Unmudl - Course-to-Jobs Marketplace

54-71% of all individuals who end up dropping out of college, are doing so to keep their jobs. The work-school juggling act is not one most people can keep up with.

Through Unmudl, learners have access to a ‘course-to-jobs marketplace’ of noncredit offerings from our network of community college. 

This gives the learner most direct path between education and the job they want. Unmudl helps to do so affordably, conveniently, and quickly. 

1. By offering noncredit workforce courses, Unmudl reduces learners’ immediate education investment to as little as one 8-week, $250 course. Before they even pay, learners can see which employers are hiring out of which course.

2. Learners can aggregate disparate noncredit courses across multiple colleges, then “redeem” them later at any one college for a formal degree or certificate, via credit for prior learning protocols. Unmudl organizes colleges’ existing credit for prior learning processes into a common approach & interface.

   

54-71% of all individuals who end up dropping out of college, are doing so to keep their jobs. The work-school juggling act is not one most people can keep up with. And without a degree, credential or a license these individuals are vulnerable to layoffs and struggle financially in low-paying and temporary jobs.

The current student debt stands at $ 1.56 Trillion, and Federal data shows that 3.9 million students (with average debt of $ 7,174 amounting to $28 Billion) dropped out of college with debt in 2015 and 2016. For-profit sector produced a disproportionate share of indebted dropouts. 

The burden of paying back hefty loans is becoming too much for some college students to bear. In a recent survey of 3,069 students, MagnifyMoney found that 39 percent of those with loans would consider dropping out of school before graduation to avoid taking on more debt.

According to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, by 2020, 65 percent of all jobs in the American economy will require education beyond high school.

How can students get those extra skills and certifications they need to move forward in their career without immediate upfront education investment?

The overarching goal of this work is to enable our three-sided course-to-job marketplace to function at an efficiency and scale sufficient to enable the re-skilling and re-employment of Americans post COVID-19. 

Unmudl slashes the time, cost and uncertainty associated with higher education as a route to employment: 

• By offering non-credit workforce courses, Unmudl reduces learners’ immediate education investment to as little as an 8-week, $250 course.
• Learners can aggregate disparate noncredit courses across multiple colleges, then “redeem” them later at any one college for a formal degree or certificate, via credit for prior learning protocols. 
• National employers with local job sites can submit a course development RFP, request an academic expert, or distribute specific course materials, to all relevant Unmudl community colleges simultaneously, at the push of a button with an employer portal that files and data shares with community colleges’ workforce division personnel. 
• Employers (and colleges) can now perform quick apples-to-apples comparisons of courses, and of learners– without having to acquire intimate personal experience with each college/ learner’s individual strengths and weaknesses. 
• Learners can see which employers are hiring out of which course and employers can easily reach out to community colleges’ workforce divisions to source the best talent.

Our marketplace’s target audience is the 64.5M working learners in the US who have been historically juggled working and learning simultaneously in an effort to get ahead. By offering non-credit workforce courses, Unmudl reduces learners’ immediate education investment to as little as one 8-week, $250 course. Before they even pay, learners can see which employers are hiring out of which course.

64.5M is the sum of the “working learners and “learning workers” demographics , a market worth $535B in educational expenditures.

Our marketplace’s target audience is the 64.5M working learners in the US who have been historically juggled working and learning simultaneously in an effort to get ahead. By offering non-credit workforce courses that employers want, Unmudl reduces learners’ immediate education investment to as little as one 8-week, $250 course. Before they even pay, learners can see which employers are hiring out of which course.

By reducing learners' immediate education investment, Unmudl is a perfect solution for historically marginalized communities who are experiencing unprecedented levels of instability, with many people facing unemployment or struggling financially in low-paying, temporary, or part-time jobs.

Full-time staff (4)

Part-time staff (3)

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Unmudl’s mission is to forego the current practices of institution exclusivity and prerequisite experience, that is why the platform specializes in short-term skills based courses that do not require a large initial investment from the learner.

From day one, the executive team made a commitment to make Unmudl as an all inclusive platform for people of disabilities. A size-able portion of design and development costs were allocated towards development of an ADA/WCAG compliant platform.

Our long-term hiring goals include hiring more than 50% of our talent via Unmudl's learner pool. This would include an overwhelming majority of working learners from historically marginalized communities.

Nurture our culture to be as inclusive as possible with zero tolerance for discrimination, harassment and physical impairment.

There is no marketplace or product in the market that serves as "stock exchange for community colleges" i.e. Unmudl brings community colleges into a national marketplace.

In order for employers to transmit clear skills requirements for courses and job applicants; in order for learners to acquire learning in units of skill; and in order for colleges to determine whether their courses and learners match employer requirements and learner needs, we integrate a skills-based “accounting system,” into our 3 sided marketplace. 

We standardize the definitions problem by using O*Net (Department of Labor) skills and skills definitions, which are derived from massive national surveys of real employees in real jobs. We solve the measures problem by using the O*Net anchors to divide skills into levels, so that the expertise level within each skill has a measure associated with it. To our knowledge, this is the first use of O*NET anchors in a commercial product.

Human-mediated registration, enrollment, and course upload is not sustainable at scale, nor is it wise in a COVID-19 era, which is why the most innovative part of our development plan is integration of Unmudl with the colleges’ own student information systems (SIS), identity provider system (IdP) and learning management systems (LMS).

This would help:

• Learners have a seamless user experience for browsing and purchasing courses without having to worry about which college is delivering the course.
• Courses are available for learning in real-time after purchase.

A foundational goal of the marketplace is the ability for a learner to convert individual course credits from the marketplace into a college credential, or for a learner to transfer marketplace course credits into a college and enroll into a program. While there are federated identity management systems in place that establish trust relationships across multiple institutions, there is no solution in the market today to seamlessly map a user’s personal identity to institutional identity provider authentication across multiple colleges.

This presents a unique technical challenge that is solved by Unmudl:

• Users maintain a secure personal identity to manage all their courses and credentials in one place.
• Each college maintains both a unique student ID (in their SIS) and authentication information (in their Identity Provider System) for each user who has taken a course.
• The user’s personal identity needs to be mapped to each college’s student identity, while maintaining secure authentication and authorization through the entire flow, in compliance with SOC 2.0 and ISO 27001. As needed, the marketplace user identity is mapped to either SAML based authentication (Shibboleth / CAS) or OAuth on the campus side. 

Online Marketplaces have been transforming industries including travel, retail, construction, agriculture, education et cetera.

In the past few years education/skills marketplaces such as coursera, edx and udacity have put universities on a global marketplace.

However community colleges (which in fall of 2018 account for 33% of undergraduate students) have yet not transformed to get access to the corresponding national/global customer base of potential students. 71% of students during the pandemic say they’d prefer to take some or all courses online. 

Community colleges give real college credit, fancy certificates from those other online providers look pretty, but community colleges still have the US Department of Education behind them. An official degree is worth a lot (it’s still "the coin of the realm”), and students will still pay a significant premium for pathways that lead to a real degree and a connection to the local workforce. 

Furthermore, thoughtful studies of current learning-based skills taxonomies point to the fact that any learning taxonomy requires an articulation of levels of expertise within a skill to denote learning progression (a simple example: bachelor’s -> master’s -> Ph.D. , all in chemistry). This is something that employer-based job taxonomies lack. Employers tend to specify years of experience instead, and the disconnect between expertise and experience can become wildly dysfunctional. For example, employers seeking a high level of skill can end up requiring 5 years’ experience in a programming language that has existed for only 1 year.

1. By offering noncredit workforce courses, Unmudl reduces learners’ immediate education investment to as little as one 8 week, $250 course. This is an effort towards solving long standing racial and gender injustices in the US which hinder the education, employment, and earning potential of Black, Indigenous, LatinX, and other historically marginalized communities because of lack of funds available for education.

2. National employers with local job sites can submit a course development RFP, request an academic expert, or distribute specific course materials, to all relevant Unmudl community colleges simultaneously. This will help employers to train and hire talent from historically marginalized communities or individuals from low socio-economic backgrounds.

3. For colleges we expanding the market for their workforce division courses:

   
   

   1. The paying customer base for workforce division courses becomes national, rather than local.
   2. Employers are more likely to fund more course development and learner tuition/costs, now that they can easily issue RFPs 

   This helps the community colleges especially the ones serving rural/semi-urban settings increase their student reach, job placement and revenue generation as community colleges have seen their enrollments and revenues drop each year since 2011.

By 2021, we want to partner with 25 community colleges, train 25,000 working-learners and two state portals. The goal of state portals is to have a one place for all working-learners in a state to access all community college resources.

From 2022 to 2023, Unmudl plans to partner with 100 community colleges especially those serving in areas with historically marginalized communities.

We aim to train around 250,000 working-learners to fill vacancies in areas/jobs where the employers currently report lack of skilled labor. We also aim to serve around 15-20 state portals during this time as well.

2023-2024: We aim to partner with around 250 community colleges, at least 3 in each state. During this period we aim to train 2 million working-learners and help them transition into a better job and also improve the skills-based training for individuals entering the workforce.

Taking community colleges to a national marketplace is a complete paradigm shift for the colleges and a complete overhaul of their business model, which almost certainly results in resistance to change. 

The colleges are not used to serve students nationally because almost all of them usually serve their local communities.

Community colleges need to reconsider the instructional model of one instructor per 40 students. A college’s current staffing model will work fine, until it is actually successful in the e-commerce world. Popular courses will have 2,000 enrollees. They will be intensely profitable, but colleges will need flexible workforce of hourly TA’s or adjuncts (the “Uber model”) to make the experience workable for the college and its students.

Our team spends a significant amount of time with community colleges to train them and change their mindset to bring them to a brand-new learning model, that allows them to control their own revenue generation.

We are also helping our current community-colleges partners to develop capacity within their own institutions to be able to serve students nationally and market their courses even to international students, which will be a great source of revenue to community colleges.

We want to collect unemployment information, economic development information and WIOA specific metrics from local workforce boards which will facilitate us in developing algorithms that will:

• Enable learners to make informed decisions about which pathways and jobs best suit them, including promoting the benefits of non-degree pathways to employment. These pathways will be tailored for each learner based on the learner's current skill-set and experience.
• Implement competency-based models for life-long learning and credentialing. The data that we will gather from workforce boards will help implement more personal models for each learner.

Our team has been working side-by-side, sometimes together, sometimes in parallel, for over a decade. Founded by CEO Dr. Parminder K. Jassal in collaboration with Dr. Merrilea Mayo and Julian L. Alssid, SocialTech.ai is focused on scaling the technologies and methodologies we know have made a difference to working learners. We are bound together by a belief that a future focused skills-centric approach to education and workforce development is the key to serving employers and learners alike. 

Our flagship product Unmudl, a one-stop Course-to-Jobs Marketplace founded by community colleges to connect working learners and employers. Unmudl features courses, credentials and services to help learners build employer-validated skills linked to real-world opportunities leading to higher incomes. Employer-validated courses offer a solution for working learners seeking the highest quality, fastest, most efficient, most direct path to a better job and further learning. 

Through the Unmudl Course-to-Jobs Marketplace, Social Tech provides a solution for working learners and employers driven by America’s most future-forward community colleges.

To support every learner’s evolution to become an agile “working learner.” We currently partner with our five founding community colleges and others including:

1. Bellevue College, Bellevue, WA
2. Central New Mexico Community College, Albuquerque, NM
3. GateWay Community College, Phoenix AZ
4. Pima Community College, Tucson, AZ
5. San Juan College, Farmington, NM
6. National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development
7. Base11
8. Global Education Board

Our founding community colleges seeded Unmudl's first round and funded the initial development of the platform.

In partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Seattle, We will be conducting user testing with adult education clients of the Workforce Investment Board of Seattle-King County.

Contact:

Matthew E. Houghton

Workforce Development Advisor

 City of Seattle, Office of Economic Development



O: 206-883-7604 | matthew.houghton@seattle.gov

The Business Model

Revenue Sharing: 20% of each sale goes to Unmudl (exact percentages vary by vendor tier)

Subscription Services: Employers purchase $250/month subscriptions for skills + services.

Partner Packages: Better revenue share and some perks, for partners willing to pay $50k upfront. Founded by community colleges for community colleges with a $250,000 pooled investment.

The Customer:

Unmudl comes with its own built-in user base. Community colleges who sign on to Unmudl are required by contract to advertise Unmudl to their current and former students. Our first five community colleges alone represent 115K in current students.

As mentioned in Business Model section, Unmudl will generate revenue through:

1. Learners - 20% of each sale goes to Unmudl (exact percentages vary by vendor tier)

2. Community Colleges pay an annual fee of $35,000-$50,000 (exact pricing depends on membership round and associated benefits) to be Unmudl members, which gives them the right to place their wares on the Unmudl marketplace.

3. Employers pay an annual fee to be Unmudl employer partners, which gives them the right to connect with community colleges in their area or nationally. Employers can message the course’s instructors, to ask for their best students to fill their workforce needs.

Colleges currently represent Unmudl’s main revenue source. They pay an annual fee of $35,000-$50,000 (exact pricing depends on membership round and associated benefits) to be Unmudl members, which gives them the right to place their wares on the Unmudl marketplace. The initial payments from our five preliminary colleges – Pima (Tucson), Bellevue (Seattle), Gateway (Phoenix), Central New Mexico (Albuquerque) and San Juan (Farmington, NM) funded Unmudl’s alpha build. Unmudl has also been able to optimize its design to colleges’ needs, thanks largely to regularly scheduled calls with functional teams that include representatives from the 5 colleges in each of the following areas: finance, registration & enrollment, leadership, IT, marketing, veterans resources, international and superadmin users.

We seek to raise $5 Million by Q2 of 2021.

For 2021, our estimated expenses are projected to be between 2-2.5 Million USD. Most of the capital will be spent on:

1. Hiring full-time technical talent
2. Scaling the platform to serve working-learners from all 50 states and other territories
3. Hiring full-time marketing and college-partnerships staff
4. Customer Support and Services

Taking community colleges to a national marketplace is a complete paradigm shift for the colleges and a complete overhaul of their business model, which almost certainly results in resistance to change. 

By partnering with workforce boards to pilot our project in a specific region, we will help our community college partners provide the right short-term courses that fulfills the workforce needs of employers in that specific region. Workers will interact with these organizations and Unmudl for job searches, get career navigation advice, learn new skills from community college courses, and help get employed.