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Aligned with some major growth plans, New York-based ExecOnline closed a $45 million Series D funding round. Co-founded in 2012 by Stephen Bailey, Mark Ozer, Barry Goldberg, and Julia Alexander, ExecOnline provides executive education programs and training solutions certified by educational institutions. The company partners with business schools around the world to bring democratized access to leadership development at large companies. “We feel like we have a differentiated and compelling story having pioneered this space,” The company’s CEO Bailey told AfroTech in an interview. “We hopefully want to create awareness that there is a new way to develop leaders that can create much more equity outcomes at organizations.” This latest funding round was led by OMERS Growth Equity with participation from previous investors including Kaplan, Osage Ventures, NewSpring and ABS Capital Partners. ExecOnline plans to use the Series D to further develop its online platform, expand its...
Alphonso “Fonz” Morris is a senior product designer at Coursera, one of the world’s largest EdTech platforms. We sat down to talk to him about his journey and his vision for the company and himself. The Beginning Hailing from Brooklyn, NY, Fonz made his way to the south in search of higher education at the historically Black Morehouse College. As a self-described “engineering-minded kind of kid,” his childhood dream was to become an architect. However, when he got to college, a computer science career seemed to have more potential than an architectural one. While at Morehouse, he also participated in a study-abroad program at Oxford University, where he studied art history and visited some of the world’s most iconic museums and galleries. Although he began his computer science degree at Morehouse, he later transferred to Georgia State after two years because he could no longer afford tuition. While he made this move purely out of financial necessity, he believes everything worked...