Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that you catalog Pluralsight and TrainSignal and all of these course providers?

Karen Francis: Not everyone but if we don’t, it’s because we just haven’t contacted them yet. We’re really out there. We have a business development team seeking new course providers. You can also go to the site and say, “I have five courses. How do I get them on?”

Sramana Mitra: Now you get to pitch me why I should put out a course on your site.

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Thought leaders in Online Education: Gary Matkin, Dean of Continuing Education, UC Irvine (Part 3)

Sramana: You are making the claim that often people are looking for a specific piece of information and that they do not need to complete an entire course. It is not necessary to complete an entire course just to supplement a specific skill gap.

Gary Matkin: We all have learning projects every day. Those learning projects can be decisions to enter into a degree program that will take you three years to complete or it might be something that takes you 15 minutes to understand like how to prepare a pot roast. All of those learning projects are legitimate, even if they are shallow or momentary. If they have a positive impact on your life, then they are perfectly legitimate responses to human learning desires. That is why universal access is needed. To complete MOOCs with courses that have high completion rates is really missing the point. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 2)

Karen Francis: We’re seeing the emerging trend of students saying, “This is why I want this track and this is what I’ll take. I’m not going to take the rest of it.” They are able to customize what they want either from a broad perspective of choosing colleges and institutions or saying, “I’m going take a blended experience. I don’t want just online or just in the classroom. I want to be able to mash it all together.” There’s enormous activity and investment in education technology today. We’re seeing lots of experimentation. I don’t see a clear winner yet, which is exciting. More and more people are saying, “What is the result I want from my education?” Then, work backwards and say, “How do I then use the technologies available to gain that result?”

Sramana Mitra: How does CourseTalk fit in to this picture?

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Thought leaders in Online Education: Gary Matkin, Dean of Continuing Education, UC Irvine (Part 2)

Sramana: Will this consumption and sharing of open education resources occur via shared MOOCs?

Gary Matkin: Open education resources will expand dramatically beyond formal higher education. The big driver here is the need for more and more people to become better and better educated, often for very specific things in their lives. They need to be able to access education resources to meet their needs in a very convenient and inexpensive way. That is the imperative that is driving all of this.

MOOCs are a form of open education but they are a rather restricted form. In fact, they are not open at all. They are only open to individuals who want to learn for their own sake. Right now most of the MOOCs available are not downloadable and usable by other institutions. Open education, including the open education that UCI offers, is generally under a Creative Commons License, which is the least restrictive license of all. That means anybody can use the materials we put out in any way they want including, in some cases, commercial uses. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Karen Francis, CEO of Academix Direct (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Online Education continues to be a fast-changing field, and various people are working on various aspects of the industry to make a complicated puzzle come together. This conversation explores some of those pieces.

Sramana Mitra:  Let’s start with introducing our audience to you as well as Academix Direct and CourseTalk.

Karen Francis: My name is Karen Francis. I’m the CEO and Executive Chairman of Academix Direct. I’ve been in my position for just over four years and I come with a strong marketing and general management background. I was fortunate enough to be on the Board of Trustees at Dartmouth College where I got my undergraduate degree. I have a Harvard MBA. That gave me a unique perspective on education and on what’s behind the curtain of putting together an academic institution. I’ve always been very >>>

Thought leaders in Online Education: Gary Matkin, Dean of Continuing Education, UC Irvine (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Gary Matkin has been involved with open education from the beginning. Here, he discusses the current issues and predicts the demise of Moocs. Read on for a fascinating insight into the future of open education.

Sramana: Gary, let’s set some context for our readers. Could you describe your role at UC Irvine and what you are doing for online education?

Gary Matkin: UC Irvine has been providing coursework online for about 14 years. My role at UC Irvine is Dean of Continuing Education, which covers all aspects of continuing education such as distance learning and summer sessions. Those units have provided the bulk of the online and open learning opportunities at the campus.

In extension, we offer 800 online courses per year. That is half of our offering to the continuing education audience. That audience consists primarily of working adults who are coming back to us to get additional education, change careers, or update their careers. Sometimes they are also there just to have some fun learning. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Todd Hitchcock, COO of Pearson Embanet (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch gears a little bit. If you were to advise entrepreneurs who are interested in working in the domain of online education, where would you point them? Where do you see open opportunities to build businesses in?

Todd Hitchcock: There are a lot of inflection points. We know that there are a lot of pieces of the partnership that we have competency in, but there are certain pieces that we may never build a competency in if we don’t acquire a company. Therefore, we like to partner with that provider to bring them into the ecosystem. We’re very strong in our belief that we need to provide solutions but that doesn’t mean that we need to provide every single component. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Todd Hitchcock, COO of Pearson Embanet (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That’s only true if you’re looking at those local types of businesses. We work globally and we work on only digital entrepreneurships – IT, IT-enabled services types of businesses. That’s non-local and a lot of it is very scalable. We’re seeing a lot of interest from entrepreneurs all around the world – not just from the United States.

Todd Hitchcock: I absolutely agree. Traditionally, we work with colleges and universities to put those programs in place driven by their region. I think you’re hitting on a macro trend. There is tremendous opportunity for international entrepreneurship programs. To that end, it hasn’t been one that has been brought to us by a specific partner yet. I think you’re really catching on something that has tremendous possibility.

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