Thought Leaders in Online Education: Dror Ben Naim, CEO of Smart Sparrow (Part 1)

This conversation delves into the personalized learning design system space.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself and Smart Sparrow to our readership.

Dror Ben Naim: I’m the Founder and CEO of Smart Sparrow. We are a learning technology platform. We help education providers make their digital learning experiences personalized and adaptive.

Sramana Mitra: Double-click down on that for us and tell us a bit more about what that means. You can use use cases. It’s a perfect way to explain all this complex stuff.

Dror Ben Naim: Many schools in the market we operate have learning management systems (LMS). All of our customers are not happy with their LMS. The reason they’re not happy with their LMS is because they are using a management system for creating learning experiences.

Over the last two decades, education became digital. Education was very non-digital. Education was a public affair. A lot of people use the language of economics, markets, and industries to describe the world of education when in fact it is neither a market nor an industry. However, I will use this phrase because they are useful. As education has been digitized, people started delivering through a new medium, namely software. The first generation of people who did that moved their lecture to become an online digital lecture and their quizzes to be digital quizzes. That was the first wave of migration of analog to digital.

The next wave that we’re starting to see now is a wave where the interest is not just moving the content to put it on a website or an app but to make the digital learning experience itself more personal, and much more engaging. It’s driven by the understanding that just moving content to make the content accessible to learners is not actually helping anyone learn. If giving access to content was the problem, libraries were the solution.

The realization was that they need to design digital native learning experiences. When they look at the tools that are available to them, they find it very difficult to design digital native, personal, and engaging learning experiences using the very basic toolset provided by the LMS. That’s where they typically look for solutions and that’s how they come to Smart Sparrow.

Smart Sparrow has a platform for designing, developing, delivering, analyzing, and sharing learning experiences that are inherently different than just doing content online because they use logic. They are adaptive. They are much more engaging. They store data in a useful way that is easy to analyze.

Sramana Mitra: Can you take us through a use case? Let’s say a school has an LMS. They’re not happy with it, because it’s not a digital native system. How would they get started on your system? Who’s providing the content? How do you personalize that content? What’s the go-to market strategy that you follow?

Dror Ben Naim: I’ll start with the use cases. They’ll get an account. That will become a tool that their faculty members and instructional designers would use. It’s browser-accessed. It’s SaaS.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Dror Ben Naim, CEO of Smart Sparrow
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