One of the most important lessons Mike Feerick (MBA 1993) learned at HBS was delivered before he even arrived on campus. Feerick was accepted to the School under a deferred admissions program and encouraged to spend 18 months in the business world before joining his cohort. During that time, Feerick went to work as an assistant to Chuck Feeney, founder of the Atlantic Philanthropies, who is among the world’s most generous philanthropists. The experience left Feerick asking, “What if I gave the best years of my life to building something with enormous social impact?”

Feerick has answered that question with Alison, the Ireland-based online empowerment platform he launched in 2007. Alison’s first six courses were among the first MOOCs—massive open online courses—to take advantage of the reach of the internet, debuting even before the term was coined. Now, 14 years later, Alison offers some 2,000 different courses from IT and marketing to languages and humanities and has educated 19 million learners in 195 countries—all for free—supported primarily by revenue-generating leads from search advertising. The number of participants has skyrocketed during the pandemic, “and we’re just getting started,” Feerick promises.

Growing Demand for Online Courses

As the online education sector has grown, Alison’s “freemium” model continues to set it apart. The company is one of the largest certifiers of education globally and boasts 3 million graduates. Feerick is especially proud of the company’s course completion rates, which are often higher than those of other free products. About 30 percent of students who spend more than 10 minutes in an Alison course complete the course. In some offerings, that number is as high as 60 percent, a nearly unheard of level of engagement for the sector. Feerick credits the success to the company’s twin emphasis on tried-and-true pedagogy and gamification. “We want you to get addicted to the course the way you get addicted to a game,” he says.

Since the start of the pandemic in early 2020, Alison has more than doubled its worldwide staff to 125 in order to meet the growing demand for free online courses. Four million new learners have used the site in the past year, and a million more who earned a score of 80 percent or higher in a course have become Alison graduates. The demand has not been in what Feerick calls the “fun” courses—for instance, studying Swedish in advance of a trip. “People are studying practical skills, like project management, and with more commitment than ever before.”

The company’s mission is to provide the necessary resources for learners who lack access to the education and skills training they desire: primarily, those in the developing world where there are fewer educational opportunities, those in the developed world who cannot afford the available options, and those affected by the upheaval in business and schooling caused by the pandemic. For instance, in the United States, Alison is integrated into state workforce agencies in 29 states as a tool to assist those who are unemployed bolster their skills. “Our workplaces are changing very dramatically,” Feerick says. “We can provide people with the most up-to-date courses to give them an edge.”

A Sustainable and Scalable Model

Despite Alison’s social justice focus, Feerick was determined to build a successful for-profit education company. While working with Feeney, he saw his mentor’s generosity toward educational institutions. But Feerick also realized that “the challenge of making education accessible to all is beyond the capacity of philanthropy,” he says. “I believed a social enterprise company could provide free education to everybody profitably, so that it would be sustainable and scalable.”

For Feerick, the pandemic has highlighted the urgency of building an alternative to the traditional college education model. “College students are still being asked to pay their $20,000 fees even though they are also required to study from home using video they could probably get on YouTube,” he says. “That can’t last.” Alison also now provides free psychometric testing and cognitive skills tests. “Everyone has a right to understand their own strengths,” he says, adding that Alison is working on a universal free online high school.

“We can profoundly change access to education,” Feerick says of Alison’s approach. He expects that one day there will be hundreds of thousands of courses on Alison for free. “We can change the world for the better with free education and workplace skills training,” he says. “Why wait?”

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