Eruditus

India-based technology company Eruditus collaborates with top universities to make executive education accessible globally. Founded in 2010, Eruditus has partnered with over 80 universities, including Harvard, Cambridge, INSEAD, and MIT, and educated more than 350,000 students across 80+ countries. Co-founder and CEO Ashwin Damera shares his vision for making high-quality education accessible and affordable to the next generation of leaders across the world.

What inspired you to found Eruditus?

My co-founders and I were beneficiaries of high-quality education, and we believe that had a massive impact on our lives, both professionally and personally. At the same time, it was clear to us that access and affordability of high-quality education is very limited. Less than half a percent of the 60 million high school graduates in any year go to the top 500 universities globally, which creates a big gap in outcomes. We founded Eruditus to use technology to bridge that gap, by enabling first-rate institutions to deliver courses online to a wider audience around the world.

I think our purpose is even more relevant today than when we started because the global skills deficit is increasing, not decreasing.

How do you ensure that Eruditus' partnerships and programs align with the rapidly changing needs of today's workforce?

If I rewind back to when I was studying for my MBA at Harvard Business School, was AI part of the curriculum being taught? No. And I'm talking about one of the top institutions. It's not just AI. Take topics like sustainability or ESG: companies today are trying to figure out how to make a more diverse range of people feel included in the workplace. But how many companies have been skilled in doing that? You can't just assume that leaders know how to do it. For us, it's about understanding these kinds of topics and areas that will evolve and emerge as society goes forward.

How does Eruditus use AI within its own business?

We've started using it to improve the student experience, for example, to help answer more questions in live sessions and to summarize those sessions for students who couldn't attend.

AI is also reshaping grading. One of the biggest criticisms about online education is that it's all multiple choice with a true/false type of grading, which doesn't motivate students to put in effort. In fact, in our pedagogy, we often use descriptive, essay-type answers, but grading them is a labor-intensive process. Now, AI is helping us to do that at a much higher quality.

AI is also our number one course topic. It's gone up 5x in the last 12 months. So, we're continuing to create more relevant content, which is another way we can contribute to the AI revolution. For example, we're working with the computer science and AI lab at MIT to disseminate their content to thousands of people. That research will influence where AI is going to take companies.

Do you think AI can help people make better choices for their careers and futures?

The advantage of a platform like ours is data - on student backgrounds, motivations, course ratings, etc. We've started experimenting with feeding that data into a language model that makes connections and then suggests courses to students based on what it thinks will best suit them. A human program counselor wouldn't be able to determine those nuances at scale.

We don't have data on our students' roles after they graduate yet, but that's part of our roadmap - to be able to look at students who've completed our courses and see how many of them made a change? What was the delta on their compensation? And to be able to attribute that to a specific skill they learned during the course. That's the feedback loop.

I can think of larger platforms like LinkedIn or Monster.com, for example, being able to tell a job candidate that their chance of getting it is, say, 20% based on the skills overlap and share five things they could do to boost that likelihood by 22%. Then measuring what happened so that it gets better and better.

What edge does Eruditus have in today's heated race to upskill and reskill the workforce?

We're not a platform that just provides content. We provide education based on three pillars:

First: social interaction. We believe humans are social learners. So, in every one of our courses, as well as learning some parts of the course by yourself, you will also be learning as part of a group.

The second thing is live instruction. In our courses students engage live with faculty or industry experts, which is extremely motivating for them - our courses have an average completion rate of 85%.

Third, we focus on learning by doing. Take our negotiations course with MIT. Rather than just watching videos and answering multiple-choice questions, we've built out four negotiation simulations.

We're also addressing a global market: around 30% of our students are in the US, another 30% are in India and APAC, and the rest are across the world. And about 20% of our students are learning in languages other than the original course language.

What feedback or insights have you had from faculty members who are now teaching in person and online?

A lot of faculty members have told us that their in-person teaching has improved because of the online courses they've created. Why? In a classroom, you may give a 60-minute lecture, but online, nobody's listening to that. So, they're forced to reformat into maybe 10 three-minute lectures. Each one needs to be bite-sized, with a clear point and examples. Instead of having many lectures with a big exam at the end of the semester, they're creating mini assessments along the way. Faculty members have started using this in the classroom as well.

What opportunities do you see as you look to grow the business?

Today, we work with about 85 universities. There are over 20,000 in the world. There is a massive opportunity to double the number of universities we work with because we're still at an early stage in India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and many parts of Europe. We'll go deeper into these markets while still working with the top 1% of institutions.

Secondly, a lot of our partnerships today are with business and engineering schools, but the skills gap also exists in other domains. There's a huge opportunity to grow into medicine, law, journalism, design, public policy, and public health schools.

Finally, we started by going direct to individuals, but companies struggle with upskilling and reskilling their workforces too. We're thinking about how we can use our great content and delivery mechanisms to add value to companies as they future-proof their workforce.

What are you most proud of achieving so far?

In the last 12 months, about 250,000 students have enrolled in our courses. I would say that around 90% of those students would not have had access to those courses if we didn't exist.

30% of our students are women. They juggle more than perhaps men do and through our flexible, online model we can make high-quality learning more accessible to them.

How do you see the future of work and education evolving over the next 100 years?

There's more and more research showing that humans are going to live longer. So, I think the notion that getting a degree early in your twenties that guarantees your success professionally for the rest of your career will disappear. I don't even think it will take 100 years for this to happen. The people who make it to the top will be those who understand that education is a continuum, that you've got to keep investing in it to remain relevant and achieve your full potential.

In the future, there may be a shift from degree learning to taking one short course at a time on a specific topic, which could be a hard or a soft skill.

Companies are also increasingly realizing that people learn differently and should be allowed to do so in their own ways, at their own pace, according to their needs. Rather than companies mandating what training people need to take, I think we'll see decentralization, with employees deciding what training they want - and platforms that become skills banks, which companies will use to match people to specific roles and projects.