Acadeum turns another college’s empty seat into your next credit

At the University of Mount Union, the summer of 2017 exposed a peculiar problem. Students needed courses the Ohio college could not conveniently supply. They took those courses elsewhere. A later Acadeum white paper put the lost summer tuition at roughly $900,000. The students were pursuing their degrees quite sensibly. The institution was watching part of its business walk out the door.

There is something wonderfully awkward about higher education’s capacity problem. One campus has an empty seat. Another has a student facing an extra semester. Both possess something the other needs. Acadeum’s business begins with that mismatch and proceeds through the paperwork required to make cooperation possible.

01 / The seat already existed

Founded in 2016, Acadeum built a marketplace for online courses taught by participating institutions. Its first student enrollment arrived that December. The company now reports more than 500 institutions in its network. The customers are colleges, universities and academic associations; students benefit through their institutions. Acadeum supplies the exchange. Partner colleges supply the teaching.

Its origin story includes a modest admission: “We didn’t invent course sharing.” Colleges in the Five College Consortium and Claremont Colleges had shared in-person instruction for generations. Online collaborations followed. Acadeum’s contribution was to make the coordination portable: course information, academic review, enrollment, grades and money could move through one platform.

Even the name required clarification. The business was originally called College Consortium. Josh Pierce told EdSurge that people mistook it for an actual consortium, prompting the change to Acadeum. A company selling infrastructure had accidentally named itself after its customers’ organizational arrangement. Naming, like credit transfer, benefits from fewer ambiguities.

02 / Permission before participation

Course Share is the central product. A home institution identifies an outside course, reviews its academic material and maps it to an equivalent in its own catalog. Approval makes that course eligible for enrollment. The teaching institution delivers instruction; the home institution remains responsible for the student’s degree pathway.

That order matters. With an ordinary transfer course, a student may have to establish whether outside work will satisfy a requirement. Here, academic acceptance is arranged in advance. Grades can count as well as credits, and federal financial aid may apply under specified conditions. The selling point is certainty about the requirement, rather than simply another video lecture.

For students, the practical move is to ask an advisor about the missing class. Self-service registration exists where a participating school enables it. For administrators, the product offers access to syllabi, faculty credentials and learning outcomes. Nobody escapes academic judgment; the platform gives that judgment somewhere useful to happen.

03 / Follow the registration fee

The money has two distinct journeys. A teaching institution sets a registration fee charged to the home institution. The home institution determines what its student pays and retains that billing relationship. Acadeum’s published payment policy says the teaching institution receives its registration fee less a 25% enrollment fee.

For an illustrative $400 registration fee, that means $300 reaches the teaching institution and $100 goes to Acadeum. Those numbers describe the institutional transaction, not a student tuition quote. License charges are another part of the model. The public agreement places them in an order form; the institution’s contract determines the amount.

Mount Union joined the platform in 2019. The later white paper, covered by Inside Higher Ed in March 2025, reported tripled summer enrollment and quadrupled summer revenue, reaching about $1.1 million in 2024. These are reported institutional results, not a controlled experiment. Still, they explain the appeal: serve the student elsewhere without surrendering the relationship at home.

04 / Borrow the curriculum, too

Program Share extends the arrangement beyond a missing requirement. Institutions combine partner courses with their own offerings to develop majors, minors and concentrations. Acadeum describes Albright College using shared courses to support a customizable business master’s curriculum. Eureka College’s account describes a computer science major with 25% of the degree supplied through Saint Leo courses.

Skills Marketplace adds workforce certificates and training. Coursera is a partner, bringing industry credentials into institutional portfolios. That places Acadeum between academic administration and online learning distribution. Building every course internally, arranging bilateral exchanges and sending students through conventional transfer routes are alternatives. Acadeum packages the shared route and its administration.

Investors have funded that expansion: $7 million in 2020, $5 million in 2021 and $11.92 million in 2023. Green Street Impact Partners led the Series B alongside ECMC Group and Pearson Ventures. Richard Keaveny’s appointment as CEO was announced in January 2025, after his work as Chief Product Officer.

05 / The spreadsheet gets a vote

The network’s friction is revealing. A January 2026 presentation at the CIC Presidents Institute described an older mapping workflow involving CSV files, emailed spreadsheets and departmental reviews. It attributed six-plus weeks to a single review. New tools suggest equivalencies inside the platform; Quick Enroll adds AI-enabled search. Institutional approval remains necessary.

The empty seat becomes useful only when somebody agrees what it counts for.

The copyable lesson is procedural: identify the bottleneck, review the substitute before enrollment, settle responsibility for payment and make the resulting credit usable. Course sharing depends on compatible calendars, available seats and institutional agreement. Teaching partners can cancel sections that miss minimum enrollment. Online instruction also needs to suit the learner. A larger catalog cannot settle those questions by itself.

Acadeum asks colleges to regard another institution’s classroom as usable capacity. For a student one course short, that can turn an inconvenient timetable into an achievable graduation plan. The seat was there all along. The work was getting two colleges to agree on it.