CourseCompare

CourseCompare lets learners explore interactive listings of thousands of programs in in-demand subjects ranging from data science to nursing to the skilled trades - then connects them directly to the right schools' admissions teams. We do this in partnership with education providers across Canada and around the world. 

CourseCompare publishes labour market data, alongside student outcomes and school ratings and reviews. Learning Advisors are also available to help people map out learning and funding plans. 

If scaled globally, CourseCompare could help:

1. Close the skills gap by helping millions of people identify and pursue the right training opportunities.

2. Build more transparent and equitable higher education markets, where predatory schools and poor learning experiences are exposed to the full light of the day through continuously published learner ratings, feedback and reviews, as well as published data on student outcomes (e.g., job placement rates, salaries, student satisfaction, employer satisfaction, etc.)

Preparing people for the future of work is one of the critical challenges of our generation. The (now digital) economy is rapidly changing, labour markets are shrinking due to historic waves of retirement, and automation threatens to upend job security. How do we ensure a smoother, faster and more effective way to keep people continuously learning the right skills? 

To cite just one example, if no policy intervention is implemented, Canada alone will face a 60,000-person shortage of nurses by 2022. Industries that rely on skilled tradespeople are facing similar shortages, while demand for new and emerging skills in data science, web development and digital design, for example, is surging. Helping people understand where the opportunities lie and how best to navigate an increasingly complex landscape of learning opportunities will be essential to solving this problem!

CourseCompare takes best practices from the marketplace model and applies them to higher education. Our platform uses dozens of different forms of technology to digitize hundreds of course catalogues from colleges, universities, coding bootcamps and other training organizations in one place. We then use our technology to match people to the best programs based on their career goals and learning needs -- connecting them directly to admissions at the click of a button. We have helped more than half-a-million people to date and see tremendous opportunities for scaling our solution globally. 

Our solution serves an astonishing variety of people, from career changers, to people looking to upskill, to international students who don't understand local education markets, to marginalized communities looking for alternative pathways to education or new modalities that allow them to learn valuable job-ready skills remotely or on a part-time basis while working or taking care of their families. We speak with literally thousands of these people every year, and we've carefully built our technology to serve their needs. We have even begun to work with education providers on curricula and delivery methods to ensure greater access to education for all across Canada and beyond. 

CourseCompare is helping learners find the right programs more quickly and effortlessly based on their career goals and learning needs. But our platform is also helping institutions of every kind waste less time and fewer resources on recruiting students locally, nationally and globally. 

Learner data from CourseCompare -- which we collect on a global scale across hundreds of institutions -- has the potential to help harmonize national data on student outcomes and dramatically improve program design and delivery for all learner types. We would like to pilot this in Canada in 2022. 

CourseCompare is predominantly focused on the Canadian higher education market, but it does work with education partners in the U.S., European Union, and Australia. We have a proven model and hundreds of thousands of annual users. We believe we are somewhere between "Growth" and "Scale" in our journey. 

CourseCompare is Canada's first education marketplace. No other platform gives users access the same transparent access to continuing and professional education programs at every institution type across the country. If scaled according to our vision and in close continued consultation with learners and education providers, it could help close the skills gap, spur greater innovation in learning design, and add significant transparency to a market that, in some places, is vulnerable to predatory behaviour. 

CourseCompare uses a full-stack to run massive interactive listings of programs and courses and directly deliver learners to the right admissions teams through numerous API integrations. Our back-end for managing school and user data, and front end interface for matching students and tracking student ratings and review, are all proprietary. We have not created "new" or "novel" technology, but applied a range of existing technologies to a novel business idea that has the potential to help people, employers and economies at a massive scale. 

www.coursecompare.ca 

The only risk we face is to our user data, which, of course, is a risk virtually every technology company on the planet must now confront. We keep all data secure in our system using third-party encryption tools and work with an agency that monitors and maintains our data security on an ongoing basis.  

CourseCompare currently serves ~750,000 visitors per year globally, predominantly in Canada. On an annual basis, we intend to reach 1.5M in one year and 10M in 5 years as we expand into global markets.

To help more than 10 million people worldwide launch new careers or meaningfully upgrade their skills. 

We are tracking the number of learners who use our platform, connect with a "best-fit" program based on their career goals and learning needs, enroll in a program, and secure work in their desired field of study within 6 months to one year of graduation. With work with many different organizations and education partners to track this data nationally. 

4 full-time staff

16 part-time staff

2 agencies 

Before starting CourseCompare, Robert Furtado, Founder & CEO, managed millions of dollars annually developing recruitment strategies for colleges and universities across Canada. He also taught undergraduate students as a college instructor on a part-time basis for 5 years. CourseCompare was founded as a way to improve the efficiency and speed with which students are recruited while also helping close the so-called skills gap in Canada.   

The team at CourseCompare is highly interdisciplinary in its approach, with journalists working alongside digital marketers, designers, data analysts, and full-stack developers, for example. This allows everyone to approach problems with the kind of vulnerable curiosity that leads to great questions and insights. Everyone, as a rule, is also passionate about lifelong learning. 

CourseCompare is still in the process of building its leadership team. All recruitment efforts focus on multiple, diverse, sources of talent. A blind scoring system helps ensure hiring is done equitably. And more than 60% of CourseCompre's team is currently female. Historically, 40% of CourseCompare's team has included people who are visible minorities.