Thought Leaders in Online Education: Dror Ben Naim, CEO of Smart Sparrow (Part 1)

This conversation delves into the personalized learning design system space.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself and Smart Sparrow to our readership.

Dror Ben Naim: I’m the Founder and CEO of Smart Sparrow. We are a learning technology platform. We help education providers make their digital learning experiences personalized and adaptive.

Sramana Mitra: Double-click down on that for us and tell us a bit more about what that means. You can use use cases. It’s a perfect way to explain all this complex stuff. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Patrick Mullane, Executive Director of HBX (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Could you switch gears and tell me what you see out there as open problems around which people could be starting new companies?

Patrick Mullane: That’s a broad question. I see a lot of opportunities in the job I’m in that we don’t address and I don’t see anybody addressing. One is how can we very quickly make content that’s compelling and that is custom in nature for a particular company’s needs. I’d argue for a long time, executive education programs were the domain of only large companies because it costs a lot of money to send somebody somewhere.

There certainly are huge benefits to that. I think that it’s a need that’s not going to go away, but there’s probably a whole tier of middle-market >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Patrick Mullane, Executive Director of HBX (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about some of the other trends that you see in this mode of delivering education. Are there international students who are just doing the certification and has nothing to do with applying for the full program?

Patrick Mullane: Yes, for sure. Let me be clear. The number of people who use it explicitly to apply to the Harvard MBA program is exceptionally small. Of that 37,000, I’d be shocked if 500 of them took it for that purpose. Most people are not taking it for that reason. They’re taking it either because they want to apply to some other school or they have some other business needs.

To your point, 40% of our participants are international students so we have a very strong international presence with our programs. Most of them use it for similar reasons that the American students do. Either they’re applying to graduate programs in some other country, or they have no >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Patrick Mullane, Executive Director of HBX (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Now let’s go to the types of programs that you’re running. I’d like to take them one by one and understand better the trends in that. Let’s start with the one where you have people taking it as a preparatory step towards applying for Harvard MBA. What are the trends in that?

Patrick Mullane: There’s a specific product that people think about when they think about the market of people looking to go get an MBA. That’s our product called CORE, which stands for Credential Readiness. It’s a three-course program of accounting, economics, and data analytics. It was originally built as a pre-matriculation program for accepted Harvard MBA students who needed to get up to speed on those disciplines so that when they came to campus and got in a classroom, they would be ready to speak intelligently on topics without the faculty having to worry about remedial training. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Patrick Mullane, Executive Director of HBX (Part 1)

Harvard Business School is using online education extensively across different use cases. Learn how.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself and HBX platform.

Patrick Mullane: I’m the Executive Director of HBX, which is Harvard Business School’s online education initiative. Harvard Business School built a custom platform about four years ago with the intent to deliver case-based business learning in a scaled way; in a way in which we could reach more people around the world in the interest of furthering the business school’s mission, which is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.

Nick has built a very interesting e-learning company and addressed scalability with nifty strategic choices. Read on. You’ll learn a lot.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Nick Shaw: I was born and raised in the state of Michigan. I grew up with the goal of wanting to go to the University of Michigan. It’s a top-level school. I was lucky enough to get accepted there. I started in the Sports Management program. I originally wanted to be an athletic director. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: O’Reilly Media Chief Content Officer Karen Hebert-Maccaro (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: LinkedIn uses their influencers very well in bolstering the social network aspect. They really harness the expertise in the community to get a lot of free content that they have basically monetized themselves.

Karen Hebert-Maccaro: At O’Reilly, we’re talking about socialization and providing social learning in a slightly different way. One of the things we’re working on and have recently released is the ability to create and share playlists. That is a way to essentially allow folks to engage with folks inside their organizations or perhaps eventually outside of their organization in ways that they can follow what people are reading, what people are watching, and what people are paying attention to. It has that influencer characteristic. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: O’Reilly Media Chief Content Officer Karen Hebert-Maccaro (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The way you’re set up in terms of your platform, is it an all-you-can-eat subscription model such that this performance-based learning is something people can access as they go?

Karen Hebert-Maccaro: We are a subscription-based SaaS model. You or your organization subscribes and you have access to the entire platform 24/7 on your mobile devices or your desktop. Since we have this multi-modality with everything from reading full books to small videos and conferences, that’s all available to anybody who’s a subscriber.

Sramana Mitra: I’m sure you watch the space quite closely. I’m going to ask you for some commentary on what other people are doing and how do you analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Let’s start with Pluralsight. >>>