- Outlier.org, an online education platform that offers online courses that earn students transferable college credit, announced it raised $16 million
Outlier.org — an online education platform that offers online courses that earn students transferable college credit — announced it has raised $16 million in total funding. This announcement also includes a recent $11.7 million Series A round led by GSV Ventures with participation by Harrison Metal, Tectonic Capital, and Jackson Square Ventures.
And Outlier.org is known for producing cinema-quality lectures that are taught by some of the brightest and most charismatic figures in academia, including professors from Yale, MIT, Columbia, Cornell, and Davidson. For a cost of $400, about one-sixth the cost of a traditional college course, Outlier.org students enjoy a world-class learning experience that includes access to 1-on-1 tutoring, AI-proctored assessments, dynamically-generated problem sets, and active learning techniques.
This round of funding follows an extension of Outlier.org’s successful 2019 fall pilot program with the University of Pittsburgh, which will continue into the spring and summer terms in 2020.
As part of the pilot, Outlier.org students achieved a C grade or better at the same rate as those in comparable courses within traditional classrooms. And the results indicate a breakthrough in providing truly scalable and affordable for-credit college education.
“Our mission is to increase access to high-quality education and reduce student debt,” said Aaron Rasmussen, CEO and founder of Outlier.org. “With this funding and the insight that we have gained from our two pilot courses in the 2019 fall semester, we will continue building more intro-level courses and expanding to accommodate more students and more experts in their fields who can provide top-quality education at a reasonable cost.”
Rasmussen is also known as the co-founder of MasterClass. MasterClass is known for helping popularize online learning.
“We are proud to support Outlier.org in their efforts to change higher education for the better,” added Julia Stiglitz, board member and investor at GSV Ventures. “The 2019 fall semester is just the beginning, and Outlier.org has the capacity to give students an opportunity to get an education in their respective fields without committing to decades of student debt payments.”
