Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 5)

Karen Francis: To that end, we are paying a lot of attention not just to the individual course certifications but series certifications. edX is leading down this path. One of the next things that we’ll be introducing on our site in the next couple of months is the ability to upload your certification and then attach it to your official transcript. You might go to high school and you have a transcript from your high school. You don’t want to go to college the way that other people might think about it. You know which skills you want and you want to be able to prove to an employer that you’ve mastered it. You will be able to take that certification and attach that to your official transcript.

Sramana Mitra: You are maintaining consumer records on their certifications and transcripts?

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I have a bunch of questions on that. These are, again, trend questions. One of the big problems with the Internet, in my view, is that it’s a free-rider and free-loader population. What percentage of your traffic are paying users as opposed to people looking for free courses?

Karen Francis: The only way I could answer that right now would be to give you metrics on the paid course sales. I would say we’re too early for that. Most of the people on our site are connecting to free courses. I think that’s largely because they don’t know that they’re available yet. We’re really at the early stages of adding the courses. We’re just getting exposure now for those people who are willing to pay.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that you catalog Pluralsight and TrainSignal and all of these course providers?

Karen Francis: Not everyone but if we don’t, it’s because we just haven’t contacted them yet. We’re really out there. We have a business development team seeking new course providers. You can also go to the site and say, “I have five courses. How do I get them on?”

Sramana Mitra: Now you get to pitch me why I should put out a course on your site.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 2)

Karen Francis: We’re seeing the emerging trend of students saying, “This is why I want this track and this is what I’ll take. I’m not going to take the rest of it.” They are able to customize what they want either from a broad perspective of choosing colleges and institutions or saying, “I’m going take a blended experience. I don’t want just online or just in the classroom. I want to be able to mash it all together.” There’s enormous activity and investment in education technology today. We’re seeing lots of experimentation. I don’t see a clear winner yet, which is exciting. More and more people are saying, “What is the result I want from my education?” Then, work backwards and say, “How do I then use the technologies available to gain that result?”

Sramana Mitra: How does CourseTalk fit in to this picture?

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 1)

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Online Education continues to be a fast-changing field, and various people are working on various aspects of the industry to make a complicated puzzle come together. This conversation explores some of those pieces.

Sramana Mitra:  Let’s start with introducing our audience to you as well as Academix Direct and CourseTalk.

Karen Francis: My name is Karen Francis. I’m the CEO and Executive Chairman of Academix Direct. I’ve been in my position for just over four years and I come with a strong marketing and general management background. I was fortunate enough to be on the Board of Trustees at Dartmouth College where I got my undergraduate degree. I have a Harvard MBA. That gave me a unique perspective on education and on what’s behind the curtain of putting together an academic institution. I’ve always been very >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Todd Hitchcock, COO of Pearson Embanet (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch gears a little bit. If you were to advise entrepreneurs who are interested in working in the domain of online education, where would you point them? Where do you see open opportunities to build businesses in?

Todd Hitchcock: There are a lot of inflection points. We know that there are a lot of pieces of the partnership that we have competency in, but there are certain pieces that we may never build a competency in if we don’t acquire a company. Therefore, we like to partner with that provider to bring them into the ecosystem. We’re very strong in our belief that we need to provide solutions but that doesn’t mean that we need to provide every single component. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Todd Hitchcock, COO of Pearson Embanet (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That’s only true if you’re looking at those local types of businesses. We work globally and we work on only digital entrepreneurships – IT, IT-enabled services types of businesses. That’s non-local and a lot of it is very scalable. We’re seeing a lot of interest from entrepreneurs all around the world – not just from the United States.

Todd Hitchcock: I absolutely agree. Traditionally, we work with colleges and universities to put those programs in place driven by their region. I think you’re hitting on a macro trend. There is tremendous opportunity for international entrepreneurship programs. To that end, it hasn’t been one that has been brought to us by a specific partner yet. I think you’re really catching on something that has tremendous possibility.

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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 7)

Sramana Mitra: Engineering schools wanting to teach entrepreneurship is a different trend. What’s driving that trend is that engineering students and engineering graduates are the best equipped to start companies – especially when it comes to the whole IT kind of entrepreneurship which is the most prevalent form of entrepreneurship all over the world right now. These are people who can actually build stuff. It’s a lot easier to bootstrap the business and get something off the ground and launched if you can build something yourself as opposed to having to hire people to do it, which requires capital.

Sher Downing: The other part of it is that digital business is now striding across so many different things. For people to try to determine what they’re going to be and what they’re going to do when they get out of engineering school, it’s very difficult because they have the opportunity to really touch a variety of areas in any kind of business. I think what we’re seeing is students who want >>>