Thought Leaders in Online Education: Niall McKinney, President of Avado (Part 2)

Niall McKinney: If you think about how we learn at school or college, we don’t expect children to learn on their own at their own pace. We send them to school. We send people to college to learn with other people. There is a social normative effect that you want to keep up. You want to be able to participate in group discussions.

In most of our deployments, we create cohorts of people who go through the learning at the same time. When most online education companies are created, they saw the opportunity for scalable learning, but what they lost was that human motivation for learning together, to be able to share the insights you’re getting, and the motivation of keeping up.

What we do differently in our learning for all of our B2C clients is they are learning in cohorts. They’re all learning the same thing in the same week, so they can interact with other people on that same course. It means they can do group work together.

In most of our programs we have virtual collaboration. You’re learning things, and you’re applying in a virtual group context. Rather than having it pre-recorded or not even any recording, once a week or once every two weeks, they’re in a live classroom so they can interact with other students and an expert.

The learning experience is much more aligned with how humans learn
psychologically. That’s why we get very high completion rates. We have a program called Google Squared Online that we developed with Google five years ago. They had been running a program and they came to us and said, “Can you make this work in an online environment?”

We applied the principles that I mentioned. It has a blend of different learning types – live instructor, individual work, group work, research. Even though that program is five months long and requires about six to eight hours of work a week, our completion rate is still 85%. Our completion rates are an order of magnitude higher than something like LinkedIn Learning. That approach of people learning better together and using technology to create a much broader blend of learning modality is what makes us very different from the rest of the market.

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to have you double-click down one more level. Describe in a bit more detail how your technology facilitates group learning.

Niall McKinney: We have built our own campus platform. When a student from a company starts a program, they join the campus and they get shown around the campus on a virtual tour. Within that, they’re allocated to a cohort.

For example, they have a kick-off live class which is essentially meeting the team and meeting the other learners who are doing that program on the same schedule as them. Campus guides them. In Squared Online, it might show a case study.

It might say, “Please write a comment on this forum about how you think this case study has some lessons that you can apply.” Every individual has to write. If they don’t write anything, we can see that. Our system will automatically email them saying, “You haven’t completed your comment in the forum yet. You need to complete it by this day.” That’s one way. 

Sramana Mitra: Commenting is compulsory to show engagement. 

Niall McKinney: Exactly. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Niall McKinney, President of Avado
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