Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That’s a big value proposition that is still part of society. When we were in university and college, there were certain social relationships that formed that ended up being valuable social relationships. A lot of people’s closest friendships get formed earlier in life and a lot of it is college friendships. These are not easy to quantify. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The simple thing is if you give things for free, people just click on it and then move on. If they pay for it, there’s a lot more commitment.

Peter Hirst: Low completion rate isn’t necessarily something that should be critical in relation to MOOCs, exactly because of what you said. People can try it out and see whether this is of interest or value to them. Perhaps, they get value out of a part of it and fulfill an important need for them.

Sramana Mitra: We’re not a free program. We have one layer of free program which is this weekly online mentoring session we do over WebEx. We have entrepreneurs around the world dial-in to that session and use that program. The premium program is a $1000 annual membership fee program. It has got a very rich curriculum with video lectures and case studies. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Online learning is something that you can do at your own time in a very flexible way. That flexibility goes away with that. You’re saying that there’s more benefit in terms of engagement and learning, but there is that other benefit of flexibility that gets taken away from that setup.

Peter Hirst: That’s right. There are certainly trade-offs like that. Although you can use technology to track whether people have watched the videos that you’ve asked them to watch, one of the realities that we have is they will have done the pre-viewing or pre-reading with varying degrees of concentration. In some cases, maybe none at all. In the physical class, one of the things that we find that we have to do is allow time for the people who didn’t really do the pre-work intelligently as others to catch up, and do >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 2)

Peter Hirst: From an education standpoint, the input doesn’t look that dissimilar from a cost base. The other approach is the MOOCs. Often, they are free and are low-cost courses. We’re beginning to see some executive education versions of those. As I go around and talk to my peers in other schools and in schools developing those larger scale offerings, at the moment it’s still quite early days. They are still seeing significant investment of time and effort to produce really high-quality versions of those massive courses.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 1)

This interview is a great discussion about the various experiments going on in the world of higher education and how online learning is playing out there.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to what you’re doing at Sloan vis-à-vis executive education.

Peter Hirst: I’m the Director of the Executive Education program here at the MIT Sloan School. Essentially, what we do is run short, non-degree courses for individual executives and Senior Managers. We also do this for companies in a more customized >>>

Entrepreneur Dysfunctions in Cartoons: How Do You Recruit A Great Mentor?

First, here, meet a great mentor!

Entrepreneurs around the world are searching for great mentors who can show them the ropes of how to short-circuit their entrepreneurial journeys.

Recruiting mentors is a tricky thing. Mentors – unless they have an emotional investment in you (friends, family, former boss) – tend to want to only work with entrepreneurs who have compelling businesses, can score substantial funding, and yield solid exits.

Typically, these are potential advisors who want to be compensated in equity in your business, or potential investors who want to invest in it. Either way, they want to invest time, or money, or both. Let’s call them investors.

Investors, by definition, look for compelling investment opportunities.

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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 the college was going through a lot of soul-searching like most other liberal arts colleges. What is the future of liberal arts education?

Karen Francis: I have a grand vision for what a liberal arts college experience could be. I say those words very precisely. Just because technology is enabling things to open up, doesn’t mean that the college campus can’t do that. I actually think that the real opportunity here is to look at places like Smith and Dartmouth and say, “You go there, but you’re not bound by the boundaries of the geography or the professors who choose to teach there for what you’re going to learn and experience.” >>>

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 Direct site, we work with any post-secondary institutions whether it’s traditional brick-and-mortar, online, or blended – which most of them are. Even the ones you think are traditional have online components now. The CourseTalk site is all online.

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