Galway-based online company ALISON.com, the brainchild of serial entrepreneur Mike Feerick, recently celebrated its fifth birthday by becoming a global leader in free online education.

ALISON.com (Advance Learning Interactive Systems Online) provides free online interactive education to help people acquire basic workplace skills. It has a million registered learners, the bulk of whom live in the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Nigeria and the Middle East, where ALISON has 200,000 students. It is adding 50,000 learners each month.

ALISON.com learners are passionate about its benefits; Mariyam Thiseena, from the Maldives, wrote on its website: “I love ALISON because you give the feeling that even the poorest person deserves an education.”.

Born in New York, but raised in Galway, Mike Feerick has already had a very lucrative business career.  According to Feerick, ALISON is a for-profit social enterprise. “My vision is that all basic education and training is freely accessible online worldwide and accessible by everyone,” explains the company founder. 

Mike Feerick was honoured by Unesco in 2011 for innovation in online workplace education and has been recognized by Ashoka as a social entrepreneur. “Education underpins all social progress. If we can improve the general education level worldwide, global poverty can be dealt with profoundly and a general standard of living can be vastly improved.” said Feerick.

Mike Feerick is also chairman and founder of the Ireland Reaching Out project – an Irish genealogy campaign which aims to connect with the Irish Diaspora by contacting relatives of past immigrants.

See a New York Times profile of ALISON.com here.

Image Caption:  CEO and Founder of Alison.com and IrelandXO.com, Mike Feerick