Zoe Mackay | IBL News

Cengage Unlimited, launched last September, has reached 1.5 million subscribers to date. George Moore, CTO at Cengage [in the picture], spoke to this success on “The Changing EdTech Business Model” panel at the IMS Global Learning Consortium. The panel was moderated by Ray Henderson, and Moore was joined by Curtiss Barnes, Melissa Loble, and Jason Palmer.

“Software is eating the world, “ said Palmer, a General Partner at New Markets Venture Partners. “All jobs are tech jobs. All companies, no matter what those companies are, are in fact tech companies. Everything has been digitized.”

Barnes, a Managing Director at Pearsons, noted that a clearly evident trend in edtech is that technology “is not transformative. It just is.” Particularly for what he calls the current generation of learners, Gen Z, technology “is part of their daily life.”

Moore agreed, following Barne’s train of thought, saying “technology is. It’s not another modality.” Nine months after it’s launch, Cengage Unlimited has 1.5 million subscribers and has saved $60M for students to date. Moore estimates this number will surpass $100M by September.

Created with the Netflix subscription service as a model, Moore says that “from an affordability perspective, we feel it’s very successful. From an adoption standpoint, students love it…this is how they buy music [and] videos.” The commercial model was created for students, “to help them with their 100 year learning career.”

Loble, a SVP at Instructure, has been shifting their emphasis on the full journey, “from the first day of school to the last day of work.” This learning continuum, as she refers to it, necessitates being aware “of where there are skills and where there are gaps” so lifelong learning flows smoothly.

To watch the full panel discussion, please see the video below.

 

 

The Promises and Challenges of Emerging Markets in Higher Education: Emeritus CEO Ashwin Damera in Conversation

 

Henry Kronk | IBL News

Numerous U.S.-based online program managers (OPM) have made the news lately for better or for worse. But what about similar companies operating in different countries?

Emeritus currently employs over 400 people and partners with many top U.S. institutions, but has offices in India, Dubai, Singapore, and Mexico. And they don’t exactly consider themselves an OPM.

IBL News recently contacted CEO and Co-Founder Ashwin Damera to learn more about the value proposition involved in such a decentralized business model.

Henry Kronk: How did you come to found Emeritus in the first place?

Ashwin Damera: I grew up in India. I worked at Citigroup for five years. I then went to do my MBA at Harvard Business School. After that I came back to start an online travel company. It was funded by Sequoia. We started in 2005, I ran it for four years. Eventually, we were acquired by Travelocity. I had a year where I spent some time for Travelocity Asia Pacific, just advising them about regional strategy in the online travel space.

At that point in time, I met my co-founder Chaitanya Kalipatnapu who had gone to INSEAD and was working there at the time. When I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, I was looking at two sectors: education and healthcare. Both have the ability to touch peoples’ lives.

So we kind of joined hands and started the parent company of Emeritus, which is called Eruditus, in 2010. Chaitanya [Kalipatnapu] went to INSEAD, I went to Harvard. Those are obviously great places to go and it actually changed our careers and made us very successful. It had a catalyzing effect. So we wanted to see how we could make these universities more accessible to a larger number of people across the world.

That was our mission statement then; it’s our mission statement today.

We started in 2010, INSEAD was our first partner, and we started offering programs in the region. We started in India and then moved to Dubai and Asia Pacific. The idea was to get students to sign up for these classroom programs initially, delivered partly on campus, partly in region, and partly online.

In 2015, we created Emeritus to say, listen, not everyone can come to a classroom program, for many reasons, right? (Travel, price, days away from work.) So why not leverage online? MOOCs had already launched, schools were warming up to the idea of online delivery. But we took a different approach. We wanted high-touch online because, at the end of the day, the learning outcomes matter.

What we loved about our educational background was the fact that you had some contact with the faculty, you had peer-to-peer learning, you had projects and assignments and you got feedback. So we tried to incorporate all of that into what is now known as SPOC (small private online courses), which we offer through Emeritus.

We went to our partners at that time, MIT, Columbia, and Dartmouth. They became the first three schools. Today that has expanded. We work with Wharton School of Business, Kellogg School of Management, Berkeley, London Business School, Cambridge [and more]—all elite schools. We offer classes both in person and online. Last year, we taught about 30,000 students through these university courses.

We continue to be very mission-focused. Part of this global access has resulted in us opening an office in Mexico City. We are starting to offer courses in Spanish and Portuguese because we understand that language is also part of access. Access means many things to many people. It usually means price point. Online is helpful because there’s no travel, but the language is also valuable.

In general, we are a platform. I’m not sure we would actually qualify as a traditional OPM. I’m not even sure if we would want to be called an OPM. The reason for that is, while we provide a lot of the OPM-type services, I think we are far more flexible and unbundled than a typical OPM. For example, we work on classroom programs through Eruditus. Those could be 2-day programs delivered in, say, Singapore, Dubai, Mexico City, or India. Or they could be a six-month journey delivered both in a classroom and online. Or they can be purely online. We are very flexible with the type of program we can work.

OPM is an online program management—they don’t do any classroom stuff. We do. That’s one reason that jacket doesn’t fit.

More importantly, each school has its own goals and objectives. Somebody might say, ‘Listen, what I want you guys to do is to boost enrollment online in emerging markets. I don’t need your help in the U.S.’

Somebody else might say, ‘Hey, we’ve created this course, we want you to help us deliver it.’ And then of course, the majority of our partners want us to do everything for them. For the same partner school, for some courses, we might do everything, and for some other courses, just parts of it. We’re very flexible.

As a consequence of that, our terms with our clients are also flexible. No clawbacks, no 15-year contracts, no exclusivities and all of that. If we follow our mission—if more people at more universities have access—we are excited.

 

Henry Kronk:  Many American colleges and universities are currently worried about their existence. Enrollments have been dropping and are expected to continue to fall. Many believe that emerging markets, where data infrastructures are starting to be able to support online course might a factor that helps them stay afloat and might even be a silver bullet. Do many institutions turn to Emeritus with this strategy?

Ashwin Damera: Yes, emerging markets are a large opportunity. However, it’s a different opportunity. It’s not that you can take what works in the U.S., cut, copy, and paste it into emerging markets.

What do I mean by that? The first thing is the brands that resonate in the U.S. may resonate very differently in different parts of the world. It’s absolutely true that there are some brands, some top schools, many of which we work with, that have reach everywhere in the world. The second tier, third-tier brands, for example, a college that may be very popular in certain parts of the U.S. may not resonate in India or Latin America or China.

The opposite is also true. A college that is ranked, let’s say, outside of the top 100, can still be a very strong brand in other markets. So you have to think about that carefully.

Price points are also different because the willingness to pay is different. You have to be really clear which price points you want to target.

The third thing is that tuition for most students (in the U.S.) is funded by student loans, which are funded by the U.S. government. In many emerging markets, that ecosystem is still nascent. A lot of people might take loans themselves, but the interest rates are much higher. It’s not 3% or 4%, it’s more like 12% or 15% in some places.

The implication of that plays out in ROI. If I do this degree program through the school either online or in the classroom, what do I get at the end of that? What does that mean in terms of my ability to pay back what I’ve borrowed? You have to couple these things with career outcomes. Those questions are asked a lot more.

So large markets—if you just look at enrollment numbers in a place like India, there are 30 million students in higher education, but the gross enrollment ratio is still only about 27%. There’s a huge room to grow. In China, it’s about 35%. So there’s lots of room to grow, and these economies are still growing. The population is still growing.

Are institutions reaching out to us [to target these markets]? Yes. Both with certificate courses and online degrees, we have always had emerging markets as our focus. We have offices in Mumbai, in Dubai, in Singapore, in Mexico City. Emerging markets are part of our DNA. Schools realize that.

Especially when you’re targeting emerging markets, you probably want a partner, because there are many unknowns. Today about 70% of our enrollments are non-U.S. That is very different from other players in the U.S. who are quartered locally.

 

Henry Kronk:  Establishing a business in not two, but many different countries—I can’t begin to imagine all of the challenges that have posted. What’s the return on investment with creating such a decentralized business?

Ashwin Damera: Think of our customers—the universities. Whether they’re sitting on the East coast, the West coast, in Europe (maybe in Toronto). If you’re looking at their on-campus programs, especially at the Master’s level. It’s very common for more than 50%, even 70%, to be international students. The U.S. and Europe are great brands. They have great institutions and many students from around the world want to come and study. There’s a huge demand for these education experiences globally. That’s a given.

The reason why we do what we do is because our university partners want to have students from across the world. That’s part of what they do.

In some ways in the U.S. and Europe, there is plateauing demand. Populations are aging. It’s always good to think about the next 10-20 years as a university. You need to be in these high-growth markets, that is clear.

The complexity, for example, of offering a course for students in China, Indonesia, India, Peru, Chile, South Africa, Nigeria—it’s very difficult. As a university, do you want to go and tie up with 10 different providers in each different market? Or would you rather work with one who can help you access all of these different markets and take care of the operational complexities?

That’s the value in our business model. It’s very difficult to do what we’re doing. But it’s much easier to come to a client and say, ‘We will market your course in North America and Europe.’ These are fairly politically advanced economies. The students are mature. The buying process is fairly evolved. Versus saying I’m going to take this course and offer it in 35 or 40 other countries and take care of all the other things involved in that. You have to speak to students, counsel them, manage the taxation issues, the regulations, a whole bunch of stuff. But that’s the value to the university and it’s also our mission: to make high-quality education accessible. If we weren’t doing what we’re doing, we wouldn’t be living up to our mission.

 

Henry Kronk:  Many people (especially those with vested interests) still discount credentials as all but useless and land far in favor of diplomas. How would you weigh in on the worth of credentialing internationally?

Ashwin Damera: I tend to think three things matter: what is the credential, who is giving it, and what is the acceptability of it.

In general, a degree is still far more valuable than whatever you call the certificate. You can call it a Nanodegree, you can call it a MicroMasters, you can call it a verified certificate, or you can just call it a certificate. That pales in comparison to the value of a degree.

I’m talking about mostly emerging markets here. It’s very social-cultural. You can look at the ‘70s and ‘80s when a lot of people went to great local institutions or went to the U.S., got a degree, did very well in life. The degree is kind of an indicator of success.

But even in the degree space, people understand that an MBA from XYZ school is very different from an MBA from a top school. Like I said earlier, it all depends on career outcomes. The starting salaries of graduates from a school probably matter a lot more than just saying, ‘I have an MBA.’

The third thing that also matters is, people are starting to realize that you can get an MBA in Mexico or parts of Latin America for anywhere between $1,000 and $8,000 to $10,000 depending on the institution. What does the $1,000 MBA give you? What is the rigor of the assessments? What are the criteria? People are able to ask the question even in credential programs, what’s the value and how are they related to each other.

Of course, if you charge $150,000 for an online MBA, will you get a lot of students from emerging markets? Probably not. But if you charge a reasonable fee, provide the rigor and the career outcomes, there’s a market for it.

I would say there’s an exception to what I’m saying—there may be a few. One is the concept of bootcamps where they’re not providing a credential, but they’re providing very strong career services. They address the students needs for ROI and career advancement, though they’re not providing a credential at the end. These are definitely more popular in the U.S. and continue to make headlines. But in emerging markets, they’re still nascent. My intuition is, if done well, there’s a huge market for that product.

 

Henry Kronk:  When MOOCs received all their hype 6 or 7 years ago, many believed they would democratize education and improve equity. It then turned out that most people who really benefited from them were actually mid-career professionals in Europe and North America. Is there a typical demographic that Emeritus serves?

Ashwin Damera: Yes. In our typical online courses, the average work experience is about 10-12 years. These are mid-career working professionals. They may not have a graduate or undergraduate degree in some cases. But they have significant work experience. They’re not looking at this as getting their first job; they’re adding a skill that will help them advance in their current job or in their current company.

 

Coursera’s international growth will now take the organization into Canada.

The leading MOOC provider announced this week the opening of the first engineering office outside of the United States, in Toronto.

The new office will be initially staffed with nine engineers [in the picture], whose mission according to Coursera will be “to accelerate innovation for the company’s enterprise and partner products”.

“As a global platform with more than 80% of our learners coming from outside of the U.S., it is also important for us to diversify our talent sourcing and build a presence in new tech hubs to enrich our own product thinking and engineering best practices.”

Within the expansion plan, Coursera also announced the opening of its New York City office to support B2B activities (Coursera for Business).

With 40 million learners, 1,800 business, and 190 university and industry partners, Coursera –which competes with Udacity and edX– continues to prepare itself for an IPO.

EdX-style education will now reach Afghanistanis.

Six universities have joined efforts to scale higher education and deliver quality courses for learners throughout Afghanistan.

These institutions, managed by the Central e-Learning committee of the Ministry of Higher Education, have created AfghanX, an initiative which has just joined the edX Consortium.

The Ministry of Education’s goal is to incorporate digital technologies into teaching, learning and research and ultimately increase the employability of Afghan men and women in the workplace.

The first offering from AfghanX is Contemporary Manuscript Illumination of Herat, a 6-week course on edX.org, designed to teach learners various ways to create an illuminated manuscript. This practice is considered a national art in Afghanistan and is used primarily for religious, scholarly and historical manuscripts.

This class is currently open for enrollment and starts on May 29.

As an Alternative to the Tech Transfer Approach, Carnegie Mellon Will Open-Source Dozens of Internally Developed EdTech Tools

 

Henry Kronk | IBL News

In March, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) announced an unprecedented initiative. Over the course of the year, they plan to release dozens of digital learning tools they have developed over the past decade on an open-source license. These include the learning analytics platform LearnSphere and their pioneering adaptive learning project the Open Learning Initiative (OLI). In all, CMU estimates $100 million in grants and university funding went into these efforts. The effort was spearheaded by the Simon Initiative, which continues the legacy of Nobel Laureate, Turing Award recipient, and CMU professor Herbert Simon.

Simon made numerous contributions in various fields throughout his lifetime. But in education, he is remembered for the concept of learning engineering. As Simon wrote on the subject, “Most of us were trained as teachers by serving as TA’s in a couple of classes when we were graduate students; and our students, with rare exceptions, have never received any systematic and consistent instruction in how to learn. Yet that is the skill they have been exercising every working day of their lives for more years than they would like to remember. So students don’t study the skills of learning, and university teachers don’t study the skills of teaching.”

By promoting learning engineering, Simon hoped to both study the process of teaching and learning as academics do their own fields and disciplines, and then apply what they’ve learned to improve their own classrooms.

Norman Bier is the director of both the Simon Initiative and the OLI [Website]. He has a unique perspective on university-created edtech products. Besides being on campus while other CMU edtech efforts such as Acrobatiq were developed and brought to market, he used to work for iCarnegie. While not strictly a software company, iCarnegie sought to train software developers much like coding bootcamps do today.

IBL News reached Bier to hear more about CMU’s massive open-source effort.

Henry Kronk: Naturally, the main thing I’d like to know is why do this open-source initiative in the first place?

Norman Bier: Carnegie Mellon doesn’t have a college of education. But at the same time, we’ve got a really rich tradition of interesting work at the place where psychology, cognitive science, human-computer interaction, and computer science intersect. We’ve got a rich tradition of building sort of weird cross-discipline teams that you don’t always see in other institutions. Particularly from Herb Simon’s influence, we’ve got this deep tradition of thinking seriously about how to improve learning.

What we’ve had from these collaborations are some really exciting and impactful individual projects that range from things like our work in cognitive tutors (in the algebra space, we’ve seen use of the tutors can help K-12 students get an additional year’s worth of training compared to their traditional peers) There’s also the OLI. The OLI is probably best known for its work in statistics where we saw roughly twice the learning outcomes in half the time. But there are a whole host of other things as well from virtual chemistry labs to new tutoring approaches in second language acquisition to educational data mining—lots and lots of work in this space that we’re really proud of.

Henry Kronk: How is CMU education research applied?

Norman Bier: We don’t always see this work being used here on campus for CMU students’ benefit. Despite some of the impressive numbers I’ve just cited, we don’t always see this work getting out into the world in a way that has a real impact in terms of improving learning. Although I do think we collaborate as well as anyone, even here, we often see that projects don’t always integrate well. Sometimes we see replication of effort. So the Simon Initiative was launched to better interconnect and accelerate the work that is happening in this space to position it in a way so that we can really use these tools but also these techniques and approaches we have been developing to transform the learning experience for Carnegie Mellon students, to also get it out into the world in ways that have a broader impact and improve learning outcomes more globally.

In a lot of ways, we follow Herb Simon’s challenge to his colleagues at the end of his career—that if we want to improve learning, we need to stop thinking about it as teaching and start creating it as a community-based research activity … In some ways, our charge is if we don’t have a college of education, we should treat the entire university as a college of education and make the classroom a learning laboratory.

With this diversity of approaches and tools, we need to think about what is common across the work. This is where we really emphasize the ‘learning engineering approach.’

Over the years, we’ve been thinking about how to position these tools and approaches in a way that will have the greatest amount of impact. How do we get more people to engage with them?

 

Henry Kronk: Why take this approach compared to a more traditional, for-profit go-to-market strategy?

Norman Bier: Particularly in the educational technology space, there are some real challenges in the traditional tech transfer approach. I think that, broadly speaking, the edtech market is not one that broadly emphasizes or rewards effectiveness. Too often, we see these really effective approaches get pushed out into the market and then they end up needing to pivot to focus on the things that are going to help them sell, rather than the things that made the product effective in the first place.

Most of this work still needs to be embedded in its research. We’re not at a point where any of this is mature and the research is finished. But rather, when we think about this as part of an engineering effort, we see this real need to staying close to this ongoing research, recognizing where we have new questions that we’re asking, and if we start to really push on this notion that every new learning experience that we’re designing represents a hypothesis, staying close to the toolset, staying close to the approach becomes really important.

As we’ve investigated new ways towards getting this learning engineering approach broadly used, more broadly accepted, it became increasingly clear that we didn’t have a perfect existing model to tie into.

The tech transfer approach wasn’t going to work. We started saying, ‘Maybe we’ll think about CMU just building this stuff for the world. We can build the world’s best statistics course, everyone can use that.’

 

Henry Kronk: So then, what specifically is attractive about the open-sourcing model?

Norman Bier: Our ongoing research keeps showing us that 1) there is no perfect statistics course for the world and 2) cultural context is so important for learning that what we really need to do (if we think these tools and approaches are important) is position them in ways such that folks can deploy them in their own context with their own learners’ needs in mind. And if we were going to learn from that approach, we need to position this work in a way that the results coming back from those efforts can come back in a way that we and the rest of the community can see them.

This really started pushing us to more of a community-based approach and that in turn led us to this notion that we need to be more open about our work.

By opening up these tools and opening up the software, I’m not sure that I’m trying to encourage every institution out there to spin up their own instance of the DataShop platform. That’s 1) not very efficient and 2) for a lot of the folks we’re trying to see impacted, they don’t have the resources or expertise to do this. But in order to encourage this use of some of the centralized tools and centralized approaches, that code base was sort of table stakes. It was a way of saying, ‘Look, you can count on the fact that this stuff won’t disappear because it’s out here for you.’

 

Henry Kronk: A lot of existing coverage of OLI’s open-source initiative is saying something like, ‘Carnegie Mellon is giving these digital tools away.’ Now, this is a purposefully imperfect metaphor, but let’s say I developed a tool to fix my bike. I could hand that tool to somebody else so that they could fix their bike. But that’s not exactly what’s going on here, is it?

Norman Bier: No, I think it’s different in two ways. What we are providing is a garage where you can come, bring your bike, and, to push the metaphor, you need to bring your own data or your own grease or your own brake pads. But what we have is a community-supported bike garage where you can go in and take advantage of some of the tools there.

But if you have the resources, we’re also handing you the tools to go and open your own bike garage. If engaging with this centrally-supported garage isn’t going to work for you, then you have the opportunity to go home and build your own. Take the case of LearnSphere (an iteration of an earlier version of DataShop, which was intended as that one central educational data mining and warehousing infrastructure for the community. A lot of folks had been consistent users over the years, but we were consistently hearing that, though they were comfortable with the notion of sharing their data, and though they were comfortable with the notion of sharing techniques, they weren’t necessarily comfortable with taking their data and sticking it on CMU servers.

So one piece of the LearnSphere project has been to create a more distributed infrastructure so that, if the University of Memphis stands up their own LearnSphere data, they’re now completely in control of their own data. They’re able to expose that so that if others need to use that data for secondary analysis, they can still get access. They participate in some of the larger sharing of analytic methods and some of the visualizations.

 

Henry Kronk: And then, there’s also the data-sharing aspect.

Norman Bier: Yes. This is starting to take the bike shop metaphor in weird places, but if you want to go off and stand up your own workspace, it can still connect with and share some of the resources with the original bike shop or any other one in a way that should be mutually beneficial to everyone. That’s a really important piece in this. When we talk about the learning engineering approach, we also talk about, in the aggregate, that data feeding fresh discoveries in the learning sciences. A model where everyone goes off, stands up their own DataShop, stands up their own OLI, and only uses that information internally really limits our ability to learn from what is happening, to identify what is working, and to see that pushed out to a larger group of students.

Some piece of this is saying, ‘You don’t need to become dependent on our bike shop and worry that we’re going to close the doors or start charging for it. You could go build your own if you need it. But there is a benefit with engaging and contributing to this work as part of a larger community.’

 

Henry Kronk: Based on your time spent with other edtech tools and services that have gone the for-profit proprietary route, are you moving forward with this open-source initiative with any specific lessons learned?

Norman Bier: I think when I combine my experience at iCarnegie with some more recent work here at OLI, it’s become increasingly important to find ways to let individuals revise and re-contextualize the learning materials that are getting pushed out. If we are serious about leveraging learning data to improve that learning experience, and we’re serious about faculty needing to be able to make these changes, then we really need to focus on putting tools in their hands that exposes them to the data, makes that information actionable, and gives them that chance to engage in their own closed-loop cycle of review, analysis, design, development, and deployment.

That was a piece that we didn’t have at all at iCarnegie. Again, this was prior to the existence of the concept of open education. Maybe that’s not fair. I have some colleagues at the Open University who would hunt me down and beat me up for saying that. This is prior to the Creative Commons license existing before we were talking about OER. We never got faculty to a place where we were asking, ‘How can we equip faculty to make changes to this?’ let alone, ‘How can we more deeply involve them in this improvement process?’

That’s been a lesson that stretched into OLI. We have a process that has historically produced some really remarkable and effective courseware. But at the same time, to get faculty to engage with the larger course development team … for a lot of faculty, this notion that I don’t need to build a full course, I’ve got this one specific learning challenge I need to address, and I’ve got some ideas about what can be effective—it seemed pretty important to include that population in this work. We’ve been spending a lot of attention and making some deep investments in the kind of authoring and improvement tools that really should allow anyone to come in and make some changes to an existing course or test out their hypothesis but also making sure that there’s going to be data coming back.