Episode 46: Accessible Education for Everyone with Pierre Dubuc, Co-Founder & CEO at OpenClassrooms

Education has no borders and should be accessible to everyone, whether they're business professionals learning at their own pace or individuals who are simply looking to learn a new skill. This is an idea that Pierre Dubuc has lived by for a very long time as the co-founder and CEO of OpenClassrooms.

Pierre's mission with OpenClassrooms is to make education more accessible, which is the focus at Illuminate Higher Education as well. The OpenClassrooms platform has 500 employees building the online platform that allows 2,500 mentors to train more than ten thousand degree students per month across 140 countries. According to Pierre, the business is growing fast and increasing 150% every year, attracting around one hundred fifty million dollars in venture funding from reputed investors, making it one of the biggest online education platforms in Europe. 

Their online courses and degree programs are endorsed by the French state. The online programs are not yet formally accredited within the United States as they are different from a traditional college education. Nevertheless, they still provide the same complete student experience. They have courses, teachers, a network of students, and a network of alumni. After finishing the program, the students will get connections and partnerships with appropriate employers.

MOOC Madness

Massive open online courses (aka MOOC courses) are the first step to a larger revolution. They're a challenge to traditional higher education and an avenue for lifelong learning in general. Once millions of students started enrolling in MOOCs, it triggered a first wave of new investments, platforms, and initiatives, which took years. It could also be argued that a big trigger for a massive change in higher education was Covid. MOOCs might have been a stepping stone, but the acceleration in the shift of higher education towards the online space was a massive undertaking during Covid. Full university experiences have moved online, giving students a partial or full online education experience. As a result, we can definitively say that anybody can learn online in some form. 

Now that we know we can learn online, we can get a degree online. On top of that, we have a need to learn more, and we need upskilling and rescaling programs because jobs and skills are changing like never before. Covid accelerated the transformation of jobs and skills, which means that as a result, a lot of workers lost their jobs because they were displaced. They probably need some sort of training and upskilling to get a new job, which could be in another field or a new sector. Even if your job hasn’t been threatened, you actually need to acquire new skills very quickly nowadays. 

When you look at the trends that have occurred within universities since Covid began, a lot of the things that we thought were required—like a classroom, library, or student union—all of these things were put to the test, and it felt like they were not a necessity for education. Anyone wanting to get a degree, or get a credential to upskill at their current workplace, or get a new job, or change job, can now prepare for specific roles with things like MOOCs.

Flexible Pedagogy for Everyone

OpenClassrooms designs its curriculum by analyzing the job market, specializing in the skills and jobs of the future, and by talking to employers who have a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the jobs in high demand. It also has mentorship sessions via video conference on a one-on-one basis every week. For 12 months in a program, students are going to meet with their mentor 50 times, who will be there to coach their students and give them best practices, motivate them, and provide a necessary human element to online education.  

The human touch is critical to drive high completion rates and good student outcomes. The key element of OpenClassrooms’ pedagogy is flexibility—being able to adapt to any sort of individual situation such as disability, living in a remote area, having kids or family to take care of, and so on. It's important to recognize education as a complex matter since there is a lot of collaboration involved with governments, public employment agencies, and college universities. A lot of these models work well with lifelong learners, adult learners, or working learners.

It's hard to say what the future of education will look like 10 or 15 years from now, but the challenges we've seen with Covid are here to stay. Things will continue to accelerate and transition from in-person to online, or some sort of hybrid approach, but generally speaking, the balance will be weighted more towards online. It's going to be all about skills, competencies, and job and student outcomes. 

Typically when we think about higher education, we think about students between the ages of 18 and 24. But in the United States, more than 50% of students in higher education enrolled today are older than that. The reality is that higher education has been designed for younger people, but we have so many lifelong learners now, that the trend for older learners will continue to accelerate. There is a big shift in the number of people that need to upskill and rescale, which leaves a huge opportunity for colleges and universities to train many more people. 

Clearly, we need something that is more scalable. It's a matter of skills, jobs, competencies, volume, and accessibility. Pierre views accessibility in terms of financial and pedagogical as well as accessibility for underprivileged populations. There is a need to bring more women, Black people, and school dropouts into tech and other highly in-demand jobs. Employers will need to invest in people earlier and earlier, meaning offering apprenticeship programs, internship programs, and so on. There is a huge talent shortage and the turnover rates are through the roof as well, so employers will need to start acting if they want to stay competitive in the market.

Connect with Pierre Dubuc: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pdubuc/

Learn more about OpenClassrooms at https://openclassrooms.com/en/

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This episode is brought to you by N2N’s Illuminate App, The iPaaS for Higher Education.

About N2N Services

Founded in 2010, N2N is committed to serving educational institutions and helping them figure out how to serve their students, faculty, and staff using the most innovative technologies and solutions available in the marketplace. Over the last decade, N2N has served over 300 academic institutions and enabled their student success journeys.

N2N Services Inc. is a leader in enterprise application integration and strategic advisory services for higher education, At N2N, we are committed to providing the highest quality solutions and collaboratively building student-centric solutions.

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