What Ever Happened To Coursmos (Or, How Those MOOCs Doing These Days)

Once upon a time, internet-delivered courses were the Next Big Thing. Outfits like Udacity were promising to deliver a college education, digitized and personalized. In a Wired article on "The Stanford Education Experiment [that] Could Change Higher Education Forever," Sebastian Thrun predicted there would only be ten universities left in the world and that his online education company Udacity would be one of them. That was in 2012. Ten years are up.

Read Audrey Watters piece, "I Told You So" in which she takes a deserved victory lap in the wake of Udacity's sale to a consulting company. 

Back ten or so years ago, plenty of outfits wanted to get in on the biz. Let's look at another one and see if its story has a happier ending than the story of Udacity (spoiler alert: it does not).

In 2013, Coursmos launched, promising to fill a "soundbite-sized gap in the e-learning delivery space," a sort of mini-MOOC for your phone, "e-learning for the Twitter generation." Coursmos was a Russian start-up, co-founded by Roman Kostochka, Kateryna Seledets,  Pavel Dmitriev, Alex Sinichkin, and Pavel Konan. The team included Kostochka (CEO), Dmitriev (CMO), Vyacheslav Grachev (CTO), Seledets, Konan (Lead developer), Igor Pahomov, Todd Gibons (Growth Hacker), Paul Shuteyev, Pedro Sanchez de Lozada, Igor Shoifot, Brian Sathianathan, Igor Ryabenkiy, Jon Nordmark, Dmitry Ufaev-- a team assembled from USA, EU, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.  

The company opened up shop in San Carlos, CA. Kostochka had previously founded EdKarma in Silicon Valley. Seledets had had worked at the Happy Farms Business Incubator, the American-Ukranian business accelerator that helped launch Coursmos. Sinichkin doesn't list Coursmos on his list of startups.

The model was basically a learning brokerage. Instructors could sign on, and students would find them, and Coursmos would take a cut for being the educational matchmaker. Their own pitch found them a bit behind others in the field (Udacity, Coursera, Udemy, etc) both in funding and courses, which they cleverly spun as Coursmos offering the best dollar-per-course ration. 

The idea was to set up a phone app, so they hit the Apple Store first, then later added Google play. "Mobile first" was supposed to be their "disruptive" element. Their exit strategy was to be acquired in 2-3 years, possibly by Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Benesse, the Washington Post Company, or Apollo Group. (Spoiler alert: that did not happen).

Coursmos did its seed rounds of investing in 2014 and 2015, then in 2015 went after venture capital. It was a half-million here, a half-million there some of it from the Russian Imperius Group. By 2015 it was claiming a half million registered users and pushing itself at corporate users, saying its strongest markets were in U.S., Russia, the U.K., India, Brazil and Indonesia. 

The website pitch was "Education for generation distracted." At first. By 2016, the pitch was "Build your online education business" and aimed clearly at folks providing the course materials. It bragged 1.7 million students, 36,032 courses, and $2.5 million in sales. They even had a wikipedia page.

But by 2016, the buzz had died down for the micro-learning platform. Kostochka's LinkedIn profile says he co-founded and CEOed a new business in January of 2017-- in Hong Kong. The Coursmos Twitter account went dormant in October of 2016 (except for one random post in May, 2018). The barely-active Coursmos Courses account likewise stopped in September, 2016. And a Coursmos R&D account opened up in August of 2013 with "Today we are launching it in the AppStore-- in Russian--then posted a total of 19 times. 

In 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, the website was pitching a "leading-edge training solution that enables your company to efficiently train employees and build a modern corporate learning system" with a "new generation SaaS LMS platform" boasting 5000 "off-the-shelf business courses." Then the wayback machine archive shows Coursmos going silent-- with nothing but 404 messages or a message, in Russian, that the domain registration has expired.

But the Coursmos story isn't over yet!

In December of 2023, a promise that "our website is coming soon." 

And sure enough, on January 1, 2024, Coursmos was back. Same logo, same web address, but a slightly different mission. "We turn your stress into straight A's" the bold print promises.

We're your writing wizards. Custom essays, research papers, and dissertations on any topic. We cover everything from online class help to exams to homework and assignments. Our academic superheroes take your strain. So you can stress less and score more.

 Yeah, one of those sites. The current Coursmos offers services ranging from "essay writing help" and "dissertation help" to "do my assignment," "do my homework," "take my online exam," and "take my online class." There are links to industry recognition articles, all written about the old Coursmos. 

There are glowing student testimonials that all follow the same basic outline, making sure to mention the course involved in the first part of the first sentence (Couldn't make it to my psychology class, My literature essay was a breeze, Tackling environmental science was tough, I was kinda lost on my biology thesis, History can be tricky sometimes, For my business dissertation, etc). 

A broad business like this would seem to require a whole lot of inhouse experts to help the customers cheat study. Unless you had a whole library of previously created educational content that you could just tap.

There's also a friendly chat that immediately offers help, as soon as you give it your email and phone number. That was "powered by Brevo," a firm that automates customer relationships, but my chatter said she works for Coursmos.

I asked the chat (Samantha) who the CEO is, but didn't get much in the way of an answer, though she did indicate that the business has been taken over. The whole ownership and operation of the biz is mysterious. They have a blog, which weirdly today put up some posts about some gamer codes, in German, and I'm just not going down that rabbit hole today. The rest are more closely related to the actual cheating business of the site, with none from before January 1, 2024.

Three names turn up in the blog. Tom Baldwin, Garfield Conner, and Dave Franklin. Of the three, I could only find Franklin, who just happened to set up a profile on M5Srack Community two weeks ago. From this we learn that Coursmos HQ is now in a Los Angeles "coworking and office space" location. On this page, Franklin describes Coursmos as a platform that offers "bite-sized courses on a wide range of topics," but on other profiles the "academic writer" is clearer that "we offer cheap online class help in USA." 

We could chase leads all day. There's Andrew Stevens, a guy from New York whose LinkedIn profile names him the CEO of Coursmos from 2014 till the present. Of course, almost everyone who's linked to Coursmos doesn't note an end date.

But mostly what we have here is the lifecycle of a piece of education-flavored entrepreneurialism. Coursmos was never started to make an important advance in teaching people-- it was created to be just good enough to attract a deep-pocketed buyer so everyone could cash out. When that didn't happen (because MOOCs are not a great idea and miniMOOCs are even less great), there was a brief attempt to tap a different market, and then Coursmos went into a coma until someone bought up all the "content" aka all those courses that folks created for them, and sold it to someone who decided the content library could be used to help students cheat. 

Is there a lesson here? I guess. Every ed tech has a story, and very often it's not a story about education. Pay attention.