Mike Feerick leads a company that has been credited as being the first ever massive open online course or MOOC. He founded ALISON in 2007. Unlike other prominent MOOCs such as Udacity, Coursera, and edX, ALISON's content is not drawn from elite US-based universities. Rather, the Galway, Ireland based company focuses on practical workplace skills that can be tested by employers to gauge growing competencies. Since I last spoke with Feerick, the company registered its five millionth user, and much of the growth has been in the developing world. India, for instance, is the company's fastest growing market. ALISON has thrived on serving traditionally underserved education marketplaces.
As Feerick probed for opportunity to serve additional groups of people that have been underserved, perhaps the most marginalized group of all became a target: the population of formerly incarcerated people. In the US alone, 20 million people are among the formerly incarcerated, and one of the triggers of recidivism is a lack of solid job opportunity. As Feerick describes in this interview, he believes ALISON is perfectly suited to serve this often marginalized population while reducing the rates of recidivism in the process.
(This is the 14th article in the Education Technology series. To read past articles with such luminaries as the CEOs of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the "Follow" link above.)
Peter High: Mike, I was intrigued to hear this announcement about ALISON getting involved with the formerly incarcerated to provide training to make them both more employable and presumably less inclined to recidivism. The data is actually quite stark. There has been a lot written recently on the incarcerated population in the United States. The data indicates that 2.3 million people are currently incarcerated in the United States, there are up to 20 million ex-offenders, and that up to six million people are still under supervision of one kind or another. There certainly is a big population you might serve. Could you talk about the genesis of this idea?
Mike Feerick: I enjoy using new technologies and business systems to organize solutions to address social issues. With ALISON, we are making education more accessible the world over, but some marginalized groups have greater challenges than others in accessing what we provide - incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people among them. The need is huge, not just in the USA, but globally. For instance, there was one article in the Guardian yesterday that said that 92 percent of those being released from UK prisons feel unprepared for the world outside the penitentiary. These people have some of the greatest educational need in society.
The percentage of the US population in prison is just extraordinary. You have 25 percent of the world's prison population, and yet America has less than 5 percent of the world's population. Something is seriously wrong. For the 20 million people you mentioned who are already out of prison—if you have a felony, it is hard to get on with life as there are so many roadblocks. The one thing a formerly incarcerated person can do however is educate themselves, and the beauty of ALISON providing a massive number of free courses at many different levels is that the starting point can vary to suit every potential student.
As we have been leading this education revolution, I have had an eye on this social group and I thought, “OK, there are very few education dollars left for these people when they get out, yet it costs $100,000 on average per year to keep prisoners in jail. But when they get out, the government pays very little money to keep them out.”
So how do you educate these people in basic skills? First, a large number of formerly incarcerated people do not know how to learn. You need to pick them up at a very low level and bring them on with a focus on the fundamental stuff like how to study. The second thing is that a lot of them have been behind bars for quite some time. Many simply do not know what a mobile phone is, or how it can be used. When they come out you need to teach them basic technology. Then the soft skills: do they really understand why it is important to turn up on time for work and why you have to work a full day? Now that might sound patronizing, but actually it is an issue in terms of reliability, dependability; there are issues that are not engendered in people that are under supervision all the time.
We have a solution here that can really help. What we have done is create a course that really focuses on this need for workforce re-entry skills, taking the most relevant of the courses that are on ALISON and putting them together in the Advanced Diploma in Workforce Re-Entry that we have just launched.
I have been thinking of how to address incarcerated populations worldwide since I first thought up the idea of ALISON in 2005. Our first task, of course, was to be successful with a mainstream learning audience. In February of this year, I was in DC being interviewed by Ingrid Sturgis, an associate professor of new media at Howard University. Through the interview, she recounted her childhood growing up in a tough section of the Bronx, New York, and how so many of the families she knew ended up having members incarcerated. Over a coffee at Union Station, she talked about being an African American, and how the prison issue caused tremendously difficult issues within her community – and indeed how, similarly, the same issue was experienced daily by other marginalized populations like Native Americans. Minorities are overrepresented [in the prison population]. Ingrid was frustrated about the situation so I said, "Well, I have been thinking about this for years and maybe this is the segue that I need. Ingrid, we are going to do something about it.”
I went back to the hotel and I just started emailing people. I emailed all of the correctional education people I could find in all of the different states. Nobody responded to me except one person: John Linton, who was the head of correctional education at the Department of Education, the number-one civil servant in the country in correctional education.
High: How did things develop from these initial meetings?
Feerick: I was delighted to get an email from John, who agreed that we needed to bring new ideas and new technology to this issue. Having learned more about the innovation ALISON had brought to accessing education globally, he simply said "Maybe we can do something here."
It is important to understand that ALISON is coming to this initiative with some unique capabilities. Firstly, ALISON has worked since our inception with workforce development and investment boards across the USA. ALISON is the default free training option on workforce portals for 22 US States, including large states such as California and Florida. Literally, hundreds of thousands of learners have come to ALISON through federally-funded workforce and labor-focused portals - so we have a ready-made audience of workforce investment boards and officials who know of ALISON and what we do. Every state has programs about re-entry and correction, so we are tying together these relationships, the correctional education people, the academic community and the workforce boards to develop the optimum solution to address the need. At the launch of the Advanced Diploma for Workforce Re-Entry in DC, it was great to see the representation from the local DC workforce development community. There is a great enthusiasm to deal with the issue, and President Obama’s intervention and renewed interest over the past week or so has fueled this determination so much more. We need to get the certification introduced nationwide and rolled out, in particular to 20 million that were formerly incarcerated. We also need people who care about this issue, and are able to support us in our plans, to reach out and contact us. As ever, the larger the overall team is in addressing this issue, the quicker and more profoundly it can be dealt with.
High: You mentioned at the outset the community you are hoping to serve are not necessarily very technology savvy and they are not necessarily used to sticking with something and working towards accomplishing something. How do you think about addressing those?
Feerick: First, we have IT courses that start with “This is a keyboard, this is a mouse,” Courses that are “hear, see, and do.” If you just have a text and just read, an inexperienced or a relatively uncommitted learner will find that tough going. But if you use multiple senses at the same time, you will have greater success and some of our courses have terrific interaction. One of these courses has been taken by over one million ALISON early learners worldwide – people like the elderly who have been marginalized technologically and are starting at the basics.
The second issue is confidence. These people are, or have been at some time, institutionalized. For years, they have been told when to get-up, eat and sleep. We need to change this mindset to one that is more self-motivated and self-believing. In a survey of our graduates, 88% of the people who had certified with ALISON said that learning online with us had improved their confidence. The different thing about ALISON is that our courses are short and so our graduation rates are quite high. Very importantly, 90% of graduates said that it encouraged them to learn further. That’s something everybody wants: for people to be more confidence in their life, to be more assured of what they know and who they are, and to be interested in learning further. The trick to learning success is to get people learning at all. Keep it short, relevant and interesting. Once they achieve even the smallest educational success, they will then come back for more. Quick small wins is what you want. It is quite obvious and simple isn’t it – but then free learning provides extraordinary opportunity not understood or seen before.
For the incarcerated population, who have felt the brunt of not being part of society and most likely weighed down with a sense of inferiority because of their isolation and tough life, it is an immense opportunity. If they can begin to learn at all is half the battle. Even a little independent learning opens up wide new pathways. There are a lot of very bright people in prison wanting to have different options in life, and there is no new doorway quite like free education and skills training.
High: What about ALISON’s content makes it so suitable to reach this population?
Feerick: The courses on ALISON are reachable. The certificates to start off with, between two and two and a half hours, they can reach that – and they are all self-paced, so they can learn when and where they want. We also have nearly 750 courses online now so there is likely to be some course of interest to them to get them on the learning ladder. All future learning of course does not have to be with ALISON. We are content enough if we can engender an appreciation of the power of education in changing lives.
High: How do the courses you envision for the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated differ from what might be offered by MOOCs?
Feerick: ALISON learning content is self-paced, very different from traditional MOOCs such as Coursera or EdX. The content is focused on workforce development; it is very vocational, more about learning how to use Excel, health & safety, business skills, how to create a website, how to create a business online. This is not the stuff that you go to Stanford to learn. The Advance Diploma focuses the formerly incarcerated on four areas – basic study skills, basic IT skills, customer service and basic food hygiene training – as the hospitality sector hires so many former prisoners.
High: Are there partners you are working with now to make sure it is reaching the intended audience? Who are they and how have you engaged them?
Feerick: We have enthusiastic interest and buy-in from prison systems in states from an education point of view, some of them in large states with large problems to solve.
What we are looking for are pilot groups. If you are a parole officer and you have twenty people to look after and you need to encourage their self-esteem and get them to work, you should introduce them to online learning as a lot of them have access to the internet. A percentage of them will certainly be able to go on to ALISON and start doing free courses, especially if it is a mandatory part of the parole program.
What we would love to happen, sooner rather than later, is a judge saying to somebody who has a misdemeanor of some sort, that instead of going to sweep the street for 200 hours, or going to prison for a short sentence, they have to complete a course of study on ALISON – starting with our Advanced Diploma. I would wager with good odds that a 20-hour course will change their future a lot more than 200 hours sweeping the street. What if you insisted that somebody had to do the course, and they had to learn how to write a resume, or understand health and safety on a construction site?
The magic of ALISON is that you can be tested anywhere, anytime. That is a key concept behind the ALISON free learning system - or ecology as we call it, that you can test anyone on any ALISON course, anywhere, anytime. It tests what you know NOW, not what you might have known once upon a time. So a parole officer can basically tell somebody under his supervision to go onto ALISON and do the course. When they come back into the office, the parole officer can, if he wishes, just turn on his laptop, turn it around, and give the parolee a quick flash-test on it. ALISON is not training the brain surgeons of tomorrow, we are training basic skills: how do you do EXCEL, how do you speak English, how do you do basic accounting, basic project management, health literacy, and testing in this way makes a lot of sense and is powerful in its simplicity.
Where do formerly incarcerated people find employment? An awful lot go into kitchens. Clearly food hygiene is important to teach. Teach them the basics. A lot of them go into construction. We have courses on carpentry, plumbing, and health and safety on the construction site.
High: Do you have plans at some point to make ALISON accessible within prisons?
Feerick: Yes, absolutely. Google, I understand, are working on a program where they allow limited internet access within prisons. There are a lot of companies trying to sell tablets and other mobile devices into prisons. I am told that very few of those programs are actually working well, but they may start working better. The challenge for us is that when we allow access to our content in prisons, we do not have advertising income required to subsidize our costs – and the service must be paid for somehow. Just because we provide learning for free does not mean we do not generate revenues to support what we do.
High: In addition to the incarcerated population, where else do you see demand for ALISON’s educational services?
Feerick: Just this week we launched a partnership with AISECT, the largest training center in India with 12,000 training centers. In fact, we were referred to AISECT directly by the National Skills Development Council in India. We are growing rapidly in India – hoping to have one million students there by 2016. We have about one million learners in America and approaching six million around the world now. We have over one million learners in Africa where ALISON is extremely popular, not least in countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt, and South Africa where there is extraordinary need for the free certified education we provide.
It is amazing how you see national characteristics through our global activity. We look at statistical dashboards like any consumer internet-focused company, and you see people waking up and learning on the platform. You can see nations getting up and studying. We know that in India, for instance, people want the certificate at the end of the study more than anything. But in Africa, people just want to learn. They are sponges for knowledge. I am bullish on Africa as a continent. If we can hook-up this intellectual power and learning appetite in scale, things can change their very rapidly. Through online education systems servicing the learner directly, we can avoid a lot of the political interference that has affected the rollout of more traditional mass learning initiatives. There is a huge amount of talent in Africa and of course, huge population growth.
High: One of the points that is often raised when people debate the progress of MOOCs is attrition rates. Of course, you are a big data operation and you are tracking all of this stuff. How is that progressing or not, as the case may be?
Feerick: The single biggest thing that has happened in ALISON is that the navigation and design has greatly improved – so our rates of people coming onto the website and enrolling in courses have increased very dramatically in the last two years and allowed us to grow quicker than ever. Now, when people study something successfully, we have more courses to lead them to so they can continue to study – and we are much better at suggesting what new course they might consider. Also, we are making career paths come to life and more than ever, using big data to see where the trends are going.
Having 750 free courses available to study might seem like a lot, but it is not. We are getting ready for a shift into a situation of having many tens of thousands of free courses available. That is where you have even more data and more predictive environments and where we can talk in earnest about adaptive learning: using big data and trying to be predictive. People are definitely staying on longer – getting more satisfaction from what we provide and what we do with greater personalization as we have the means to provide it.
High: In terms of your investors, is there pressure for an event on the back end of this unless you choose to do so?
Feerick: We are a self-funded for-profit social enterprise. We have investors set for a very good financial return. However, for myself, and all the ALISON team, the social mission is important. There is rarely a day that goes by that we do not get an email from somebody around the world saying thanks for changing their world for the better. It is not needed but it is nice to get. As one of our team says, “Our goal is not just to do no evil but to do good”. The likelihood is that institutional capital with a social interest will replace our early investors in time. We have had extraordinary success over the past ten years, but what is most exciting is what is before us, and knowing we have so much further to go. That I think is our greatest advantage we have – that we have a clear vision of where we want to go (or at least we think we do!). We are not far from releasing revolutionary tools that will change education as we know it today.
The reality of online education is that it costs next to zero to share digital content online. A huge percentage of the activity within the education industry worldwide is duplication, focused on selling the same product over and over again. So much of the education that is being delivered can be done online for a fraction of the cost. Our aim is to drive down those costs as far as we can to a level where free education for all is genuinely possible.
High: So what else can we expect from ALISON in the coming months?
Feerick: Free Learner Management System (Free LMS) which we will release later this month is the big one. On ALISON, from next month, you will be able to invite a group of people to study a course while you monitor and manage their performance for free. This functionality will be of interest to a business owner, HR manager, or teacher, or essentially anyone interesting in organizing learning. This release will open up state-of-the-art learning technology to a new world of users. There is a huge corporate, as well as a traditional classroom and home-school market for this type of functionality. You can review individual performance on an individual or group basis, and premium services with certificate services. It is a superb way for organizations with no formal learning experience to engage with first world training. This learner management functionality (LMS) will be free on ALISON up to a certain number of people.
Learning management systems are a multi-billion dollar business today, and this is the start of this type of functionality being provided for free for evermore. It will enable small and large businesses and organizations all over the world to access state-of-the-art online training systems with free courses at no cost. It will enable millions more people to be educated around the world and we look forward to welcoming them on board.
There is also some very interesting stuff we are about to release in relation to personal profiles, not unlike what Linkedin do – but their focus is clearly much more professional and networking than what we do. We have created a new community section to allow you to read inspirational stories about our learners around the world. People know we have millions of learners – but who are they? Now, you can go online and read about learning achievement on ALISON in every country. There are a lot of marginalized people around the world using ALISON like emigrants, disabled, elderly, and huge numbers of young women across the Middle East for instance.
Society has a challenge ahead of it globally to up-skill huge numbers of people who are becoming unemployed and becoming unemployable due to increasing investment in new technology and capital intensive systems (Skills Gap). We believe the only way re-training and up-skilling can be done on the scale required is through the likes of ALISON. Our research suggests to us that over 100,000 people have got new jobs or promotions through studying on ALISON and presenting their learning accomplishments to employers – and we are having this impact without a cent of government funding! Makes you think doesn’t it?
Very simply put, we need to allow those that know to teach those who do not know. Like UBER utilizing the vast private yet dormant transport capability that was always sitting there, or Airbnb utilizing a vast supply of private accommodation that was similarly sitting there unused, ALISON seeks to access all the knowledge and teaching capability that is in the world and release it. There will only be room for middlemen, i.e. colleges and the like, when they provide something unique and local, like face time with professors, or access to training labs. Sharing old re-hashed facts is not a business model any traditional education institutions can survive on for very much longer.
High: Do you have a sense for what sorts of courses are going to be the biggest candidates and what is your approach to quality control?
Feerick: World-wide, our business courses are very popular. We take it for granted in the United States that you can do accounting and project management courses whenever you wish. But actually in places like Africa or Asia, it is not so easy, and people there are starved of affordable and high quality learning opportunities. Hence, why ALISON is such a well-used resource there. Quality is of the utmost importance. We do not produce that many courses (just yet) because we have a whole curated view on life. We have a content team with master’s degrees in pedagogy that review every course. We are not a “YouTube” of learning where just anything can be posted up. While we are not subject matter experts in everything, nor could we possibly be, we are expert in pedagogy. So we can look at a course and apply classic concepts of good quality. And then, online learning is very different from traditional learning. How a PDF is laid out is very different from how good e-learning is laid out. In e-learning, you have voice, you have speed, you have 3D, so you need to understand online pedagogy, not just standard two-dimensional pedagogy. Often a teacher that is trained in the old way might find it difficult to create content for an online environment.
High: The distinction you have made throughout our discussion between the education provided by a community college or in an associate’s degree program and that provided by a research university is interesting. Where does ALISON fit in relation to a traditional four-year program or traditional university-based education?
Feerick: Take an example such as healthcare management. We have many healthcare courses on ALISON. Is an ALISON diploma in healthcare the equivalent of a four-year degree in hospital management? No. But if there are one hundred jobs applicants going into a hospital looking for an administration job, and one person turns up with a diploma in healthcare from ALISON and is willing to take a test to prove their knowledge - you can be sure that person has a great chance of getting that job. What you are seeing here is the power of informal learning. It is about differentiating yourself, having a portfolio of learning accomplishment that is unique. It is like in some instances being the one-eyed man in the land of the blind: having what nobody else has.
What is happening over time is that more people start doing informal learning, and then five or ten people are turning up with ALISON diplomas or certificates. Then, which candidate knows more or has the best skill to do the job best? Who tests out best through the immediate assessments you can give each candidate via the ALISON free learning platform?
People used to ask us "Well who is ALISON certified by?" They do not get it. It is competency based: can you do it or can you not? I am still asking audiences "Who has a degree?" And they all put up their hand. And I say, "Who wants to be tested on it right now?" And they all put down their hands and giggle. The thing is, this is the charade that we have today. It was the best system that we had in years passed, so let's not knock it, but today you can test anyone on anything anywhere and anytime. Again, pieces of paper saying you used to know something once upon a time are becoming redundant at a very rapid race. As new learning opportunity presents itself via the likes of ALISON in the coming years, it will be incumbent on every professional worker to keep up-skilled to remain competitive. Unlike today, everyone will have immediate access to learn and up-skill. The fact your parents saved and sent you to college will no longer be the passport to a successful life that it once used to be. Employers of the future will expect you to be learning constantly, whether they pay for it or not.
This is the fundamental concept that is going to change education around the world and bring immediacy to learning. And that is not to say that ALISON and its likes are the solution to all education needs. Of course there are places where you need one to one peer and master discussion. Of course there are places where you need to talk to a professor. Of course there are times where you cannot just watch a video but you have to go into the lab and actually do it. But in terms of opening up fact-based learning, it is going to be hard to beat us at what we do, and we are getting better at doing what we do every day.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy, has just been released by Wiley Press/Jossey-Bass. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. Peter moderates the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. Follow him on Twitter @WorldClassIT.
