We have some exciting new from the InstaEDU team: Cardinal Scholars, an in-home tutoring company owned and operated by InstaEDU, has been acquired by Course Hero.

Cardinal Scholars was the service that inspired InstaEDU.com. Dan and I started Cardinal Scholars to help students get in-home tutoring from awesome and ambitious tutors. It worked, and we saw big improvements from our students. We quickly expanded from 15 tutors at Stanford to 150 tutors in the Bay Area, Boston and New York.

Soon, we started looking at how we could make a difference for more people. As big as the market is, the traditional in-home tutoring model can only reach a small fraction students. We realized we’d need to:

1. bring the same high-quality tutoring online,
2. allow students to get academic help the moment they need it, and
3. lower the cost.

And, thus, InstaEDU was born.

Cardinal Scholars is still an awesome option for students who want an in-person tutoring experience, but as we’ve become more and more focused on InstaEDU, we haven’t been able to give Cardinal Scholars the attention it deserves.

While deciding how to best serve our customers and tutors at Cardinal Scholars, we had the good fortune of meeting the Course Hero team. Course Hero is well-positioned to run and build an incredible in-home tutoring service, so we decided to pass the Cardinal Scholars reigns.

We’re very excited to see Course Hero continue to build Cardinal Scholars into an awesome way for students to connect with in-home tutors.

Meanwhile, we’re focused on one thing: Making it possible for any student – anywhere – to get amazing, one-on-one academic help when they need it. Especially as online education grows and changes, we think it will be more important than ever.

- Alison Johnston, CEO of InstaEDU