Thought Leaders in Online Education: Norm Wu, CEO of i-Human Patients (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I have a question here. This material that you’re developing and making available in a cloud-based model, do you develop the content and the whole infrastructure for delivering this content?

Norm Wu: No. We have the technology platform and we work with outside medical educators to develop the content. There are really two different models. One is the crowdsourced model where institutions take our platform and develop their own content. We have an authoring system that’s supported by a very large medical media asset repository so they can create their own cases. In that crowdsourced approach, they develop it for their own use and then make it available to others. They allow other schools to take their cases and make derivatives of those cases.

The other approach that we have is to sponsor peer-reviewed cases that are developed by experts across different institutions. We have had 86 different educators under part-time contract. Those cases are then sold to other schools. Those cases may have been funded by us or may have been funded by folks like the American Medical Association, which has been very interested in what we’re doing to transform medical education. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jon Mott, Chief Learning Officer, Learning Objects (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who are some of the good showcases of your technology? Which institutions or organisations?

Jon Mott: Currently, we’re working with University of Maryland University College (UMUC) on implementing a next generation transcript that changes the game. Instead of listing just courses and credit hours, it would actually display capabilities that the students have demonstrated and acquired in their time at the institution. It’s a different kind of academic record.

We’re having similar conversations doing that in partnership with the University of Wisconsin – Extension System in partnership with UMUC. We’re participating in March with University of Texas Austin on a design project where we, with a couple of other vendors and some other thought leaders, are fundamentally rethinking what the learning environment looks like. What should the student experience be through their first semester to the next? How do we make that a more holistic, engaging, and a graded experience? >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jon Mott, Chief Learning Officer, Learning Objects (Part 2)

Jon Mott: There are a lot of things that we have as components or modules of our platform like building quiz questions, building item banks, and having grade books. It doesn’t make sense for a small startup to build all of those from scratch. Instead of wasting their time and energy on that, they can leverage our existing tools and then add their special secret sauce on top of that.

Our biggest segment that we’re focusing on is institutions. Mostly, institutions of higher education where they have had a very traditional approach—faculty-cantered approach and semester-based approach to learning. They’re exploring and looking at different ways of structuring the student learning experience at that institution. Maybe, making it more flexible. Maybe, making each student pass through a degree program differently based on what they know coming in. Maybe some preferential things about how they prefer to learn or interact with other students and really building a learning environment that has flexible workflows, but also that is systematically implemented for an entire institution so the different stakeholders know how to interact with others at different points along the way.

Sramana Mitra: Did I understand correctly that you have some kind of software authoring environment? >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jon Mott, Chief Learning Officer, Learning Objects (Part 1)

Some thoughts on learning objectives driven instructional design.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Learning Objects.

Jon Mott: I’m the Chief Learning Officer at Learning Objects. My responsibility at the company is to bring a learning science, higher education, and learning design perspective to both our product development and to implementations with clients. My background is both in academia and instructional design, as well as corporate education, adult learning, and corporate training.

Throughout my career, I’ve really had this focus on, “How do we help individuals acquire the knowledge, skills, and abilities they need at any given point in time to pursue goals related to the next things they’re trying to achieve in their lives?” >>>

Bootstrapping an Education Company: Tod Browndorf, CEO of Coggno (Part 2)

Tod Browndorf: I ended up moving back to California. I went into a consulting business with a friend of mine. He was basically in high-end contingent workforce business. This is in the late 90s. We placed all sorts of different types of contingent folks inside companies. As a result, we placed instructional designers into companies that were looking to create training initiatives.

For instance, a company like Washington Mutual, which doesn’t exist anymore, might want to train their 5,000 bank tellers on something. We would find the instructional designer or course developer. We would put them all together and find someone to deliver it. We deliver these packages to these organisations. That’s how I got into what I’m doing now.

Sramana Mitra: When was this company founded?

Tod Browndorf: Coggno was founded in 2007. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: All right. I’m going to switch to my last question. Based on the trends you see on online learning, where do you see opportunities for entrepreneurs to start new companies?

Bharat Anand: Let me step back a bit. Technology is allowing us to create all sorts of new and interesting offerings. I wanted to focus a little bit on learners and their behaviours. What we’re seeing is that there are, at least, three kinds of things that individuals look for in online experiences. The first I’d probably describe as a question of relevance. It’s one thing to offer content. The content might be of terrific quality, but as a learner, I want to know why it’s relevant or important for me. That’s a question that I think is becoming increasingly important. It’s a trend that’s caused by the confluence of many things such as scarce time and greater competition. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Bharat Anand, Faculty Chair, HBX at Harvard Business School (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t buy that this is going to scale necessarily.

Bharat Anand: Yes, go ahead.

Sramana Mitra: What you’re saying, it works to a point. I don’t think it’s going to, necessarily, scale to millions of numbers – the kind of numbers with which edX is working with right now. I don’t think the model you’re talking about is going to scale at those levels because for all the factors with which you are trying to preserve quality – the price, grade, and expectation of the interaction level. I think that works like an elite conversation mode. That does not work in a mass crowd mode.

Bharat Anand: I think i disagree with that. When we think about peer conversation, obviously, you can’t have ten thousand people on the same platform asking each others questions. We’ve experimented with the right size of the cohort. Where we’ve converged to is somewhere between 300 to 500 people. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ron Olsen, CEO of Remote Learner (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Any other trends that you want to highlight?

Ron Olsen: What we’re seeing from our clients is really a stronger push towards the user experience and identifying this learning solution as ours. Particularly in the corporate space, how do our training and learning solutions directly tie in to our own brand? How do we make it easy and accessible for our folks? We have a fair amount of clients where we’re building near-custom applications around the needs of specific companies and their training needs. We’re seeing a straight grab-it-off-the-shelf, and the deploy it approach just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Sramana Mitra: In the portfolio of clients that you’re serving and the kinds of scenarios that you’re discovering where you need solutions to, are there specific tools and technologies that you see the need for that is not in the market that you would encourage entrepreneurs to develop? >>>