Thought Leaders in Online Education: O’Reilly Media Chief Content Officer Karen Hebert-Maccaro (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: LinkedIn uses their influencers very well in bolstering the social network aspect. They really harness the expertise in the community to get a lot of free content that they have basically monetized themselves.

Karen Hebert-Maccaro: At O’Reilly, we’re talking about socialization and providing social learning in a slightly different way. One of the things we’re working on and have recently released is the ability to create and share playlists. That is a way to essentially allow folks to engage with folks inside their organizations or perhaps eventually outside of their organization in ways that they can follow what people are reading, what people are watching, and what people are paying attention to. It has that influencer characteristic.

Sramana Mitra: My last question is about open problems and emerging trends in the online learning space. What do you see in the horizon? Where do you see open problems that you would encourage new entrepreneurs to go solve?

Karen Hebert-Maccaro: There are a variety of open problems in the space of learning. One of them is definitely in terms of measuring return on investment. I shy away from return on investment, because learning is much more of a human calculation that involves different variables. When we think about how to speak about the value that is derived from whatever the learning ecosystem is that individuals are building and participating in, there are some real open challenges there to provide insight into how people are using and benefitting from what they’re learning.

One of the things that is notoriously difficult for learning and development folks is finding out those metrics that will help the learner understand his or her own progress and the organization understand the workforce’s upskilling initiative. A ripe place for entrepreneurship disruption would be to really understand the ways to measure learning and to bring to the parties involved insights about what sorts of things are working and not working. We are taking some steps in that direction.

We have a very firm point of view with regard to ROI or impact. We think that looking at things like the type of learning engagement is important. We think we need to look more at correlation between established human capital metrics like employee engagement and promotion rates. When the world became much more open, this whole issue of being able to track a learner’s progress and impact to themselves in the organization became increasingly difficult. I bet you there are some entreprenerus out there who can really take that head-on.

Sramana Mitra: It was nice speaking with you. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: O’Reilly Media Chief Content Officer Karen Hebert-Maccaro
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