Sramana Mitra: When you look at those early adopters of your technology, what strikes you as the common characteristics of these kinds of players? What were they doing that made them early adopters? Don Kassner: They had those typical early adopter feature sets. They understood that they needed to take their online education service to
Sramana Mitra: You gave a presentation to a group of universities explaining that there’s something that you wanted to do and they resonated with that. Could you explain what that pitch was? Don Kassner: We got up and showed what we were doing at Andrew Jackson University with this remote proctoring product that we had
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. One of the chief bottlenecks of the adoption of online education has been the lack of ability to handle testing in a secure fashion. ProctorU addresses that gap and is growing at a nice clip. Sramana Mitra: Don, let’s start at the beginning. Tell me about
Sramana Mitra: Well, it can be looked at differently as vocational training. For example, there are plenty of jobs in computer networking. We live in a networked world. Somebody who is trained in computer networking and has a good theoretical understanding can deal with equipment and so forth. This is a very nice vocation even
Mike Pellerin: Correct. Now I have a question for you. I have been approached for a couple of K-12 courses as well, for the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades. A number of school districts have expressed interest in recommending some of our material to their students. Have you seen any trends on that? Sramana Mitra:
Sramana Mitra: What you are doing is that you are selling equipment to the universities. And you have a lot of curriculum material, which you have packaged up into MOOC and then, you are letting students use it. In case, they express some interest in using those digital curriculum materials, colleges and universities might want
Sramana Mitra: So what you are talking about is the student curriculum development including knowledge, talking about localization. Is it a strategy of Extreme Networks? It sounded like you have a lot of budgets to work with. Why is Extreme Network trying to nail the common educational publisher?
Sramana Mitra: Are you developing a curriculum that you’re offering for free to various schools and universities? Mike Pellerin: Currently, we offer three courses. These include courses on data networking fundamentals, wireless LAN fundamentals, and data center basics. We will soon be releasing a course on security concepts. Each course length ranges from six to