Thought Leaders in Online Education: Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What trends are you seeing on your platform? What are the top topics that people are teaching and what are the top topics that people are learning?

Greg Smith: This is a question I get a lot. There are trends within different areas. There’s a lot of training and education around health and fitness. There’s a lot around levelling up in your career and profession. That can span everything from corporate finance to software development. There’s a lot around crafts and hobbies.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific (Part 1)

Online education is a booming field that is seeing entrepreneurship both on the platform and technology tool side as well as on the educator side. This interview covers both.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and Thinkific.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Paul Kellenberger, CEO of zSpace (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How do you find and recruit these developers who are very important to your success?

Paul Kellenberger: Over the course of the last three or four years in the education industry, there’s a set of events and a lot of conferences that we go to where both developers as well as end users and resellers traditionally go to.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Paul Kellenberger, CEO of zSpace (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s elaborate on the platform and your own applications versus third-party applications. What’s in the platform? What part of that platform is yours versus from Unity? Where are the third-party developers adding value to this?

Paul Kellenberger: Let me start at the bottom and I’ll talk about the technology from a hardware perspective. We have two proprietary components that are unique to zSpace. One is the way we do the display module that creates the stereo 3D  effect.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Paul Kellenberger, CEO of zSpace (Part 1)

AR/VR is changing education. In our TLOE series, this interview delves into the trends and the white spaces.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and to zSpace.

Paul Kellenberger: I’m the CEO of zSpace. zSpace is a very innovative technology company that has been in the market and focused on education for the last six and a half years. We’re a unique combination of augmented reality and virtual reality.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Tim Broom, CEO of ITProTV (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You have 100,000 users and 50,000 paying subscribers. What is the size of the IT learner market? What percentage of that is learning on your platform in this mode?

Tim Broom: That’s the great news of this business. About $50 billion a year is spent in the learning space. Pluralsight does $400 million and Lynda does $200 million. We’re going to do $12.5 million this year.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Tim Broom, CEO of ITProTV (Part 1)

Online learning has produced some unicorns and a plethora of niche businesses. Tim talks about one that focuses on the IT learner.

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

Tim Broom: I am the CEO of ITProTV. We’re an online learning provider for people who are interested in information technology, security, and networking. The easiest way to describe it is, it is the Netflix of IT learning where someone may pay us a subscription price to have an entire library.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Gregory Marino, CEO of Kaplan Higher Education (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about technology – all this data and analytics? What is the mix there?

Gregory Marino: Everything is on a digital platform. We ensure that when we put a process in place or a course online, there is a mechanism to measure the effects. We’ll get down to the clickstream data and understand where students are getting the best learning outcomes, what materials are being used more frequently, and what is helping to lead to better results.