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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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 1)

This interview is a great discussion about the various experiments going on in the world of higher education and how online learning is playing out there.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to what you’re doing at Sloan vis-à-vis executive education.

Peter Hirst: I’m the Director of the Executive Education program here at the MIT Sloan School. Essentially, what we do is run short, non-degree courses for individual executives and Senior Managers. We also do this for companies in a more customized >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Katya Andresen, CEO of Cricket Media (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You were able to build a minimum viable product, start monetizing it right away, and then, scale it from there.

Katya Andresen: Not right away. Most of the overnight successes have a five to seven years lag.

Sramana Mitra: That’s my point. How do you finance five to seven years of development?

Katya Andresen: We did it slowly with MVPs and self funding through our own growth. It was really hard work and that’s why we didn’t scale faster.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Katya Andresen, CEO of Cricket Media (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The concern is that it is complicated and expensive to build these programs. Then, if everybody wants everything for free, how do these businesses sustain themselves? That’s the real question that I’m extremely worried about.

Katya Andresen: I think no one ever jumps to the opportunity to pay for something, right? If it is incredibly hard to build, it’s a big investment, and if you’ve invested in high-quality learning that is not equally replicated, that has a lot of value and people do pay for it. I don’t know what the amazing, fabulous, and free learning experiences are out there that are as good as those other ones.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Katya Andresen, CEO of Cricket Media (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve taken seven years to build $17 million in revenue. That’s not a timeline that fits in the venture capital framework. The venture capitalists are looking to build hundred million dollar companies in seven years. This is what I’ve been really concerned about. For a long time, venture capitalists basically just decided not to invest in educational technology. Some sectors like adult education and for-profit universities got some money. But largely, educational technology was not a segment that people were willing to invest in.

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