Chegg’s CEO offers insights on using mobile to succeed in education

Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig strongly believes that mobile is helping dramatically transform the state of higher education. In fact, he says that his company wouldn’t have succeeded without it.

The Internet has helped this online textbook rental company reach its current position and enabled it to really establish dominance as the market leader in the so-called “Student Graph“. Speaking at the MobileBeat conference, Rosensweig admitted that he was a bit chagrined about the introduction of mobile at first: “I’ve never seen anything move at the speed of mobile. We’re getting whole companies created just by mobile … the changes and scale, global nature, and speed at which it’s happening to continually reinvest in where the puck is going is something I’ve never seen before.”

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He shared that prior to him taking over the company more than five years ago, Chegg had a real problem trying to account for customers coming back, selling or buying textbooks just through the Web. In fact, the company was buying all of its textbooks and spending $100 million per year. During Rosensweig’s tenure, Chegg became one of the largest platforms for students, with 75 percent of its customers being high school students on their way to college, and counting 50 percent of post-secondary students as users. It has gotten to the point where 25 percent of the company’s revenue comes from textbook sales.

So amid this company shift, what has Rosensweig learned about mobile in the education space? In today’s world, students will not know a time when they don’t have an iPhone, Netflix, or the Internet. He says that this generation of college students will assume that companies, services, and platforms know where they are and can figure out what they need, without them having to do much work and through the convenience of a phone. A service has to be instantly accessible and built for the mobile device.

Rosensweig offered this anecdote: Chegg has more than 17,000 students impaneled, and the company once asked them why they favor Instagram over Twitter: It was “brain dead easy” as you can just post a photo and it’s done. With Twitter, users have to count 140 characters, know what an @ sign is, and more. It’s just too much work.

“If you don’t make it easy, college students just blow it off,” said Rosensweig.

Education is one of the remaining industries where mobile technology hasn’t dramatically changed the space. Rosensweig believes that the industry is outdated. We assume technology will make things more accessible, cheaper, and more relevant, and get rid of restrictions on time, geography, and the size of the classroom. However, in reality, physical classrooms are at capacity and academic professors are given fewer hours. Chegg sees its mission as helping the system teach more people; be more effective, relevant, and personalized; and help lower costs.

The old ways of teaching aren’t working anymore, so Chegg is eager to capitalize on mobile adoption in the industry. It estimates that 67 percent of students use their cell phones in classrooms. Why not leverage that by bringing in additional resources? Rosensweig sees this as a $100 trillion market opportunity, and he’s betting on a winner.