Thought Leaders in Online Education: Norm Wu, CEO of i-Human Patients (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I have a question here. This material that you’re developing and making available in a cloud-based model, do you develop the content and the whole infrastructure for delivering this content?

Norm Wu: No. We have the technology platform and we work with outside medical educators to develop the content. There are really two different models. One is the crowdsourced model where institutions take our platform and develop their own content. We have an authoring system that’s supported by a very large medical media asset repository so they can create their own cases. In that crowdsourced approach, they develop it for their own use and then make it available to others. They allow other schools to take their cases and make derivatives of those cases.

The other approach that we have is to sponsor peer-reviewed cases that are developed by experts across different institutions. We have had 86 different educators under part-time contract. Those cases are then sold to other schools. Those cases may have been funded by us or may have been funded by folks like the American Medical Association, which has been very interested in what we’re doing to transform medical education. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Norm Wu, CEO of i-Human Patients (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The topic is of huge interest to me. I’ve actually written about this quite a lot. I’m thrilled that our paths crossed and we are able to discuss this topic at length. Let me start by peeling the onion a little bit for our audience to understand what you’re doing and who you’re doing it for. Where do you position your company’s offering?

If you’re talking about medical training, the assumption is that doctors are going to go to medical school and get trained. It’s a very lengthy process. It’s an expensive process. Obviously, it’s hard to train millions of doctors in full-fledged medical schools. Are you, somehow, addressing that issue?

Norm Wu: We’re doing a number of things. What we do at medical schools may be slightly different from what we do with nurse practitioner schools. Let me first talk about medical schools. In the US, the capacity in medical schools is not growing very quickly. That’s because there are limited residency slots. Schools that try to increase their capacity will have trouble matching their graduates into residency programs. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Norm Wu, CEO of i-Human Patients (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit more about i-Human Patients. What do you do? How do you do what you do? What are the trends that we see in play in this particular venture?

Norm Wu: We are fundamentally an online education technology company. We’re focused mainly on the healthcare professional vertical market. Specifically, we make virtual patient technology. This is a cloud-based platform to simulate life-like patient encounters all for the purpose of developing and assessing what are thought of as very difficult, critical-thinking, and cognitive competencies. These are things like, “How do you assess and diagnose patients quickly, accurately, and cost effectively so that you can treat them appropriately?” It’s what we think of as the Sherlock Holmes part of medicine.

What we are doing is really addressing two very large pain points. One is basically the quality of care. If you look at the research studies, you’ll find that anywhere from 5% to 25% of patients are misdiagnosed, and half of those misdiagnoses can actually be harmful. It results in 40,000 up to 150,000 avoidable deaths each year. It accounts for a very, very large portion of the $700 billion to $1 trillion of unnecessary healthcare that is being spent. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Norm Wu, CEO of i-Human Patients (Part 1)

There will be an acute need for trained medical professionals as healthcare becomes democratised around the world. Norm discusses what his company is doing in this very important realm using online education principles.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to i-Human Patients. What do you do? What trends are you working with?

Norm Wu: I’m a serial entrepreneur. Even in high school, I had a little bit of entrepreneurial experience. I was one of the co-founders of the campus radio station. I became very interested in technology. I started working in Silicon Valley after getting my BS and MS at Stanford. I worked on reconnaissance systems for the defense industry. This was during the Cold War when we really needed to understand what the bad guys were doing with respect to radars and missiles. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jon Mott, Chief Learning Officer, Learning Objects (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who are some of the good showcases of your technology? Which institutions or organisations?

Jon Mott: Currently, we’re working with University of Maryland University College (UMUC) on implementing a next generation transcript that changes the game. Instead of listing just courses and credit hours, it would actually display capabilities that the students have demonstrated and acquired in their time at the institution. It’s a different kind of academic record.

We’re having similar conversations doing that in partnership with the University of Wisconsin – Extension System in partnership with UMUC. We’re participating in March with University of Texas Austin on a design project where we, with a couple of other vendors and some other thought leaders, are fundamentally rethinking what the learning environment looks like. What should the student experience be through their first semester to the next? How do we make that a more holistic, engaging, and a graded experience? >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jon Mott, Chief Learning Officer, Learning Objects (Part 2)

Jon Mott: There are a lot of things that we have as components or modules of our platform like building quiz questions, building item banks, and having grade books. It doesn’t make sense for a small startup to build all of those from scratch. Instead of wasting their time and energy on that, they can leverage our existing tools and then add their special secret sauce on top of that.

Our biggest segment that we’re focusing on is institutions. Mostly, institutions of higher education where they have had a very traditional approach—faculty-cantered approach and semester-based approach to learning. They’re exploring and looking at different ways of structuring the student learning experience at that institution. Maybe, making it more flexible. Maybe, making each student pass through a degree program differently based on what they know coming in. Maybe some preferential things about how they prefer to learn or interact with other students and really building a learning environment that has flexible workflows, but also that is systematically implemented for an entire institution so the different stakeholders know how to interact with others at different points along the way.

Sramana Mitra: Did I understand correctly that you have some kind of software authoring environment? >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jon Mott, Chief Learning Officer, Learning Objects (Part 1)

Some thoughts on learning objectives driven instructional design.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Learning Objects.

Jon Mott: I’m the Chief Learning Officer at Learning Objects. My responsibility at the company is to bring a learning science, higher education, and learning design perspective to both our product development and to implementations with clients. My background is both in academia and instructional design, as well as corporate education, adult learning, and corporate training.

Throughout my career, I’ve really had this focus on, “How do we help individuals acquire the knowledge, skills, and abilities they need at any given point in time to pursue goals related to the next things they’re trying to achieve in their lives?” >>>

Scaling an Educational Services Business to $50 Million: Todd Zipper, CEO of Learning House (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You have to pick and choose the partner that you go to business with because you’re basically risk sharing. You both have to invest to get a new brand up and running.

Todd Zipper: Yes. That’s where our expertise comes in around leveraging the brand that already exists and trying to cater to what might be a new market for them. Most of the people that are going fully online, which is primarily who we are focused on, are adult learners. Adult learners are anybody from 22 to 50. The average age is 31. Catering to that student from a marketing, enrolment, and a pedagogical standpoint is different from a traditional-aged student. It’s a shift in mindset, process, and procedures. That’s why it does makes sense for a lot of these schools to outsource. Whether that becomes a permanent trend, I think it’s just too early to know that. >>>