Thought Leaders in Online Education: Gregory Marino, CEO of Kaplan Higher Education (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about technology – all this data and analytics? What is the mix there?

Gregory Marino: Everything is on a digital platform. We ensure that when we put a process in place or a course online, there is a mechanism to measure the effects. We’ll get down to the clickstream data and understand where students are getting the best learning outcomes, what materials are being used more frequently, and what is helping to lead to better results.

From the ground up, we ensure that it’s helping us to measure and report on those learning to ensure that we can improve the overall operation.

Sramana Mitra: Have you identified software vendors who have been particularly helpful in achieving your goals in that domain?

Gregory Marino: Most of our analytics happens internally. We have data scientists. Most partners that we have identified are not yet at the level that we’re at. We’ve engaged with certain outfits like predictive analytics to determine when a student is losing engagement.

We’ve done A/B testing comparing our dashboards with their dashboards. Ours tend to perform better. There’s a lot of activity in the space on the analytics side. We continue to experiment. For the most part, our analytics are all proprietary and within the Kaplan organization.

Sramana Mitra: Are marketing services also internally-generated technology or are you using external technology?

Gregory Marino: Our CRM or our SRM is Salesforce backend. The algorithm that we’ve deployed in the reporting is also proprietary. We have lead scoring mechanisms. We get to customer databases to help us with critical characteristics that could help improve certain conversion rates or retention rates. The algorithm and the follow-on processes are all proprietary.

Sramana Mitra: Got it. Now I’m going to ask you for pointers to open problems where new entrepreneurs can start companies? Our community is full of entrepreneurs. You have been in this industry for a long time. You must have observed lots of open problems.

The question is what are some of these open problems that warrant starting a new company.

Gregory Marino: Starting a company and scaling a company is much easier than it was 20 years ago. All you need is an idea. You don’t necessarily need your IT systems and networks. You can operate in the cloud.

It’s also a lot more competitive to start an organization than it was. If you have an idea, you can go for it. It all comes down to the execution. It’s hard to give an idea that no one’s working on. There are a lot of investments and ideas.

In the end, students and institutions in our space are going to get more value from an integrated experience rather than any one particular idea. If your idea only solves 1% of an integrated solution, it’s hard to see how that idea will take hold, especially for institutions that are typically slow to move.

My advice is to focus on solution and integration and not one highly-specialized idea.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Gregory Marino, CEO of Kaplan Higher Education
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