HotChalk, an education-technology company founded in 2004, started out working in the public schools, providing tools to allow teachers to share lesson plans, homework assignments, and grades. Joe Ross, a senior vice president and chief strategy officer at HotChalk, says the company soon noticed that for-profit online universities had extensive advertising campaigns aimed at recruiting teachers for their programs. HotChalk’s executives saw a business opportunity: helping well-known brick-and-mortar institutions put their programs online to compete with those for-profit colleges.
That business model has turned out to be viable — and attractive to investors. Bertelsmann SE & Co., the German media corporation, invested $230 million in HotChalk in November as part of an effort to get a bigger share of the education market.
HotChalk’s role is similar to that of 2U and other companies in the education-technology sector: Colleges bring the professors and the various academic programs, while HotChalk brings the technology to get those programs online and to connect students to one another. Mr. Ross says those online degree programs should be designed to deliver a pleasant and consistent customer experience — the sort of ethic that drives the big brands of Silicon Valley and the West Coast, like Starbucks or Apple. HotChalk’s pitch to colleges, he says, is selling that experience.
“When you see a Starbucks logo, you get a certain kind of feeling, and when you walk into a Starbucks, they give you a coffee that tastes exactly as it should,” he says. “Universities are really good at the coffee, but not necessarily good at everything else.”
But HotChalk’s methods differ from those of companies that use their own software, Mr. Ross adds. The company collaborates with other companies to build specialized software fitting what an institution wants.
For example, New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development just announced that it would use HotChalk to create an online master’s-degree program in teacher education.
HotChalk, in turn, is using a company called Torsh to build a feature that will allow professors at NYU to record, annotate, and share video of their students teaching in classrooms across the country. A student-teacher sets up a phone or iPad on a tripod, and the video is beamed back to NYU, where professors can analyze the student’s teaching style and body language.
Ted Magder, vice dean for academic affairs at the Steinhardt school, says NYU hired HotChalk to build the online program because the university did not have the people or expertise to set up the program quickly, and because it needed help in marketing the new program.
“We realized that we didn’t have the capacity internally to properly spread the word,” he says.
HotChalk has set up about 30 such programs, but NYU is the only institution that has announced its relationship with the company. (In a recent op-ed essay for Huffington Post, Alan Singer, a professor of teacher education at Hofstra University, contended that NYU was trying to “make a fast buck,” and criticized HotChalk’s ties to Jeanne Allen, a charter-school advocate and senior adviser to the company.)
The company won’t reveal its other clients, except to say it works with “more than six and less than a dozen,” Mr. Ross says.
“Because we are not a public company, and we are not subject to reminding Wall Street how well we are doing every quarter — thank goodness — we can be discreet on behalf of our universities in a way that a public company can’t be,” he says. “We let our universities talk about us rather than talk about them.”
Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.
