By Daniel Pearson
RALEIGH – Web Assign, an e-Learning software company that spun out of North Carolina State University, plans to roll out a secure web browser this month that allows teachers to keep students from searching the Internet for answers to online exams, or submitting more than one multiple-choice answer at a time.
If Web Assign connects with its core audience and reaches its goal of doubling the amount of student subscriptions, which run about $20 a year, the move would result in a $2,000,000 increase in annual revenue for the company. However, Web Assign has no marketing department or aggressive strategy in place to help get the word out about its new product.
Company President John Risley says the new program, called “Secureexam Browser,” enhances education experiences by allowing students to keep notes they gathered while solving problems, and to see exactly how they are performing compared to their classmates, among other applications.
“With the Internet wide open to a computer user who has access to a regular web browser, students have access to information world-wide during a test,” Risley says. “Our browser prevents this by allowing access to the test and nothing else.”
Risley says Web Assign, which started as a project in the NC State physics department and continues to operate under a licensing agreement with the university, is ready to step out and at least double its current user base of 100,000 students and 1,400 teachers at 450 different schools and universities.
Until now, Web Assign’s core service allowed teachers to create assignments, virtual pop-quizzes that are timed, and ascertain which individuals have turned in assigned work, among other features. The new browser release addresses many issues raised by user feedback, and the company hopes the upgraded performance of its software will stimulate word-of-mouth growth.
“Our strategy is to market to faculty members,” Risley says, “Ultimately, the teachers are the ones who will influence the purchasing decisions of school administrators.”
Positive feedback from a small group of teachers could result in a campus-wide deployment by university’s IT department, which is where the high-end dollars reside in the e-Learning sector, says Sean Gallagher, an analyst with Boston-based Eduventures, Inc.
There are four distinct markets carved into the e-Learning landscape – education delivery, content, computing infrastructure, and services – with enough room for several companies to grab market share as a niche provider, he says.
“There are large service providers with integrated e-Learning systems that more or less own the channel, but software companies that offer products that can snap-on to widely-used applications, like those offered by Blackboard, WebCT and eCollege, still have room to grow,” Gallagher says.
The overall market for technology products and services sold to colleges and universities is more than $5 billion annually. U.S. IT expenditures by educational institutions, including salaries paid and products and services purchased, tops $20 billion, according to a report written by Gallagher.
”What’s happening now is that more of those dollars are being spent on outside products and services,” Gallagher says. “To achieve scale as a profitable, national business a company would need to deploy aggressive marketing strategies, without a doubt. But the thing about higher education markets is they are highly collaborative. If a company like Web Assign is able to work with just one or two colleges – and it sounds like they have gone well beyond that – the value of their solutions will start to spread by word of mouth, as educators tend to share best practices with one another. They could quickly find their solution adopted by more and more universities, but they’ll need to be entrepreneurial about it.”
Karen Gage, director of marketing for WebCT, says emerging companies like Web Assign provide specialized tools to enhance what core learning platforms deliver, but the audience her company targets is the head of a school’s IT department, rather than the end user.
“We hold online seminars, network at conferences, do some direct mail and print advertising, but our biggest success comes from networking at education conferences,” she says.
On the other end of the education software marketing spectrum is a company called Agilix, a designer of software known as GoBinder that connects with Blackboard. Agilix dedicated a large amount of capital resources to launch a public relations campaign that sends company representatives into university bookstores around the U.S., from Aug. 15-30, and allow students to test out GoBinder in person, says Brad Baldwin, director of marketing for Orem, Utah-based Agilix.
Baldwin says campus-wide deployments by university IT department represent the highest source of revenue for education software and service firms, but Agilix hopes students will continue to purchase its product at $49 a pop. GoBinder puts out a new release every year with updated software.
“A lot of technology is deployed that helps improve teaching, but the other half of the equation is the learning side,” Baldwin says. “We put students at center of the universe and give them an application to leverage this teaching system to quickly avoid printing costs by using electronic documents, to easily search and find and notes, and really become more efficient in learning.”
One indication that demand for Web Assign’s software continues to increase is the number of servers storing its databases. Risley says the company has about 24 servers located at the MCNC Research and Development Institute in Research Triangle Park, and that plans include adding more infrastructure in the months ahead.
The company continues running off its own revenue, and has yet to receive a penny in venture capital.
“Because we offer a subscription service, people pay in advance so we were able to start out with some clients and needed no outside investors,” Risley says. “We would always consider outside capital, but the question is what you can we really by going out and getting a lot of money? Education is different. It’s not as money driven as other markets. The drive is to create solutions that make it easier for teachers to teach as efficiently and thoroughly as possible.”
TTJ
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