#ThursdayTool - Shaw Academy

Tool profile:

Shaw Academy

Name:

Shaw Academy

Category:

Online learning

Synopsis:

Shaw Academy is a privately owned online education organisation based in Dublin, Ireland.Founded in 2013, it provides pre-recorded online courses.

Shaw Academy was founded by James Egan and Adrian Murphy in 2013.

By January 2016, Shaw Academy was teaching about 55,000 new students each month. By November that year, it was teaching 400,000 new students every month and had surpassed teaching over 1.84 million students.

In January 2016, founder Adrian Murphy and Irish Minister for Jobs, Richard Bruton, announced 40 new education positions in the Dublin office. The CEO of Irish government agency Enterprise Ireland, Julie Sinnamon, described Shaw Academy at the time as "an example of an innovative Irish company in the growing online learning market, who are also supporting other Irish SMEs to grow through their extensive suite of online courses."

In January 2017, Shaw Academy launched an educational platform, called Phoenix, to accommodate growing student numbers.

In October 2017, the organisation ran a crowdfunding round on Crowdcube, achieving €2.5 million in promised investment. In November 2017, Crowdcube cancelled the organisation's appeal and released investors from their investment pledges, stating that the organisation had repeatedly failed to comply with the platform's requirements for investment messaging to be "fair, clear and not misleading".

In January 2019, one of the organisation's primary creditors, Columbia Lake Partners, sought immediate recovery of a €5.5 million loan which resulted in the High Court appointing an insolvency practitioner. In March, the court approved the exit of Shaw Academy from examinership after the company secured an additional €7.15 million in funding.

In June 2020, Shaw Academy claimed a tenfold increase in students due to the COVID-19 lockdowns. At that time several customers of the academy started making complaints that they were having difficulties cancelling free trial memberships. Other customers stated that the academy was taking unauthorised payments and the customers were having difficulty with refunds. Trustpilot has issued an alert on its website that Shaw Academy may have taken actions that lead to an artificially inflated "TrustScore". Examples of the artificially inflated scores include emails being sent by company representatives that asked customers to delete negative Trustpilot reviews or replace them with positive reviews.

Courses

Shaw Academy offers courses ranging from business related topics such as digital marketing, social media marketing and web development to wellness programmes such as health and fitness and sports nutrition. Courses are delivered with recordings of live presentations. Students can log on to an online portal to complete assignments, exams, review modules, replay lectures, and view additional content. Educational and technical support teams are also available to students.

Type of site

Online learning

Available in

English

Founder(s)

James Egan

Adrian Murphy

Employees

66 (2019)

URL

www.shawacademy.com

Launched

2013