Thought Leaders in Online Education: Mike Pellerin, Director, Enterasys University (Extreme Networks) (Part 6)

Mike Pellerin: Correct. Now I have a question for you. I have been approached for a couple of K-12 courses as well, for the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades. A number of school districts have expressed interest in recommending some of our material to their students. Have you seen any trends on that?

Sramana Mitra: Not in the high schools. Not networking in the high school. If you’re getting interest, I would definitely explore on what’s going on. But I think on this level, it makes perfect sense to me.

Mike Pellerin: No, I agree.
>>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Mike Pellerin, Director, Enterasys University (Extreme Networks) (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What you are doing is that you are selling equipment to the universities. And you have a lot of curriculum material, which you have packaged up into MOOC and then, you are letting students use it. In case, they express some interest in using those digital curriculum materials, colleges and universities might want to incorporate it into their courses. This is what’s going on here.

Mike Pellerin: Yes. However, some of the schools that have recommended our MOOC material to the students are not existing customers. It was truly done on the academic side only. We have no relationship on the business side.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Mike Pellerin, Director, Enterasys University (Extreme Networks) (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So what you are talking about is the student curriculum development including knowledge, talking about localization. Is it a strategy of Extreme Networks? It sounded like you have a lot of budgets to work with. Why is Extreme Network trying to nail the common educational publisher?

>>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Mike Pellerin, Director, Enterasys University (Extreme Networks) (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Are you developing a curriculum that you’re offering for free to various schools and universities?

Mike Pellerin: Currently, we offer three courses. These include courses on data networking fundamentals, wireless LAN fundamentals, and data center basics. We will soon be releasing a course on security concepts. Each course length ranges from six to thirteen modules. Each module is no more than 28-35 minutes because the attention span for something like this can be shared or restricted. I cannot watch a 1-hour video and connect without doing something else. I’m sure students cannot either.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Mike Pellerin, Director, Enterasys University (Extreme Networks) (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Okay, let’s drill down on the topic and see some details. First and foremost, which universities are working with you on this model?

Mike Pellerin: Sure. We have begun discussions with the Seton Hill University. They’re based out of Pennsylvania. We have a fantastic relationship with Phil Komarny, the CIO as well.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have any universities that are already working with you on this or are these the schools you’re planning to do this with?

>>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Mike Pellerin, Director, Enterasys University (Extreme Networks) (Part 1)

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

Enterasys is experimenting with a concept of corporate massive open online courses (MOOCs). Interesting concept. Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Let us start by setting some context. Tell our audience about yourself and Enterasys. Then, we’ll take it from there.

Mike Pellerin: Enterasys has recently been acquired by Extreme Networks in November. Enterasys Networks evolved from a manufacturing cable company named Cabletron that was founded in the early 1990’s. They invented some nice patents like blinking out with the lights on with the computer equipment and then evolved into the computer network game space. Fast forward about ten to fifteen years, when I joined the organization. My background is in the computer science field and I started out in the quality assurance engineering. After learning the bits and bytes of all the different technologies, I transitioned into running the education team about 10 years ago.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jim Donohue, Chief Product Officer, Cengage Learning (Part 8)

Sramana Mitra: How do you see films come into this picture? For example, one of the hit films of last year was Lincoln, right? It was a really well done American History film. How do you see something like that impacting the teaching of History, for instance?

Jim Donohue: It’s not just films. That sort of media-rich environment is what students expect because they have been raised on a media-rich environment. One of the deals we have is to have the entire UPI collection digitized. If you want to look at something that happened in World War II, you don’t have to read about it. You can actually see a treaty being signed. You are going to actually be there at the battle. We have digitized that content and it can all be incorporated.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jim Donohue, Chief Product Officer, Cengage Learning (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I was going to conclude the interview with a question about the approach of the professors. You started off by saying that it’s a non-digital native class that is teaching the courses and they are somewhat resistant to change. They are not as familiar with technology as their students are and so on and so forth.

The shift from being the lecturer to the guide-on-the-side using digital material is a major change in their modus operandi, right? It’s a complete mental model change. So my question to you, in terms of trends, since you see so many in your business, you see so many professors grappling with this change, how are they doing it? How are they dealing with it?

Jim Donohue: I split it into thirds. 30% of them are having no trouble whatsoever. They are completely adapting. They are excited, they want more, and they demand more from us. 30% of them are a little bit nervous and a lot of them are feeling pressure from the institution, from the administration above, who pressurizes them but maybe doesn’t give them the kind of support they need or perhaps isn’t as practical as how you’re going to scale it but they’re really, really keen.

>>>