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.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jim Donohue, Chief Product Officer, Cengage Learning (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s shift the discussion to Business education. In particular, the area that is of most interest to our audience is Entrepreneurship education. There’s been a huge surge of interest in Entrepreneurship Education around the world. What are you seeing? What are you doing?

Jim Donohue: Good news, bad news. Entrepreneurship education at the undergraduate level is very hard to scale. As a result, in the last 10 years, lots of schools and it’s different, we’re not talking about an Ivy League school, we’re talking about a state school where they have a thousand students taking the Marketing class. It’s very hard to scale an Entrepreneurship program to a thousand students.

Ten years ago, their entire course was based on simulations. What would you do? How would you run this business? What would you do? Build the business in a class. They have gone away from it because they just could not scale it in any real way.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jim Donohue, Chief Product Officer, Cengage Learning (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: My observation, one of the trends in the industry today is education and this is not just higher education, it’s all levels of education, is shifting from a sage-on-stage model to a guide-on-the-side model, right? It sounds like your digital strategy is pretty much aligned with that shift, yes?

Jim Donohue: It is. For instance, we’re really going to flip classrooms. We’re really interested in that additional help that we can give the student and how we can use that student’s progress by developing algorithms that measure that progress as a way to inform students what they need to do to. Exactly, guide them on the side. That really is where education is going.

I think the days of a professor standing on the stage and rattling on is not enough. Students expect more because they are bombarded in their daily lives by a lot more help than they traditionally got. When I was in the university, I had no internet. I just had a book and a professor and I had professors who used to read from their books! That was really useful, as you can imagine! You know, I can read!

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jim Donohue, Chief Product Officer, Cengage Learning (Part 4)

Jim Donohue: Professors traditionally have known what students are doing. They are able to say to a student, “Oh, you flunked this test. You’ve got to study more.” But we haven’t done a very good job, as an industry, to really tell students where they stand.

So, we’re building a whole suite of analytical tools. Everyone’s all about big data but our goal is to provide outcome information to the student, to say to them, the average person who gets an A in this class knows these concepts by this point in the class. If you don’t know these concepts, this is probably where you’re going to end up. These are the six things that we suggest you study in order to master these concepts.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jim Donohue, Chief Product Officer, Cengage Learning (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I’d like to double-click down further on each of these categories. Since you’re on the roll with the student-led learning piece, explain to me how you go to market with that. Looks like your instructor-focused business is through reps but the student-focused business is a consumer business? Is that correct?

Jim Donohue: It’s sort of both. Let me explain. Instructors are still making these decisions but what they use to make their decisions is based on what made their lives easier, to be honest. Instructors generally care very deeply about their students but there was nothing to evaluate the effectiveness of one learning material over another. So, we still market directly to the professor but now we can go in and say what the Holy Grail is, what we’re all working on in this industry is quantifying learning.

When you use this approach, 22% of the time your students will perform better on tests. You’ll have a 5% or 10% better retention rate which is a big issue for colleges as students are dropping out because they feel overwhelmed. If you use this material or this approach, you can improve your learning rate, you can improve your retention rate, and you can improve your outcomes.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jim Donohue, Chief Product Officer, Cengage Learning (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Alright. So I understand exactly where your position is now. Obviously, you’re at a very interesting point of the history of your industry. As the Chief Product Officer, you’re looking at the industry. As you said, you’re looking at the digital strategy. So talk to me about what other digital trends that you are observing or analyzing to derive your product strategy.

Jim Donohue: I think it’s more about what our product strategy is versus digital trends. It’s a really interesting time in the industry because you have a dichotomy right now. You have a group of professors who are critically important to us who are not as savvy, technically or digitally, as their students. You have the average professors, in their late 40s and 50s, comfortable with the computer but probably were not raised as that digital native and haven’t thought about their whole life of having digital access.

So, they’re trying to make a transition and we spend a lot of time, as an industry, trying to service them and to help them make that transition. For instance, at Cengage, we have a very comprehensive service group. Every time a faculty chooses to use our product, we actually set up some technology for them, especially if they don’t know how to themselves. We can actually even create course outlines for them that really match the technology we have. That’s one part of the market.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jim Donohue, Chief Product Officer, Cengage Learning (Part 1)

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

Cengage is one of the three major publishers of educational texts and materials. In this interview, we explore a range of trends in higher education with Jim Donohue, their Chief Product Officer.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start, Jim, with an introduction for our audience to Cengage and yourself so that we know whom we are talking to and the context of the conversation.

Jim Donohue: Cengage is the world’s second largest educational text and materials company. We are primarily a book company and in our educational division for higher education, we’re still about 70% print based. The goal has been, obviously, to make a rapid change as the industries change.

I think higher education is an interesting animal in that it has been, in the last couple of years, pretty resistant to the kind of technology that other related industries have caught up with. As a result, it’s still very much focused on print and I think that’s going to continue for a few more years. I think, the challenge for this industry is to offer must-have products that will really encourage professors to make that move because their students are demanding it. I think it’s a really interesting dichotomy as I look at it through the Cengage lens.

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The Future of Education: 10 Trends To Watch

It is that time of the year when we tend to pause and reflect. What have we achieved this year? What are the highlights of culture, business, technology, and trends that we have observed around us?

For me, the most exciting and positive movement at present is in the domain of technology impacting education. And it is an impact that is coming from many different directions.

Let’s explore them in further detail.

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