Thought Leaders in Online Education: Kurt Kirstein, Dean of School of Management, City University of Seattle (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that once they get their feet wet in the online program, they prefer the convenience and the flexibility of the online class?

Kurt Kirstein: They do. I think they perceive the value of it. Many of the students who come to us went to school. The last time they went to school, they were in class with the professor face-to-face. That’s what they know and that’s what they’re used to. Many resist online when it’s offered to them as an option because it’s not what they’re comfortable with. By giving them a taste of it and requiring them to participate in an online environment, many of them become much more comfortable with it and they migrate to online on their own. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Kurt Kirstein, Dean of School of Management, City University of Seattle (Part 2)

Kurt Kirstein: They’re looking to finish a degree or looking for career advancement. That’s the primary market that we serve. In that sense, we don’t serve freshmen. We don’t have freshmen that come in in droves every Fall. We serve people who are working and have decided that they have enough time and it’s a good time in their lives to try to advance their careers or maybe change careers. They come to us to seek those additional skills. What is different about the way we service our students, when compared to a traditional university, is that we focus heavily on a practitioner faculty model. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Kurt Kirstein, Dean of School of Management, City University of Seattle (Part 1)

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This discussion focuses on online education models that maximize engagement and minimize drop rates.

Sramana Mitra: Kurt, let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to what you’re doing at City University of Seattle.

Kurt Kirstein: I am currently the Dean in the School of Management at the City University of Seattle. The School of Management is in control of all of our business programs, all of the business related programs, and we also incorporate the technology programs with the Technology Institute at the University. I have been at City University of Seattle for about eight years of which I have been the Dean for seven years.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sean Brown, SVP of Education, Sonic Foundry (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I’m not doing the research. Somebody who knows better than I do is curating or providing that content and the education that I need. Essentially at that point, it’s an online university of its own style. I think that’s what’s going to happen at each of the university levels as well as there will be private business versions of each category like all the companies that we described. We fall in that online education category as well. Somebody is doing the curation, somebody is guaranteeing the quality of the learning. People are trusting that brand and becoming a member of that brand. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sean Brown, SVP of Education, Sonic Foundry (Part 6)

Sean Brown: My personal belief is that we are in the early days of what education content can do for entrepreneurs worldwide. I believe it is a bonanza – a green field – of opportunity to sit down and think about the education that they have received, what they think is valuable, the parts of the world that they want to change.

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to synthesize for my audience a few things that come to my mind. It’s not actually a big of a bonanza for entrepreneurs as you’re saying because entrepreneurs have to solve specific problems. Where you’re actually right is that if institutions go in this direction, they do have the opportunity to do distance learning. Not every institution does distance learning today although more and more are doing it. That is potentially a business. Some do it from a more non-profit community service point of view and some >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sean Brown, SVP of Education, Sonic Foundry (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like there’s quite a bit of classification and slotting that goes on. Is that happening on your end or is that happening in someone else’s system like Blackboard?

Sean Brown: It happens on our end. Then that last mile is that the university will say, “It is wonderful that you have this beautiful portal that is secure and understands the identity of my students. But I would still like the chunk of the portal that’s related to the recordings of a particular class to appear embedded inside of the appropriate section of the LMS.” If you are a creator of technology for higher education of any kind, you have to work with the chosen LMS of the university. One day I’m at a school with Blackboard. Another day, I am dealing with another LMS. We have to be fungible and integrated into each one of those systems. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sean Brown, SVP of Education, Sonic Foundry (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That would have been my guess. They take advantage of the resources you give them.

Sean Brown: The next thing I was going to tell you though is that the new trend is for institutions to start to take advantage of the presence of these video systems and flip the classroom. Schools are crowded. We would have to build more buildings. Let us say that when we meet, you are expected to have seen my lecture offline. When you come to class, we’re going to start our discussion based on the assumption that on your own time, you managed to watch my lecture. This is a trend of time shifting and optimizing collaboration time that video capture is essential to. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sean Brown, SVP of Education, Sonic Foundry (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The names that you’re rattling off – are they more of state schools? I haven’t heard you mention Harvard, MIT, or Stanford.

Sean Brown: They are. Quickly speaking, schools that have a business school, medical school, and law school with 20,000 students or more tend to be the kind of schools that are adopting this first. It’s not your Ivy League exclusively. It can be your state schools. Your four-year research schools have the most pervasive adoption of these technologies of which I speak.

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