Campuswire Invites Instructors to Make Best Courses Available to World — and Collect a Fee

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 11/18/20

Education technology company Campuswire has introduced a platform that allows professors from around the world to deliver their live online classes to anybody on the internet. Campuswire Courses differs from a massive open online course (MOOC) in that the classes are delivered in real time and students can interact with the instructors. Another difference is that there's a fee attached to each course. MOOC courses typically only involve costs when there's a certificate or college credit earned.

According to the company, in this program professors will set the tuition for their classes, and the revenue will be shared among the two entities. "A big part of what we're trying to achieve is to simply help amazing teaching faculty better monetize their expertise," said Campuswire CEO Tade Oyerinde, in a press release.

The Campuswire platform isn't new. According to the company, it has been picked up by faculty in at least 300 institutions and has 150,000 active users. Now, it will be used to enable instructors to reach students outside of their classes.

The first offering to be made available under the new program is a four-week pre-seed and angel investing course taught by Charles Hudson, a manager partner at Precursor Ventures. Tuition is $2,500. Hour-long classes will take place on Mondays and Wednesdays at 6 p.m. Pacific time and will include one weekly lecture with guest speakers and a weekly seminar with student discussion. The lone teaching assistant will be Campuswire's own CEO, Oyerinde.

"Charles' course is precisely the kind of opportunity that we're trying to increase access to. Before Courses, there simply wasn't any way, short of investing $100,000-plus into a top-five business school degree, to take classes from venture capital experts like Charles. That's now changing," said Oyerinde.

Also, the company announced that starting in January 2021, the "pro" version of the platform would be made available free to instructors on which to host their courses, as a shift in its business model. Currently, that's set at $20 per student per term. Now Campuswire will rely on generating income through the Courses program. The company already offers a free version.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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