How will BitDegree get the best courses in the world? Q/A with Adomas, the person responsible for course acquisition BitDegree Follow Mar 9, 2018 · 7 min read

Here at BitDegree, we want to be open about what we’re working on and what we’re doing. We want to share some information regarding the courses that BitDegree will house on our platform.

In one of the recent meetings, we discussed what would be the most efficient way to educate people and what’s the best way to get courses. We want to share this information with the community. To keep everyone up to date and have a better understanding who we are we wanted to share insights about the BitDegree team. We had a chat with Adomas, the person who’s making sure that BitDegree is home to the highest quality courses. Below you can find a short interview with Adomas.

Here’s an overview of everything relating courses for the month of February:

There are 45 courses that are ready to be launched.

By now we’ve reached out to 206 educators via email.

educators via email. After receiving responses, offers and detailed information we’ve scheduled meetings with 56 educators.

educators. We had follow up meetings with 34 educators.

educators. We agreed that 11 educators will start creating courses for us.

To recap: We have 45 ( 3 are live) courses already made. We have 11 educators making more courses. This doesn’t mean that 11 more courses will be added. 1 educator is working on more than 1 course at a time.

1.Could you share some information about your background?

I was born and raised in Kaunas Lithuania. After moving and working abroad, I’m thrilled that I’m able to go back to my roots and give back to my city, help it grow.

2. Where did you get your education?

After finishing high school in Lithuania, I’ve moved to Latvia and studied at the Stockholm School of Economics.

3. Where did you work before joining the BitDegree team?

During the last year of my studies in Latvia, I’ve started working at Ernst & Young as a business consultant. I’ve worked for Ernst & Young for about a year. After I’ve gained more experience I started working as a Financial Analyst for a shopping center called “Akropolis”. I’ve worked for Akropolis for about 2 years, really enjoyed what I was doing. However, an opportunity popped-up to work for Google. After several interviews I’ve started working for Google as a Digital Advertiser. I was in charge of optimizing customers accounts for Google AdWords.

After working in Google for 1 year, I moved to London. While I was living in London, I’ve started working for one the largest startup companies called HelloFresh. My job was to outsource the Customer Service department from London to Manila in the Philippines.

4. Why did you join the BitDegree project?

Initially I’ve applied as a Chief Financial Officer for the Hostinger team. However, during the interview, they quickly noticed that my skill set is an excellent fit for the BitDegree project. After spending about 4 hours talking with Andrius, the CEO of BitDegree, I started working as the Head of Business Development for BitDegree.

5. What is your role at BitDegree?

My primary role is to make sure that the BitDegree platform is home to the best courses available. It doesn’t matter if we have to create the courses ourselves, license already available courses or buy courses from leading experts. I’m involved in shaping the strategy of BitDegree and bringing some best practises from my previous experiences.

6. What did you already achieve during your one month together with BitDegree?

I’ve spent a good portion of my time getting to know the educational market and BitDegree as a company. I believe it’s essential to base your work on data and analysis, so you wouldn’t spend your time and resources working on something that adds no value. I’ve developed a pitching strategy and prepared the required documentation. Using this strategy our team contacted over 200 teaching experts and secured over 40 courses for the BitDegree platform already. I hope to expand this number by the end of the month.

7. What’s the strategy for acquiring courses?

For now the strategy is to contact institutions, companies, teachers, tutors, educators. As of today, we’ve reached out to over 200 potential partners. We’ve already signed contracts with some of them. Moreover, further negotiations are still being made with others. We’re working out the details of the courses and how should they be presented to the public. We already have over 45 courses in the pipeline. We’re waiting for the alpha version of the platform to be finished so we could present them.

8. What are you looking for in a course? What do you think is a good course?

In order to determine what a good course is, we need to collect more data about user behaviour. Without data we have no way of knowing what is the best learning experience for our users. Everyday we ask these questions: how long should the course be, what format works best, video or text? Maybe there’s an angle we haven’t even thought of yet. For now, the strategy is to house many different courses on the BitDegree platform. Then, we can start tracking user behavior, see what kind of courses perform best. We want to figure out why they are performing so good and build on top of that. I trust data, not opinions. I believe that every business should make decisions based on data. So to answer the questions, we don’t know what makes a good course yet. We want to analyze data and shape the perfect course based on that.

9. What are you going to work on during March?

We’ll keep on building partnerships. We’ll keep a close connection with those we’re already working with and try to respond to everyone who’s interested. This month we’ll pay a lot more attention to the courses we’re creating in-house. The process of creating courses in-house will provide an incredible amount of data and expertise. It will allow us to understand what we are missing. In my opinion, going through the struggle ourselves is the right way to approach content creation. We’ll keep adding more content to our latest course SpaceDoggos as well. I want for BitDegree to create a couple of great courses and get “ a feel for it”. We’ve noticed that the current online education ecosystem does not support high quality, affordable courses. Hence, we want to challenge this status-quo in a way Elon Musk would do it and attempt to build a few state of the art courses in-house.

10. Why are you taking such a cautious approach to course creation?

There are two reasons for this: the first one being, we don’t want to waste our resources inaccurately. The second one being, I want BitDegree to be a company that makes decisions based on data. It would be very unwise for us to focus our attention on a single direction without doing research. User behavior should be the driving factor. I want to work on different kind of courses and make adjustments based on data, not speculation.

11. What are your opinions on buying courses vs. creating our courses vs. allowing educators to upload their own content?

It comes down to Time vs. Cost vs. Value. I believe we can make the best courses ourselves, but this process takes a lot of time. There aren’t a lot of great online courses available at the moment and most of them are pretty expensive to acquire. Buying or allowing users to upload their content wouldn’t leave us with much room for improvement, it would be hard to edit their content. Producing courses ourselves would most likely bring the most value. My goal is to make sure educators, designers, developers, and writers all work together in order to, make the highest quality course possible.

12. What’s your opinion on making the courses free?

I think that the primary goal right now is to attract as many people to our platform as possible. We need to have a lot of traffic. If we put a price on the courses this could hurt our traffic. Once we have user engagement, once we have data, once we have a lot of traffic we can work on putting that traffic to work. I think the courses being free for the first year is an excellent strategic move for BitDegree as a business.

13. How do you see BitDegree in the future?

I see BitDegree as a multicultural educational powerhouse that’s home to the highest quality education. Meaning that education is available in multiple languages, courses are engaging and the blockchain ecosystem is fully implemented. Maybe even a social aspect, BitDegree could become a hub for students of the world. I’d like to see BitDegree as a crucial step for any company during their hiring process and as a large part of education in the world.

We hope this clears a lot of questions regarding courses and what we’re planning to do in March. Follow BitDegree on social media (Twitter, Facebook), and you are always welcomed to come and have a chat with us LIVE on our Telegram :). We’ve also started a new Telegram channel reserved for latest news only, so if you’re always interested in the latest BitDegree news, you can join here!