Episode 74: Josh Pierce on How Course Sharing Enables Access and Differentiation
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How can institutions collaborate to share courses? How does this enable focus and differentiation? What do you have to change from mindset to culture to operations to make it happen? We dive into these questions with Josh Pierce co-founder of course sharing platform Acadeum. Along the way, we use the analogy of travel to think about the student journey – and see what can be learned from the travel industry itself.
In the traditional model of higher education, institutions were built to be self-sufficient islands. From faculty rosters to physical facilities, colleges operated under a "vertically integrated" mindset—the idea that to provide a quality education, you had to own every single part of the process. But as student needs shift and financial pressures mount, this siloed approach is becoming a hurdle rather than a hallmark of excellence.
Josh Pierce, co-founder of Acadeum, believes it is time for a different strategy. By viewing students as "passengers" on a journey toward a destination, Pierce argues that colleges must shift their focus from the limits of their own campus to the vast possibilities of a connected network. Through course sharing, institutions are finding that they don’t have to do it all themselves to help their students win.
Breaking the Commodity Bottleneck
When we look at why students drop out or take longer to graduate, the culprit is rarely a high-level elective. Instead, it is often the "commodity" courses—Calculus I, General Chemistry, or Intro to Psychology—that create the biggest roadblocks. These are gateway courses that are frequently overbooked, offered at inconvenient times, or difficult to staff with qualified faculty.
Course sharing allows an institution to "tap into supply" from other colleges. If a student at one school can’t get into a required chemistry section, they can take an equivalent, credit-bearing course from a partner institution within the network. This "just-in-time" thinking ensures that a single full section doesn’t derail a student’s entire academic career.
Defining Success by the Destination
In higher education, "student success" is often a nebulous term. Pierce offers a refreshing, direct definition: student success is a passenger getting to their destination. Whether that destination is a specific course completion, a degree, a professional certificate, or a career that betters their family's life, the goal remains the same.
By using course sharing, colleges can provide a proactive solution for students on the brink of failure. For example, if a student is struggling midterm, the institution can offer an accelerated 8-week course from a partner school to help them catch up, rather than simply placing them on academic probation. This approach has allowed some institutions to recover 50% to 80% of students who otherwise would have slipped through the cracks.
Lessons from the Airline Industry: The "Sabre" of Higher Ed
To understand where higher education is headed, we can look at the airline industry. Decades ago, airlines realized they couldn't own every gate in every city. They developed "code-sharing" agreements and a central system called Sabre, which allowed different airlines to share flight data and passengers.
This interoperability didn't destroy competition; it created a healthier, more sustainable industry that expanded access for everyone. Higher education is currently undergoing a similar "atomization." We are moving from the "album" (the degree) to the "song" (the individual course). By participating in course-sharing networks, colleges can increase their "load factor"—filling seats and maximizing resources—while ensuring students have the most direct path to their goals.
Adopting a "New Offense" for Growth
Running this "new offense" requires a mindset shift. It means moving away from asking "What are the limits of my faculty roster?" and instead asking "How many more students can we get to their destinations this year?"
Growth no longer has to come solely from recruiting next year’s class. Significant growth can be found in retention—keeping the students you already have by removing unnecessary hurdles. When colleges collaborate and share resources, they free up their own faculty to focus on what they do best, while outsourcing the gaps to trusted partners.
Episode 74 Transcript
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Elliot Felix: That was Josh Pierce, co-founder of Acadeum, a platform for colleges to share courses across institutions so that students succeed. We had an awesome conversation about where we are and where higher ed is headed. A lot of it using the analogy of travel, which is kind of fun, thinking about the journey students are on and how colleges and universities can get them to their destinations and in a more literal sense, what we can learn from the airline industry in the process. Let's dive in.
Elliot Felix: Welcome to the Connected College Podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and how they're organized to enable student success. And if you're a leader in higher ed, and you think that the silos and separations get in the way of student success, then this podcast and my upcoming book, The Connected College, are for you. We're here to learn and work together to bust silos, question tradition, and forge partnerships so that students feel connected to their college, their community, their coursework and their careers.
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Elliot Felix: Given that we're talking about students and what they need, I would love to hear your definition of student success. How do you define that?
Josh Pierce: So I don't always talk to academics this way, but I'll be straight. I define student success as a student getting to the destination. And you could frame that very broadly as, and I think it ought to be, the destination is to the job I want that betters my life and my family's life. Because I think that's the core source of most demand that ends up in front of you now.
Josh Pierce: But that can also be down that along. A cybersecurity specialist is, I'm gonna have to learn, maybe it's computer science 101, and before that I'm gonna have to do calculus 101 to a certain standard. So you can break it all the way down to okay, for this cycle, this passenger's gotta get to this destination. So I define student success and I measure student success by how many of 'em got there. It could be course completion; there's lots of different ways to break it down, but to me, student success is: did the passenger get to the destination?
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Elliot Felix: So there's a lot of ways that course sharing supports student success by giving them an alternative, providing flexibility, providing capacity that an institution may not have. Like if you're off the schedule grid or you have a conflict or it's not offered this semester, whatever it might be. Are those the core ways that course sharing supports student success? What would you add to that?
Josh Pierce: Yeah, using course sharing is almost a whole new type of offense. To really do it in an aggressive way, you almost need certain types of new players and whatnot. But to get going, course sharing is a way to target student stories. It's not about somebody else's stuff is better than your stuff. You shift the arguments to looking at the student outcomes and going, where are the student stories throughout the academic cycle that we don't do very well in? Or where there is the real slippage in student retention and student outcomes.
Josh Pierce: You also have really hard to fill faculty areas where you may have faculty going on sabbatical or where it's really hard to recruit somebody to certain regions of the country. You may have sections of students who need to take Chem 101 this fall and your guy's out, right? That's where you can cover whole sections of demand where you may have been caught by something you didn't expect.
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Elliot Felix: You mentioned, the way it's going is the shift in scale from the degree to the course and the atomization and the working across institutions. What else is changing about sharing courses and driving completion?
Josh Pierce: The airline industry is a huge strategic analog that we use. That's why I talk about students as passengers trying to get to a destination. I would stand on this ground: that is where the industry is going. And it is a shift in thinking from where most institutions come from, which in other industries you might call vertically integrated thinking—we've gotta do everything ourselves. It is a shift to more just-in-time thinking.
Josh Pierce: We've also seen demand coming to us that we weren't expecting from players like homeschool associations, high school operators, and employers. They are coming to us saying, "How do you have all this stuff on the shelf? Because we're trying to offer our students better pathways and better outcomes." That's probably 25% of the business now and growing faster because they're coming to us saying, "Okay, you've got destinations that my passengers are trying to get to. How do I get them on those flights?"
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Elliot Felix: What should folks do to adapt to these changes? To run the new offense and think differently?
Josh Pierce: I think from a mindset perspective, it is think first about proactively where your students are trying to get to. Don't think first about what limited capacity you have, or your systems, or your traditions. Think about the networks you're already a part of. I guarantee you, you're probably already part of one that can be expanded or updated. You can use that to expand and get access, and it's probably not that far from you.
Josh Pierce: This has happened in every other industry. It is higher ed's time and we're past the first chapter. Now, if you cannot do it all yourself, you have to think this way. If you think about airlines, American Airlines does not find all the passengers that fly on American Airlines. They have to have Expedia and Priceline. The ones who figure it out are the ones who win, and the ones who don't are the ones who get run over. It'll take some work to develop some new muscles on how to think this way, but I do think it's the future and I do think it'll end up being a pretty fun ride.