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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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sean Brown, SVP of Education, Sonic Foundry (Part 2)

Sean Brown: But they didn’t expect them to go chop down the trees to make the paper. There was an industry and process in which they could participate in ways that were natural to their teaching and natural to their research. I’m saying that from the Internet explosion, there was a period of time where it was just your individual responsibility to get yourself online. The demand of students in this YouTube generation – to this on-demand generation – to be able to see things in a video format asynchronously is such that the institutions are starting to step up and say that the ability to turn your teaching performance into a digital, distributable, durable, and portable document is a shared responsibility and so we’re going to wire the room for video and audio.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sean Brown, SVP of Education, Sonic Foundry (Part 1)

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Video of the classroom is a trend. How is it playing out?

Sramana Mitra: Sean, let’s start with a bit of context. Tell us a bit about yourself as well as Sonic Foundry.

Sean Brown: I’m the Senior Vice President of Sonic Foundry. I’ve worked for Apple, IBM, and Oracle over the last 20 years. I came to Sonic Foundry about 13 years ago to help roll out our flagship product called Mediasite, which is a system which when introduced, started a new trend in converting your average classroom into an online video studio. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ray Martinez, Chancellor of WGU Texas (Part 6)

Ray Martinez: The trend that we certainly want to see in higher education is the growth of options that will allow particularly non-traditional students in that category between 25 and 64 who are looking to go back to college and complete a degree to advance their careers further. That is a trend that we’ve probably not seen prominently enough but it’s one that I’d certainly want to see more prominently.

We have traditional universities and online universities that are emulating competency-based education which we’ve been doing for 16 years now. That’s a trend that we’ll begin to see more prominently because the vast majority of our students now in post-secondary degree programs is your non-traditional students. It is not your 18 to 22 year old. It is, increasingly, your adult learner that falls into that age category.

Sramana Mitra: This brings us to the question of price of higher education. How do you price? What does it cost to be a student in your program? How do you feel about the whole rising cost of higher education?

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Ray Martinez, Chancellor of WGU Texas (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You have two kinds of mentors – student and course mentors. Then, the curriculum material is coming from third party?

Ray Martinez: Typically, that is the case for most of our degree programs.

Sramana Mitra: What about completion rates? When we talk about MOOCs – self-managed online learning – there’s a distinct problem with people abandoning the course after a while. >>>