Thought Leaders in Online Education: Todd Hitchcock, COO of Pearson Embanet (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In what kinds of disciplines are you seeing the maximum online adoption? Is it engineering, nursing, or business?

Todd Hitchcock: Traditionally, there has been a lot of growth in business and engineering. We see a tremendous amount of growth in healthcare professions. We see growth in degree programs that are associated directly with professions rather than traditional academic degrees – that may lead more to someone to move to pursue their PhD or more of an academic path. I see less growth in those currently than we do in degrees that are more aligned with what we consider professional degrees.

Sramana Mitra: I think one of the big drivers of online education especially for universities is that people are doing them in tandem with a job. Often, they’re enhancing their skills and trying to improve their career. You have to be professionally oriented.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Todd Hitchcock, COO of Pearson Embanet (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In these cases, are the universities providing the content and you’re providing the delivery framework? Are you also providing content?

Todd Hitchcock: I’ll walk you through the component. After we’ve done the market assessment, we engage with the university and talk about all of the services that need to be in place in order for them to power a very high quality online program. One of the components we start with is marketing the program. It’s not a matter of putting billboards out. It’s a matter of getting to understand who the partner is, what their value proposition is, what their differentiators are so our team can fully understand what it means to be a student at any one of our partner institutions. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Todd Hitchcock, COO of Pearson Embanet (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Any particular discipline or is it across the board?

Todd Hitchcock: It’s funny you should ask that one. How we determine whether or not to partner with an institution is not like a traditional sale where we go and sell our products to someone. We’re actually very strategic in how we engage with our partners. The process usually starts when a school comes to us or we go to a school that wants to put a certain degree program online. Before we engage in deep discussions with them, we do a market assessment. Your question is important because we look at a degree program and we have a number of criteria to determine whether or not that’s a good degree program to put online. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Todd Hitchcock, COO of Pearson Embanet (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Where does Embanet fit into this picture?

Todd Hitchcock: I should build on one other thing before I jump in to answer that question.  Our goal as a company – it’s emblematic of Pearson Embanet – is to ensure that every single product and service that we create is founded on efficacy. Our goal by 2018 is to ensure that every single product and service has measurable outcomes so that we can measure those outcomes and ensure that we’re increasing student performance.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Todd Hitchcock, COO of Pearson Embanet (Part 1)

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The Higher Education industry is going through massive adoption of online education. This conversation highlights the trends, as well as areas where Pearson is looking for partners.

Sramana Mitra: Todd, let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the Pearson Embanet unit so that we have some context set for the conversation.

Todd Hitchcock: Thank you very much for taking the time to meet with us today. I’m Todd Hitchcock and I currently manage our managed-program business at Pearson Embanet. I’ve been in education since 1990. I’ve been an educator myself and have run online programs. I came to Pearson just over six years ago to essentially build out our online learning strategy. Prior to managing our Pearson Embanet business, I was responsible for our US Higher Education online learning strategy and our content and courseware.  >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Engineering schools wanting to teach entrepreneurship is a different trend. What’s driving that trend is that engineering students and engineering graduates are the best equipped to start companies – especially when it comes to the whole IT kind of entrepreneurship which is the most prevalent form of entrepreneurship all over the world right now. These are people who can actually build stuff. It’s a lot easier to bootstrap the business and get something off the ground and launched if you can build something yourself as opposed to having to hire people to do it, which requires capital.

Sher Downing: The other part of it is that digital business is now striding across so many different things. For people to try to determine what they’re going to be and what they’re going to do when they get out of engineering school, it’s very difficult because they have the opportunity to really touch a variety of areas in any kind of business. I think what we’re seeing is students who want >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You said you have students taking your program internationally. Can you talk a bit more about where and what are the trends on that front?

Sher Downing: We have two types of international students. One is those who are obviously living overseas. We also have students who travel quite a bit extensively for their work. For people who live and are based somewhere else, once we get connected with them or work out any issues in terms of where they’re located, they’re pretty much set to go throughout their program.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sher Downing, Executive Director of Online Academic Services at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What about examining and testing? Especially, where you’re running full-fledged online programs, how do you handle testing?

Sher Downing: We have actually been trying out a number of products in the last year and have purposely focused on avoiding issues of plagiarism and any type of cheating. We pride ourselves, on carrying the Carey name, on ethics. We teach ethics to all of our students, obviously. We work with companies that provide software that does make it very difficult, if not almost impossible, to cheat on an exam. We do look at what we have to use to ensure all of our student body is doing the right thing and that everyone is earning their grade and place based on their knowledge and effort.

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