Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sari Factor, CEO of Edgenuity (Part 1)

K-12 has been a challenge for EdTech companies to build businesses in. Typically, buying cycles tend to be very long. See where Edgenuity is getting traction, and what trends are emerging in the space.

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

Sari Factor: After a short career in teaching back in 1980, I joined a company to explore technology in education. It was the first electronic publishing division of a major US publisher. I thought technology was going to change the world. I was this young green thing right out of teaching. Here I am many years later and I’m still trying to get technology to change K-12 education.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: They’re used to texting non-stop. One form of social interaction could be just having an instant messenger and they’re doing their group study that way. There’s one other thought that comes to my mind in relation to the media industries parallel that we touched upon earlier. There is this whole thing happening in the online media world right now that has come to be known as content marketing. Media companies are imploding left and right. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It starts to get very tricky because we also have weekly roundtables, which are live sessions where people are gathering from all over the world. They are networking. It’s like a class. There’s instructors and students. There’s networking and relationship-building. All of that phenomenon can, to a degree at least, be simulated online. In fact, now we’re doing it across global boundaries, which you cannot do in physical settings.

Peter Hirst: That, in fact, is what we’re doing in these avatar-based virtual classrooms. We’re really creating an emotionally-engaging environment where people can get together in that way. I have been talking to some of the other folks at MITx and edX. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That’s a big value proposition that is still part of society. When we were in university and college, there were certain social relationships that formed that ended up being valuable social relationships. A lot of people’s closest friendships get formed earlier in life and a lot of it is college friendships. These are not easy to quantify. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The simple thing is if you give things for free, people just click on it and then move on. If they pay for it, there’s a lot more commitment.

Peter Hirst: Low completion rate isn’t necessarily something that should be critical in relation to MOOCs, exactly because of what you said. People can try it out and see whether this is of interest or value to them. Perhaps, they get value out of a part of it and fulfill an important need for them.

Sramana Mitra: We’re not a free program. We have one layer of free program which is this weekly online mentoring session we do over WebEx. We have entrepreneurs around the world dial-in to that session and use that program. The premium program is a $1000 annual membership fee program. It has got a very rich curriculum with video lectures and case studies. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Online learning is something that you can do at your own time in a very flexible way. That flexibility goes away with that. You’re saying that there’s more benefit in terms of engagement and learning, but there is that other benefit of flexibility that gets taken away from that setup.

Peter Hirst: That’s right. There are certainly trade-offs like that. Although you can use technology to track whether people have watched the videos that you’ve asked them to watch, one of the realities that we have is they will have done the pre-viewing or pre-reading with varying degrees of concentration. In some cases, maybe none at all. In the physical class, one of the things that we find that we have to do is allow time for the people who didn’t really do the pre-work intelligently as others to catch up, and do >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 2)

Peter Hirst: From an education standpoint, the input doesn’t look that dissimilar from a cost base. The other approach is the MOOCs. Often, they are free and are low-cost courses. We’re beginning to see some executive education versions of those. As I go around and talk to my peers in other schools and in schools developing those larger scale offerings, at the moment it’s still quite early days. They are still seeing significant investment of time and effort to produce really high-quality versions of those massive courses.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Katya Andresen, CEO of Cricket Media (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: If you try to build a business that is selling to schools, that’s an incredibly slow cycle. I have companies in our portfolio and I know a lot of educational entrepreneurs who have become frustrated trying to sell technology or content to schools. It’s a long sell cycle. The textbook vendors are quite entrenched. To some extent, these vendors that provide curriculum materials to the schools are quite entrenched. If you look at the financials of those companies, they are not attractive financials.

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