The Story Behind Qualtrics, The Next Great Enterprise Company.
#SuryaRay #Surya Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 35-city event series hosted in 15-countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. He also founded Commonred and is ex-Electronic Arts. I met Ryan Smith about nine years ago in a college apartment in Provo Utah. We were both attending school, and after asking him what he was working on he replied, “I’m building an online research company with my dad called Qualtrics.” Nine years later Qualtrics has 5,000 customers, $70MM in funding, and turned down a $500MM acquisition offer last year in a bold attempt to build a billion dollar company. Qualtrics was well described last year when Sequoia Capital partner Bryan Schreier called them the “largest software company you haven’t heard of yet.” That is changing quickly. If you don’t know, Qualtrics was created by Ryan and has dad as a way to help schools and companies gather feedback and data on students/customers through surveys. They have 5,000 customers including FedEx, Hewlett-Packard, JetBlue, Microsoft, PepsiCo and Zappos. The company was started by Ryan and his dad. I recently interviewed Ryan at Startup Grind Utah and learned how it all happened. In the summer of 2001 while doing an internship at Hewlett-Packard, Ryan’s dad Scott called him and said he had throat cancer and would begin treatment immediately so Ryan returned home and took a semester off school. While at home he found that his dad, who Ryan describes as a “super early adaptor,” had built the technology that was the beginning of Qualtrics. Each day after Scott returned from chemotherapy they would work on the product. By the time Scott had returned to full strength, Ryan had signed up 20 customers and they had hired a small team to build out the product. The first customers were in academia. Ryan realized that he could easily find key decision makers’ contact information online, and since it worked for one it seemed only natural that it would work for others. The first customer was a professor at the Kellogg School of Management. Ten years later the first ten Qualtrics customes are still customers. All of this was literally happening from Ryan’s parents’ basement in Provo Utah in 2002 and 2003. Ryan’s first big hire was a friend that he convinced to turn down a $60,000 job to make $8,000 at Qualtrics. Don’t worry – after over delivering he made $12,000 the next year. By 2004 they had 20-people and there were so many cars on their street that neighbors http://dlvr.it/31w82V @suryaray
Currently, outstanding national student loan debt is over $1 trillion, $864 billion of which is backed by ye olde federal government. 
America’s elite institutions came out in full force for computer science education. First, the House of Representatives voted to update its traditional students 
Ask any startup founder, and they’ll tell you that engineering talent is in high demand, but the problem is that good talent is hard to come by. What’s more, we have a computer science education deficit in the U.S. Today, computer science is absent in 95 percent of high schools. Luckily, a gaggle of startups and websites, like Treehouse, Lynda.com, Code School, Khan Academy, LearnStreet and more will now teach you the basics of some of the world’s most pervasive programming languages. While these startups are collectively doing wonders for the democratization of computer science education, the founders behind 
Disruption comes in all shapes and sizes, and benefits people of all shapes and sizes. When you think about global entrepreneurs solving hard problems, you might not think about creating hardware products that aim to save the lives of premature babies. 
Online college courses are replacing traditional classrooms at a crazy-fast pace, yet it is still unknown whether they are actually better for students. A new large-scale study of 40,000 community and technical college students finds that, compared to traditional courses, students in online courses receive worse grades and are more likely to drop out. The negative impact of online study is disturbingly pronounced for minorities and students already at risk of dropping out. “Overall, the online format had a significantly negative relationship with both course persistence and course grade, indicating that the typical student had difficulty adapting to online courses,” writes Di Xu and Shanna Smith Jaggars of Columbia University. “Specifically, we found that males, black students, and students with lower levels of academic preparation experienced significantly stronger negative coefficients for online learning compared with their counterparts, in terms of both course persistence and course grades.” The research team controlled for an impressive array of student characteristics, class types and demographics, and found a negative impact across most of their variables. Interestingly, they also looked at courses where more than 75 percent of the students were at risk, and found that the presence of at-risk peers made drop out all the more likely. The impact, or “effect size” as it’s called in statistics, was very large. Taking a course online correlated with a grade drop of between 0.15-0.4 on average out of a 4.0 scale. The study, however, should be taken in context. As I’ve written before, large-scale research by the department of education finds that online education is often better than traditional face-to-face instruction. Moreover, the online courses evaluated in Xu and Jaggars’ research don’t have the world’s best instructors. One pilot found that replacing a traditional course with an online course taught by a Nobel Prize winner nearly doubled test scores. We don’t yet know how massively open online courses (MOOCs) will affect students as they scale to the wider population. This new study from Columbia is an important part (but only a part) of the ongoing national experiment. 
After five months of testing, iterating, spit balling and pavement pounding, today 
It’s almost as if there’s an arms race in online education. Which MOOC platform can expand the fastest? Place your bets now. On the heels of edX’s announcement that it will be expanding internationally with the addition of six new schools (bringing its total to 12), Coursera is doing some addition of its own. Today, the massive online course platform announced that 29 universities from around the globe have agreed to bring their courses online (for free) via Coursera. The new members will join the 33 institutions already on board, bringing Coursera’s grand total to 62. And, of course, just as edX was kicking back to celebrate its five new handpicked international members, Coursera announces that its updated roster just so happens to include 16 international institutions itself. The international expansion of both Coursera and edX is a big win for international students, who (at least in Coursera’s case) now have access to courses in multiple languages, including French, Spanish, Chinese and Italian. Of course, international expansion is also an important part of the roadmap for edX and Coursera (and online learning sites like Lynda.com as well) and could be a boon for both, exposing a whole new audience of potential MOOC adopters to courses from some of the most reputed schools in the world. While edX is a not-for-profit organization, Coursera is decidedly for-profit and, though it has plenty of venture capital in the bank, will need to continue scaling if it hopes to become a sustainable business over the long-term. To do that, as part of the introduction of 29 new schools to its platform, Coursera is also expanding its course offerings by subject, adding 90 new courses to bring its total to 313 courses in all. “With the addition of so many new courses across a wide range of disciplines, languages and academic approaches, we are now able to meet the needs of a more diverse student body, and give students more academic options to explore,” Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng said as part of the announcement. Since launching in April 2012, Coursera has registered 2.8 million students and is now seeing around 1.4 million course enrollments each month. Lately, Coursera has been taking some pronounced steps to begin monetizing its growing user base as well, launching Career Services in December — an opt-in recruiting program that matches students with employers — and adding Verified Certificates in January 