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. >>>

Scaling an Educational Services Business to $50 Million: Todd Zipper, CEO of Learning House (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Going from curriculum to a more broad soup-to-nuts set of services and, accordingly, raising the percentage of the royalties that you get paid is a massive strategic move.

Todd Zipper: It’s risky. I’d like to say we are in the private equity game because I’m going to be a million dollars in before I really know what I got. We like to think that the worst-case scenario is we could do with a million dollars. We haven’t really gotten there yet. Fortunately, knock on wood, all of our deals are working out in some form or fashion. The legacy deals are more deeper service type of deals. Once they start to get going, they pay off. That was the big strategic bet that we made. The second thing is I brought in a whole slew of operators and leaders. I just love my team. It’s a phenomenal group of individuals that can run the business four or five times the size that we are today.

Sramana Mitra: You’re doing this from Kentucky, right?

Todd Zipper: Correct. We have some outposts. We have a small operation in Pennsylvania. We have two other locations in Ohio and in Minneapolis around the school itself. >>>

Scaling an Educational Services Business to $50 Million: Todd Zipper, CEO of Learning House (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is there a particular subject material or type of degree that you specialize in?

Todd Zipper: Good question. We are, essentially, generalists. Initially, my thesis when I saw the opportunity at Learning House was that I didn’t want to work with one particular subject area. Let’s say, teaching. That’s a big program online. Another big program online is nursing.

Sramana Mitra: Your competitors, like Hot Chalk, has a big nursing program.

Todd Zipper: Exactly. Hot Chalk is probably our biggest competitor. Our biggest client and their biggest client share the same name Concordia. Their biggest client is Concordia Portland and ours is Concordia St. Paul. We also have another Concordia at Texas. The approach that we took was when I go and meet with Presidents at universities, I want to take their entire school online. I just don’t want to do the MBA program. I also want to do a DBA because when you market business degrees, you want to have choices for people or else your cost of acquisition goes up. >>>

Scaling an Educational Services Business to $50 Million: Todd Zipper, CEO of Learning House (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who are the customers? Is this something that you sell as a software solution to other education institutions who are trying to launch or run an online program or are you actually running this as an outsourced service on behalf of these educational institutions who have a brand? What is the business model?

Todd Zipper: The business model is simple. We charge a revenue share. The school charges the student $400 a credit hour, and we charge the school 15% of revenue for basic curriculum services up to 50% for the entire suite of solutions. To answer your second question, they outsource us essentially. It’s our marketing dollars. It’s very much a symbiotic relationship.

Sramana Mitra: Who provides the content and who provides the faculty?
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Scaling an Educational Services Business to $50 Million: Todd Zipper, CEO of Learning House (Part 2)

Todd Zipper: Around late 2005, one of the entrepreneurs bought a business that became what Kaplan Higher Education is today. This individual had an idea to start a marketing business focused on higher education using TV commercials. We called it LendingTree meets eHarmony. It had a matching algorithm. We went on to build a brand around matching people to potential education opportunities. I co-founded this business in 2006.

The next four years was an incredible journey because this was the boom period in the for-profit education space. Eventually, we got to working with non-profit schools. We had a couple of things that worked to our advantage. When the recession came, the TV market became completely open to our type of marketing messages and our price point because so many big advertisers came off. The second thing is we built one of the first call centres in education where we were advising students. We built that business over four years. We sold it in early 2010 to a competitor called Education Dynamics.

Sramana Mitra: How big did this business become?
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