Thought Leaders in Online Education: Gregory Marino, CEO of Kaplan Higher Education (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Break it down for me a little bit. Talk about departments within Purdue that are using this. How is it getting rolled out to the broader Purdue community? You said it went to 30,000 people because of the Purdue partnership and acquisition. Talk a but more about that.

Gregory Marino: The first part of the strategy was just to acquire Kaplan University. That was a fully-functioning, accredited institution integrated with Purdue.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Gregory Marino, CEO of Kaplan Higher Education (Part 1)

Purdue University has recently acquired Kaplan University to create Purdue University Global, one of the pioneers in online learning. Read on to understand why.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you as well as to Kaplan.

Gregory Marino: I just celebrated my 26th year with Kaplan. My resume reads newspaper boy and then Kaplan. I’ve been in education my entire professional career. Over those 26 years, I’ve been pretty much involved in each one of our major divisions.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Niall McKinney, President of Avado (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: On the language learning front, I have been learning two languages in parallel. I did personal tutors. Then I did online learning. I’ve watched a ton of films. I’m learning French and Spanish. I’ve done apps.

I watch a tremendous number of French films. I’m married to a French-speaking man. It’s all very helpful. My housekeeper is Spanish-speaking, so I get to speak Spanish with her. All that is great.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Niall McKinney, President of Avado (Part 3)

Niall McKinney: The higher level of that is, they get specific group assignments. In Google Squared Online, at the end of three of the modules, they will be assigned a group. We give them a group work.

For example, it might be a brand which is not very digital. They might have to come up with a new integrated marketing plan for that. The output is a white paper on how they would change that brand approach.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Niall McKinney, President of Avado (Part 2)

Niall McKinney: If you think about how we learn at school or college, we don’t expect children to learn on their own at their own pace. We send them to school. We send people to college to learn with other people. There is a social normative effect that you want to keep up. You want to be able to participate in group discussions.

In most of our deployments, we create cohorts of people who go through the learning at the same time. When most online education companies are created, they saw the opportunity for scalable learning, but what they lost was that human motivation for learning together, to be able to share the insights you’re getting, and the motivation of keeping up.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Niall McKinney, President of Avado (Part 1)

Avado is a $100M online learning company that focuses on group learning for enterprises. The discussion includes several exciting open problems that are ripe for new entrepreneurs to step in.

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

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very interesting topic that you bring up. There are some observations I have on that. One is that some of the rock star teachers at top universities have their very popular courses on edX and Coursera. Then you have platforms like what LinkedIn is doing. Soon after they named me one of their top influencers, they invited me to do a course on entrepreneurship.

I did a course on bootstrapping. This course has been distributed extensively. In the bootstrapped entrepreneurship audience, it’s a very popular course. It’s got well over 100K views. People who know how to teach a subject well and are good performers – this is now changing a teacher to not just an educator but really a performer because it’s entertainment almost. But it’s not entertainment. It’s delivering education in a highly engaging way. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Andrew Grauer, CEO of Course Hero (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch the line of questioning from what you are doing to more of the industry trend question. What open problems do you see in the industry right now where a new entrepreneur would be starting a company today? Instead of being 12 years into Course Hero, if you were starting a company today, what problem would you go out to try to solve?

Andrew Grauer: First of all, I would start with a methodology. I truly believe that anyone should start with identifying a real problem in the world. Hopefully, it passes the toothbrush test. That is the problem that exists frequently in one’s life. When that problem comes up in one’s life, it’s a big problem. Then third, it’s not a problem just experienced by oneself but many people in the world. >>>