Alison is an e-learning provider and academy founded in Galway, Ireland, in 2007 by social entrepreneur, Mike Feerick. It is one of the world's largest players in free online education - and one of the world's largest certifiers of educational and skills attainment. As a for-profit social enterprise, its stated objective is to enable anyone, anywhere, at any time, to gain basic education and workplace skills. Considered by many to have been the first MOOC, Alison predates when the MOOC acronym was born. Contrary to other MOOC providers with close links to American third level institutions such as MIT and Stanford University, Alison's content is workplace focused. As of Dec 2017, Alison had 11 million registered learners, 1.5 million graduates, and 1,000 courses available for free access. Largest learner populations exist in the United States, the UK, and India. Alison is reputed to be the largest free learning platform based outside of the US. A majority of Alison's learners are located in the developing world with the fastest growing number of users in India. 14% of Alison graduates state that through free study on Alison, they either obtained a new job, a promotion or a new college placement.
Video Alison (company)
A New Way of Learning
Alison seeks to bring disruptive innovation to global education and skills training. Using the internet and smartphones, and its free learning ecology of free learning, certification, learning management and publishing, Alison states it has a sustainable and highly scalable business model to enable the world to be educated for free. Founder & CEO Mike Feerick states "Traditional learning is no longer fit for purpose - it is too slow, too shallow, too costly and inaccessible. Only 6.3% of the world's population have ever benefited from formal university or college learning, and the only way we can make education accessible to the other 93% is through free online learning", Alison aims to drive all costs of accessing digitally-based education and skills training to zero.
Maps Alison (company)
Dynamic Informal Certification
Alison enables anyone to test the knowledge and skill of Alison graduates anytime, anywhere, on any subject through 20 question "flash tests" that assess their knowledge and expertise. Unlike a traditional college degree, an Alison graduate must be open to being tested on a course assessment at a moment's notice--possibly long after they have graduated from that same course. They must get an 80% pass rate to retain an up-to-date Alison Graduate status. Feerick notes "Most people with degrees would not like to sit those same exams now. While this may not be the way to test a PhD, it works fine for assessing workplace skills such as spreadsheet, database, accounting or language". Employers says Feerick, "care little about how much it cost to learn something, how long it took, or where it was studied. They want the employee to possess the skill or knowledge they state they hold now". Alison suggests this simplified and cost free form of certification and testing needs to be adopted globally to make skills and knowledge verification more accessible to everyone. It states more employers are bypassing formal education to a greater extent than before and looking much more closely at aptitude, skills and ability which are increasingly measurable
Distributed Trust
Alison proposes that massive free accredited learning can be driven by the "Power of the Crowd" or models of distributed trust or distributed collaboration, much like introduced by online platforms UBER for taxis and AirBnB for accommodation where respectively, the driver rates the passenger, and vica versa, and similarly the host rates the guest. With free online informal learning, the quality of the service between learner and teacher is similarly disciplined with poor performers rated down and ejected. Like UBER and Airbnb, Alison proposes to bring new supply to the marketplace in the form of additional experts who can now teach using free publishing tools and platforms to share what they know. Because of Alison's large user base, issues with new courses are identified quickly on publication with fixes applied instantly. A cited example of distributed trust is the popularity of TripAdvisor where crowd produced recommendations of where to stay are preferred to any reference to formal accreditation in terms of where a person might wish to stay, largely given the superiority recency of timing and transparency of TripAdvisor user recommendations and advice, and the huge number of people offering reviews.
Complementary Learning
Alison certification is accreditated through the Alison Academy, a section of Alison where traditionally accreditated pedagogic professionals review content quality and adherence to standards. Certifications through Alison are not promoted as alternative qualifications to current standards but as complementary certification. CEO Feerick states that "a Diploma in Nursing" with Alison will be unlikely to get you a nursing job in the developed world, but as complementary learning, having that extra proven added knowledge can make the difference in being hired in healthcare or not. In countries where these skills are scarce, this knowledge and skill can be invaluable. Informal learning allows learners to show they know more than their core formal learning suggests, that they are up-to-date, willing to learn, and they can also study at their own time and place, a real benefit in a world where time is increasingly at a premium.
Publishing
Alison invites publishers to publish courses on its platform. Some publish for no monetary return, others in turn agree to provide their content for free access on Alison's website due to the shared revenue gleaned 'mostly from advertising and sales of certificates. According to The Economist, the company seeks to drive education through advertising in the manner of television and radio. Through the online pay per click advertising revenue model, Alison has founded a business model whereby 'learners in the developed countries are essentially paying for those in developing countries' while providing access to learning materials for free.
Status Quo
Alison states that as education is a global $4 trillion business, the reluctance to change of those who benefit and rely on the current system of education and skills training worldwide must not be underestimated" Furthermore, it suggests making learners pay for costly traditional certification solutions makes no sense in today's technological world when free options are present. "Traditional third-party accreditation is a methodology simply too expensive on the learner and literally stops people learning. Certification needs to be more dynamic and Alison enables this" says Feerick.
Graduation & Completion
Once a learner successfully completes a course assessment on an Alison course, they are considered an Alison Graduate. There is no compulsory requirement to purchase a physical parchment or PDF to earn an Alison award, although many graduates purchase downloadable PDF's and parchments to display to employers, display as a keepsake, or to support the Alison free learning mission. This ensures that anyone, regardless of income but with web access, can educate themselves for free. Alison states that average completion rates, once a learner spends 10 minutes on each course, are approximately 35%.
Adoption of Informal Certification
To encourage mass engagement in free online learning, Alison proposes that Governments implement non-financial measures to make online learning more popular including (i) make it mandatory that within al government funded recruitment interviews, candidates must be asked about what informal learning they have completed (ii) insist on the same process for all internal promotion and performance reviews, and (iii) to implement legislation making it legally necessary for private corporations to consider what candidates have learned for free online, as access to traditional formal education often favours the better off. If governments and leading corporations show respect for informal online learning, more people will engage in such learning. Alison predicts a rise in informal Corporate Certification as Corporations now have the opportunity through free publishing platforms like Alison to certify knowledge and training about their own products and services, enabling them to be used more effectively. Alison argues that industry is better placed to lead in new knowledge and skills training dissemination than academia as it is closer to the source of what is new.
Business Model
Alison income is generated 'mostly from advertising and sales of certificates. According to The Economist, the company seeks to drive education through advertising in the manner of television and radio. Through the online pay per click advertising revenue model, Alison has founded a business model whereby 'learners in the developed countries are essentially paying for those in developing countries' while providing the learning materials free. Where many early MOOCs have retreated from free, Alison has decreased the cost of what it does charge for, and provided additional non-cash methods of payment for services offered. Learners pay a fee if they wish to download diploma certificates, or have them delivered, or they can secure the same at no cost through a "new learner" referral scheme.
David Bornstein noted that 'practical skills training is usually expensive.' Some have argued for the ineffectiveness of the MOOC model of this kind in delivering real educational impact, highlighting the lack of personal interaction with educators and the high drop-out rate of users with no incentive to commit without any material investment of their own.
Sources have noted the 'sustainable' manner of Alison's operating procedure, The Economist suggesting that Alison generates 'plenty of revenue' on its website while still providing its learning materials of 'mostly vocational education' for free.
Alison focuses on a 'bottom of the pyramid' audience in developing countries or marginalized in developed countries. The quality assurance model adopted is if the content is competitive in the mainstream developed countries such as the USA and UK, then it will be competitive elsewhere. "We are focusing on job skills at lower level says Feerick. "We are not training any one to become a qualified neuro scientist. We are training lots of people to speak English, to learn about IT, to learn about basic principles of business, on entrepreneurship. This is what we teach."
Courses
Alison currently offers over 1,000+ courses across Certificate, Diploma, and Learning Path levels across a wide range of subject categories including Technology, Language, Science, Health, Humanities, Business, Math, Marketing, and Lifestyle. The certificate level courses necessitate no more than 2-3 hours study with the more rigorous diploma level offerings requiring 10-15 hours study on the part of the learner. There is no time limit on completing a course, so learners can study entirely at their own pace. Some courses such as the Microsoft Digital Literacy Program may take up to 20 hours to complete. One of Alison's most popular courses ABC IT, a 15- to 20-hour training suite is cited by the New York Times as 'covering similar ground' to the International Computer Driving License without the cost of certification. Alison aims to create new universal standards for learning on all subjects at all levels. Alison states that rapid course development is a key benefit of recent technological developments, producing for instance courses on disease risk factors and protection on the Zika and Ebola viruses within days of the disease threat becoming known. More generally, courses are becoming obsolete far more quickly today, requiring more frequent publication and updating of courses.
Countries & Regions
Alison has learners and graduates in every country worldwide. Leading countries and regions of Alison learning activity are as follows:
United States of America
The USA is Alison's largest and most important market with over 2m learners. Alison is integrated into the US Department of Labor portals in 18 states. Use of Alison is encouraged for those receiving unemployment benefits who are urged to go to ALISON.com to "up-skill" themselves. California and other states seek evidence that unemployed people receiving benefits are taking active steps to improve their prospects.
United Kingdom
Alison is popular in the UK with approaching 2m learners. It was the first growth market for Alison on launch driven by early adoption by trade unions and the national library network where Alison basic education courses were initially promoted to many marginalised groups including elderly, unemployed and new immigrants before mainstream adoption.
India
The President of India, Honourable President Shri Pranab Mukherjee, announced a partnership between the NSDC (National Skills Development Council of India), and Alison on July 5, 2016. Alison also that it had surpassed 1 million registered learners in India. Alison CEO Feerick stated that "Prime Minister Modi's goal of up-skilling up to 150 million workers by 2022 can only be achieved using online free learning platforms". According to a 2014 Economic report by the NSDC, only 2 percent of India's workforce is adequately skilled for the modern workplace. Alison also announced a partnership with AISECT, one of India's largest training organisations with 23,000 affiliated training centres across India. "My visit to India was humbling" said CEO Feerick. "One teacher arrived to meet me in New Delhi from Gujurat having travelled 16 hours in a bus to thank me on behalf of the Alison team for providing his school with free chemistry and math courses for the past five years." The majority of Alison learners in India are aged between 18-34 years with the highest concentration in the larger urban and internet connected population centres including New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. Other areas such as Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Utter Pradesh report strong growth. Alison courses most popular in India are English language and articulation skills. After English, Indians go for HR management, operations, project management, marketing management and technical skills development. Feerick states that as opposed to other cultures, Indian people like to get a certificate for the purpose of attaining a job. In other countries, learners are often more interested in more basic self-development.
Africa
With 2 million learners, Alison is the largest free online learning platform across Africa Ghana is one of Alison's fastest growing markets in Africa with the number of Alison learners set to double from 150,000 by the end of 2018. As someone can learn and certify for free, it opens opportunity to the very poorest communities like no other learning platform. Other leading countries include Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, Kenya and Ethiopia. Over 1,000 Alison graduates requested to meet CEO Mike Feerick on his first visit to Nigeria in November 2017.
The Skills Gap
Alison's proven free learning ecology of free learning, certification, learning management and publishing has a big role to play in addressing the growing Skills Gap worldwide according to Feerick. "We have been stopping people from educating and upskilling themselves, and stopping those who can teach and train from having a wider impact" said Feerick to a large audience at a SXSW. "Global inequality and the skills gap are the biggest challenges facing governments and free online education is the most powerful modern tool that we have to address these issues". He concluded: "Governments and advisors are looking in the wrong places for answers and asking the wrong people for solutions. The correct response to the increasing automation of the workplace is to automate the learning process".
Alternative Sentencing
On March 1, 2016, an Upstate New York, USA, Lockport City Court Judge, William J. Watson ordered a defendant to complete free courses on Alison as an alternative to incarceration. Dylan Lewis, 25, completed two business management courses. Orleans/Niagara BOCES, oversaw Lewis' progress over a two-week period. According to Alison CEO, Mike Feerick, Lewis was the first person ever to complete post-high school courses on a free online learning platform as a drug court alternative sentencing requirement. "Free Education holds special opportunity for the incarcerated" says Feerick. "It's education at no cost to them, cost usually being the biggest barrier that inmates and former inmates face. We need not just to get people out of prison, we need to get them learning. Why alternative sentencing can work is that the education is free. The defendent was able to go home, log on, and do the course, and didn't have to pay anybody. More importantly, Judge Watson didn't have to pay". "It's a wonderful opportunity for the courts to add one more element of learning into their attempt to break the cycle of recidivism," Watson said. "We've always mandated education as part of our programming here, but that education has been on a high school or equivalency level. Anytime an individual needed learning beyond that, it began a voluntary scenario on their part due only to cost." In 2016, Alison created in partnership with US Workforce Development agencies an Advanced Diploma in Workforce Re-entry to help the formerly incarcerated adjust to living outside prison.
Social Impact
Research among Alison's graduate learner base indicates that 88% felt learning improved their personal confidence, and 90% said they felt encouraged to study further courses. Many learners have used their new skills to launch businesses. According to Peter Goldmark, former President of the Rockefeller Foundation, Alison "unlocks new worlds of opportunity for people around the globe who want to advance their education and professional competence"
See also
- Language education
- List of Language Self-Study Programs
- Alternative Sentencing
References
External links
- Alison website
Source of article : Wikipedia
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