Thought Leaders in Online Education: O’Reilly Media Chief Content Officer Karen Hebert-Maccaro (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The way you’re set up in terms of your platform, is it an all-you-can-eat subscription model such that this performance-based learning is something people can access as they go?

Karen Hebert-Maccaro: We are a subscription-based SaaS model. You or your organization subscribes and you have access to the entire platform 24/7 on your mobile devices or your desktop. Since we have this multi-modality with everything from reading full books to small videos and conferences, that’s all available to anybody who’s a subscriber.

Sramana Mitra: I’m sure you watch the space quite closely. I’m going to ask you for some commentary on what other people are doing and how do you analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Let’s start with Pluralsight.

Karen Hebert-Maccaro: I think Pluralsight is really doubling down on their message around technology and on providing quality content mostly in video format around technology skills. I certainly think that meets a need inside the market. O’Reilly has a complementary history with that strategy since we started with technical skills. What we have done though is shift to a true multi-modality platform that can serve the entire enterprise.

We’re allowing a broad and expert understanding of technology as well as less technical topical areas like leadership and change management. We’re marrying the two. It’s some complementary to us in the way that Pluralsight is now marketing and going to market. We decided to make a bit of a differentiation by going full enterprise.

Sramana Mitra: I think very highly of Pluralsight as a company. What about what LinkedIn has done with their Lynda acquisition?

Karen Hebert-Maccaro: That’s a fascinating space. The opportunity that I see there is that they’ve got their Lynda content and they’ve got their LinkedIn social network. The opportunity I see is to really marry social learning into everything that they do on their platform. That’s super exciting. There are certain things that are going on right now in the space that I think will enable that.

For example, there’s an increased likelihood that individuals inside corporations, in particular, are going to be using a single platform for internal communication, performance management, and upskilling and reskilling. If that comes into play in the talent management space, a provider such as Lynda and LinkedIn could optimize their social learning component and be a big part of creating the community and engagement of a learner.

Sramana Mitra: LinkedIn has an influencer program which I’m part of since about a couple of years ago. Soon after they made me one of their top influencers, they invited me to do a course for them that was on Lynda and LinkedIn Learning. This course was on bootstrapping. It was about a one-hour course.

It’s a very good production value. It’s an excellent course. That course has over 80,000 views. We haven’t done anything. It’s purely based on social distribution. That course has 80,000 views and we constantly get people coming to us who have studied that course and want to study further.

Karen Hebert-Maccaro: The power of the social network is huge.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: O’Reilly Media Chief Content Officer Karen Hebert-Maccaro
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