Thought Leaders in Online Education: Niall McKinney, President of Avado (Part 3)

Niall McKinney: The higher level of that is, they get specific group assignments. In Google Squared Online, at the end of three of the modules, they will be assigned a group. We give them a group work.

For example, it might be a brand which is not very digital. They might have to come up with a new integrated marketing plan for that. The output is a white paper on how they would change that brand approach.

Within that component, we have moderators who are going around making sure that the groups are working. The moderators will even call the people in that group and make sure that they’ll work together.

At the end of that, there is a 360-degree feedback. If your fellow group members give you negative feedback, you will fail that module, and you have to retake it. If they don’t participate fully in the group work, then they won’t complete the course.

Sramana Mitra: There’s a lot of peer pressure built into your design.

Niall McKinney: Exactly. The reason that works so well is, if you don’t do your work, then you won’t have the knowledge you need to be able to participate in the group. The group work is leveraging the knowledge you should have learned over the previous month. That drives people to fully participate because they know they have to use that in a group work.

Sramana Mitra: Got it. When you look around in the online education space, what do you see as open problems? If you were starting a company today, what kind of problems would you try to solve?

Niall McKinney: I see a couple. A really interesting area is this area of trying to create a unified platform to run programs from multiple vendors that somehow creates a consistent environment. A company can buy this service which they provide to their employees based on artificial intelligence or, at least, machine learning to identify the right course for the right person.

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that, right now, corporate learning is fragmented. This piece comes from one vendor. That piece comes from another vendor. You’re saying there’s opportunity for a meta-platform to do personalization based on the needs of the learners. 

Niall McKinney: Yes, Degreed is doing that. There’s a long way to go. There’s probably five to ten years of standardization that needs to occur before something like that can work. It’s a big problem.

Sramana Mitra: Degreed is trying to do this meta-personalization?

Niall McKinney: They’re trying to be the middleware between the content providers and standard LMS. They’re trying to be a smarter version between those two things. They’re still early stage.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. On their website, they’re saying that they cater to four million plus people over 250 plus organizations. There are beginning experiments on this one.

Niall McKinney: Another one is language learning. Language learning is a massive market, especially business English. I just don’t see anyone using cutting-edge machine learning, amazing user interfaces, or anyone who has cracked the problem of making language learning simpler, faster, and more intuitive.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Niall McKinney, President of Avado
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