Meet Mike Feerick, founder of Alison.com

I’m Mike Feerick, CEO and founder of Alison.com, an educational technology company. Alison has 16 million learners in 195 countries. It provides free learning for basic education and workplace skills with over two million graduates of its 1,500+ free courses.

I was born in New York and then raised in Limerick and Galway, Ireland. After graduating from college, I gained an internship with philanthropist and my mentor Chuck Feeney. I began to develop an interest in social entrepreneurship and realised that the best way to address a social issue was to create a sustainable business model around the need.

After working with Chuck, I attended Harvard where I attained an MBA. In 2000, I started the precursor to Alison, a sub-contracting e-learning business for Microsoft called Advance Learning. I then started Alison in 2007 as an avenue to increase employability for all.

What inspired you to launch Alison.com and what is the end goal?

The thought that education and skills training should and could be free was a big motivator for starting the platform. Everyone, anywhere and at any skill level, independent of their race or background, should have access to quality free education. I was hugely inspired and am still today by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26 “Education shall be free". This is deeply rooted in the company’s values.

How do you set yourself apart from other businesses in your industry? 

As far as I know, Alison is the only truly free online learning platform. When a learner takes a test and passes the course with 80% or higher, they automatically certify. Learners who wish to purchase a parchment or PDF of the certificate or diploma they attain through our platform, are welcome to do so but it’s not needed to prove that they have completed and passed the course.

Furthermore, Alison focusses on non-institutional learning. Traditional education or formal education from HEIs like universities, colleges and training centres is too expensive, too slow and outdated. Alison subjects are limitless, quick to update and free to access, enabling people to learn faster, more effectively and at no cost.
Alison focuses on workplace learning, particularly applicable for blue-collar workers trying to upskill in the face of automation and also assisting developing economy workers engage with the modern world of work. In a way, we address “Bottom-of-the-Pyramid” learning, those without a degree or Master Degree level formal education.
Finally, as a social enterprise and having a long-established pioneering role in making online learning more accessible to people around the world, Alison is a trusted brand seen as a force for good wherever it engages learners and communities.

How did lockdown impact your digital presence?

Free online learning experienced a huge boom of interest through the lockdown, as out of work people and those on furlough studied to improve their skills and employability. It appears that online learning has also broken through the acceptance barrier in comparison with traditional learning. In the sense that some people were slow to recognise the benefits of online learning such as free access at any time and in any place. This caused Alison.com to overtake both RTE and Ryanair to become the busiest Irish website in the month of June, according to Amazon’s Alexa.com.

How do you believe the evolution of tech will affect your industry over the next ten years

Technology is going to allow Alison to have an individual relationship with every worker in the world. We can provide them all with any learning they wish to access when and where they want it. We can allow them to publish, anywhere and at any time. They can test their knowledge and develop their self-knowledge through free psychometric testing such as workforce personality assessments and cognitive skills tests such as verbal reasoning, numeracy and abstract reasoning. This is all free via Alison and allows us to help guide users through their whole career.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt so far as an entrepreneur?

Believe in yourself. Anytime I have listened to someone whose advice is counter-intuitive to my own, and I have followed their advice because I figured they must know better than myself, without my understanding why, I have ended up ruing that decision. That is not to say I am always right, far from it. You might not be able to explain articulately why you are right, but in the absence of firm logic as to why you are wrong, believe what your gut tells you and follow it.

What has been the biggest achievement of Alison.com over the past year?

When we launched Alison in 2007, there was no other platform like us. We were the first of a kind, providing free learning and not charging yet still surviving and prospering. Over these 13 years, we have helped revolutionise access to learning by empowering 16 million people with new skills around the world. In addition to this, we have shown the world that free learning on any device, anywhere, at any time is the future. We have helped people believe free learning and education for all is possible, just like envisioned in Article 26 on the UN Declaration of Human Rights, “Education shall be free….”. When we speak today of our future vision, we are given a close hearing.

With all the success stories around entrepreneurship and how innovative people have to be to take the leap, how do you think you’ve innovated your sector and why?

Our mission is to bring all costs of education and skills training to zero. That includes free learning, publishing, testing, psychometrics, and recruitment. Often, when business people see our huge reach, they say to us, “What if you just charged a $1 for every learner?” But that never sits well with us because we know there are some people around the world who don’t have money to spare. Hence, we force ourselves to figure out how to innovate, deliver our service and not charge anyone. That requires discipline and inventiveness - it keeps us focused and in my view is part of the reason behind our success.

What are your thoughts on failure?

There is no such thing. There are only degrees of success.

If you could be in a room with four entrepreneurs, who would they be and why?

There are many entrepreneurs I admire, Bill Gates for one - he changed the world we live in through his innovation. I am also inspired by how he has used his time and resources post-success. However, as much as I’d enjoy meeting Bill, I don’t want to take his or any other famous entrepreneur’s time for hanging-out purposes. They have much more important things to be doing. If I had four entrepreneurs in a room, I’d like them to be colleagues of mine at Alison, finding ever more innovative ways to empower people around the world for free.

What plans do you have for Alison.com over the next two years?

Expanding our free learning course portfolio to tens of thousands of high-quality free courses, making our publishing toolset the most used free learning tool on the web, expanding free learning, publishing, psychometrics, and recruitment services to everyone on the planet.

Any new product launches in the pipeline we should know about?

Groups, coming August 2020 is a B2B product focused on group training that will allow training facilitators to monitor a groups’ learning progress on one account/dashboard. 

In addition to this, we are relaunching our Android app. Learners will be able to search for, study and complete courses while on the go. All in the palm of their hand.

In October 2020 we are introducing free verbal reasoning, numeracy and abstract reasoning tests on the web to increase our plethora of resources that people can use to learn about themselves and increase their employability.