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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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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