Thought Leaders in Online Education: Quizlet CEO Matthew Glotzbach (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you were to rank subjects which are the biggest draws, what would those be?

Matthew Glotzbach: Over half of the college students in the US use Quizlet on a regular basis. Over two-thirds of the high school students in the US use us. We see a wide distribution of different types of uses. Language learning is still a strong category for us, but by no means is it a majority. We get used in a lot of sciences, both in the hard sciences as well as the social sciences.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Quizlet CEO Matthew Glotzbach (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What’s happening on the technology end? How are these questions generated? How is the progression being determined?

Matthew Glotzbach: Most of the interactions are with texts and images. We do a lot of natural language processing and understanding of the text. I’ll take a multiple choice question as a simple example.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Quizlet CEO Matthew Glotzbach (Part 1)

Quizlet is a user-generated and AI-augmented study guide platform that has scaled exponentially.

Read on to understand more about this newly-minted Unicorn.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Quizlet.

Startup Ideas for the Post Covid World: K-12 Education

In the Spring of 2020, parents of young children have suddenly woken up to a world where kids have to be homeschooled. They are supposedly guided by the teachers. These teachers have no experience of teaching online, and are thus learners themselves of a new education paradigm. They are scrambling to make things flow without losing the limited attention of the youngsters that are already difficult to command in normal times. 

The key issue I observe is that the teaching tools are not designed for this usage model.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Dror Ben Naim, CEO of Smart Sparrow (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the emerging trends in the space and what are the open problems? If you were starting a company today, where would you start one?

Dror Ben Naim: I’m a CEO of a company and I’ve got lot of people working for me. They would be very unhappy to hear that their CEO is starting another company!

Sramana Mitra: That’s not the question. The question is pointers for young entrepreneurs.

Dror Ben Naim: If I had to open another company, it would probably be the same company. In terms of what’s interesting in the market, that is a definition of what the market is. There’s a big trend in EdTech to evolve talent. They’re moving from K12 and higher education to corporate training. We >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Dror Ben Naim, CEO of Smart Sparrow (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are you seeing in terms of adoption in the school systems?

Dror Ben Naim: Everywhere we look, we’re seeing great interest in the area of personalized learning. It’s not just a buzzword. It’s a reality. What we also see is that certain schools are ahead of others. The classic example is to talk about ASU which is truly leading the pack in terms of their institutional adoption of innovative learning and teaching technologies and practices. It’s not just about adopting technologies; it’s mainly about changing your practice as an organization.

On the other side of the spectrum, we will see laggards who still don’t believe in digital learning. Professors are still upset that they’re expected to >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Dror Ben Naim, CEO of Smart Sparrow (Part 3)

Dror Ben Naim: We can base adaptation on many factors. We can base it on how students are doing right now on the problems they are working on. We can adapt in a more complex way not only by looking at what they’re doing now but also by what kind of mastery level they have on the learning objective that they are currently dealing with.

For example, I’m giving you a quadratic problem. If you don’t know how to solve the quadratic problem, I can choose to give you an easier one. If I’ve got statistical information that shows that, overall, you’re doing poorly on quadratic, I may choose to take you down a different path which starts explaining in simpler ways how to solve quadratic. In this example, I talked about adapting the sequence of learning experiences. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Dror Ben Naim, CEO of Smart Sparrow (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is it software or is it content that you’re delivering in a SaaS mode?

Dror Ben Naim: This is software. We’re talking about a tool for designers, developers, and subject matter experts.

Sramana Mitra: They are designing the content on your tool.

Dror Ben Naim: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a next-generation LMS. >>>