Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. What are your thoughts about liberal arts colleges? I went to a liberal arts college as well. I went to Smith College. About five years ago, Smith started this big investment on a new engineering building. It was very plush. They invited me to speak at the opening. It was clear that

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Do you work with a lot of for-profit colleges? Karen Francis: We work with any content providers. Some people are not institutions in the way that you and I would think of it. Sramana Mitra: Your marketing service is for any kind of online or educational program? Karen Francis: Yes. On the Academix

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 5)

Karen Francis: To that end, we are paying a lot of attention not just to the individual course certifications but series certifications. edX is leading down this path. One of the next things that we’ll be introducing on our site in the next couple of months is the ability to upload your certification and then

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I have a bunch of questions on that. These are, again, trend questions. One of the big problems with the Internet, in my view, is that it’s a free-rider and free-loader population. What percentage of your traffic are paying users as opposed to people looking for free courses? Karen Francis: The only way

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that you catalog Pluralsight and TrainSignal and all of these course providers? Karen Francis: Not everyone but if we don’t, it’s because we just haven’t contacted them yet. We’re really out there. We have a business development team seeking new course providers. You can also go to the site and

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 2)

Karen Francis: We’re seeing the emerging trend of students saying, “This is why I want this track and this is what I’ll take. I’m not going to take the rest of it.” They are able to customize what they want either from a broad perspective of choosing colleges and institutions or saying, “I’m going take

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Online Education continues to be a fast-changing field, and various people are working on various aspects of the industry to make a complicated puzzle come together. This conversation explores some of those pieces. Sramana Mitra:  Let’s start with introducing our audience to you as well as

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Are We In A Golden Age Of EdTech?

John Doerr would like the world to believe yes. Speaking with Betsy Corcoran of edSurge, Doerr expresses his enthusiasm: What makes this moment “transitional” for learning, Doerr says, is the fact that so much of the technology now getting applied to learning and schools already pervades the rest of our lives.