipped classroom.

Interestingly, what unites these platforms, aside from the fact that that they’re all in some way educators, is that each has built their own custom software and infrastructure to deliver their content. Are any using traditional learning management systems, like Blackboard or Moodle? Nope. That’s because viable, interactive online education requires software that can meet a new generation of demands: Social, mobile, rich multimedia, flexibility, and scale.

Yet, while these well-funded startups have the resources and capital to build custom platforms, there are thousands of traditional schools, education providers, learning coaches, etc. producing stellar learning content that lack the tools necessary to share their awesome content with the masses.

That’s where Pathwright comes into play. Greenville, South Carolina-based Pathwright was founded by a team of hackers (and educators) who have set out to build a platform for “the next wave of educators” — a simple, DIY content management system that lets any and all educators create, distribute, and sell online courses under the banner of their own branded, online schools.

Today, those looking to take advantage of online classes basically have two options. Hack together an LMS like Moodle or Blackboard, or build their own education software. It was the same problem that led to open source CMSes, or DIY mobile app software, and white label solutions of all stripes. Moodle and Blackboard are notoriously bad, and taking the former route generally leads to poor design, UX, and suffers from a lack of branding options. In terms of the latter, if you have the time/resources to build your own great, but it’s not for everyone.

So Pathwright worked with educators and students to fine tune and simplify the process of building a DIY tool for educators. The startup beta tested with an early client, which has already delivered 8K courses and growing, Pathwright Co-founder Paul Johnson tells us.

The co-founder says that the big vision is, like that of Udemy, to give educators direct access to students anywhere in the world and to make a living without the need for institutions or legacy tech. Johnson sees a coming increase in the number of niche education options, with the best courses being offered by practitioner teachers, a la Lynda.com, as the lines between educational publisher, institution, and teacher are blurred. A tool that makes Lynda-style distribution possible (the model itself is hard to mimic as Lynda has professional studios to produce its video content) will be in an advantageous position.

That’s why Pathwright allows users to teach anything by way of creating interactive learning paths, create a single course, or build an entire online school, train employees and customers, offer courses as curricula, and coach or mentor people in any location.

How does it work? Users create a simple path of action steps to guide their students through each course on a single page. These pages can include video or audio lectures, assessments, readings, exercises, or any other type of learning action, and offer the ability to easily upload, create, or embed content from YouTube or Scribd, etc.

Each course comes with a built-in social network for every student taking the course, allowing students to share notes, ask or answer discussion questions, and receive grades and feedback from teachers. Teachers can then publish their courses is a built-in, branded catalog and sell them directly, make them invitation-only, or offer monthly subscriptions that unlock all the courses. Educators can also offer online-only or location-based courses, or both, may be self-paced, or on a schedule with varying degrees of teacher interaction.

While the increase in scalable, online learning options is good news for the soaring price of education, some online education startups suffer from undercooked business models or stifled revenue streams. In the end, this is a business, so taking a cue from the popular software startup pricing scheme, Pathwright makes its platform cheap to get started, with pricing increasing with scale and users.

There are no setup or fixed fees, but once a user has over 10 course registrations, Pathwright charges $7 per registration, plus four percent of sales made through the startup’s built-in catalog. If the school isn’t selling courses using their Pathwright account, then the four-percent fee is removed, and schools can pre-purchase registration credits in bulk to lower the per-registration fee. Find more here.

Additionally, the startup recently launched an option for schools to sell their courses on a subscription basis (a la Treehouse) as well as offering courses for other teachers to use in their own private classes. Pathwright also provides related services for a fee, like video hosting and encoding, branded, custom themes, curriculum conversion, etc.

While Pathwright’s suite of tools are going to make it an appealing option, the startup is not alone in this market. Under its current model, Pathwright will certainly have overlap with Udemy, which also allows anyone to build and sell online courses, as well as Litmos, an LMS that is more focused on business training but offers basic course building and selling options — to name a few.

Both companies are well established and have been in the game for several years at least (Litmos was acquired by Callidus Software last year) and are profitable, so Pathwright has some ground to make up. While we’re seeing a flood of new online ed players entering the space, the landscape is still largely emergent, and I’d say there’s still plenty of room for each to scale before they’re competing directly for customer acquisition. There are just too many entities looking for easy ways to offer, sell, and distribute their own courses, and the market is still largely underserved.

Pathwright hasn’t raised any funding to date and remains focused on product and marketing, but will likely look to begin fundraising later this year.

For more, check out Pathwright at home here. What do you think?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch