Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What about examining and testing? Especially, where you’re running full-fledged online programs, how do you handle testing? Sher Downing: We have actually been trying out a number of products in the last year and have purposely focused on avoiding issues of plagiarism and any type of cheating. We pride ourselves, on carrying the

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch to a different topic. Our audience is entrepreneurs. Talk to me about what you are doing in the realm of entrepreneurship education – first at the undergraduate level and then at the graduate level. Sher Downing: We currently have an undergraduate degree in Entrepreneurship and that includes coursework that

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 3)

Sher Downing: One of the things that we do is have all tenured full-time faculty teach our online classes. So you get the same award-winning faculty online that you would get if you came in to take a course. We have surveyed the students and monitored the course just to see what the students enjoy.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When people are working on these online programs – specifically, we are interested in understanding your online offering – are they doing online only program or is everything an online/offline combination? Sher Downing: Our online programs offer a real breadth of flexibility and ability to learn within a capsulated calendar. Students, at the

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Much is changing in the world of education. Universities are becoming large scale providers in online learning. Arizona State University is at the fore of this trend, running one of the largest business programs online. Sramana Mitra: Sher, let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself

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Bootstrapping to $6M from Durgapur, West Bengal: Pinnacle CAD CEO Bimal Patwari (Part 7)

Sramana: What was the most substantial change that occurred with your business after 2007? Bimal Patwari: After 2007, the biggest change was the size of projects we worked on. We began working on airports, hospitals, and convention centers. That required large teams of up to 40 people working on a project at the same time.

Bootstrapping to $6M from Durgapur, West Bengal: Pinnacle CAD CEO Bimal Patwari (Part 6)

Sramana: Were you able to change the layers of service you provided from 2-D to 3-D? Would you talk about the technologies you were standardizing on? Bimal Patwari: Absolutely. There were several companies that offered modeling software. However, Autodesk has a worldwide presence. Everyone works on their platform. We also bought some other software solutions

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Bootstrapping to $6M from Durgapur, West Bengal: Pinnacle CAD CEO Bimal Patwari (Part 5)

Sramana: Aside from having a loyal workforce, you have also created a workforce that operates in a niche market. There are not many places in India that your workers are going to be able to move to and leverage American architectural knowledge. Bimal Patwari: That is a factor as well. We invest a lot of

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