Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jon Mott, Chief Learning Officer, Learning Objects (Part 2)

Jon Mott: There are a lot of things that we have as components or modules of our platform like building quiz questions, building item banks, and having grade books. It doesn’t make sense for a small startup to build all of those from scratch. Instead of wasting their time and energy on that, they can leverage our existing tools and then add their special secret sauce on top of that.

Our biggest segment that we’re focusing on is institutions. Mostly, institutions of higher education where they have had a very traditional approach—faculty-cantered approach and semester-based approach to learning. They’re exploring and looking at different ways of structuring the student learning experience at that institution. Maybe, making it more flexible. Maybe, making each student pass through a degree program differently based on what they know coming in. Maybe some preferential things about how they prefer to learn or interact with other students and really building a learning environment that has flexible workflows, but also that is systematically implemented for an entire institution so the different stakeholders know how to interact with others at different points along the way.

Sramana Mitra: Did I understand correctly that you have some kind of software authoring environment?

Jon Mott: Yes, we really are a platform-as-a-service. The platform that Learning Objects has is called Difference Engine. Difference Engine is what we would consider a next-generation digital learning environment. It’s not really a learning management system per se. Instead, it’s built on sound notions and processes of learning design and injecting learning science into the creation of courses and programs that makes sure that there are very explicit capabilities to find and associated with every program or credential that an organisation is offering, and equally explicit definition of how each of those capabilities will be measured.

Then a set of approaches or resources for how students can learn or acquire those capabilities when they lack them. That’s really the heart of Difference Engine—providing that kind of learning-centric design and then delivering those kinds of experiences for students in a personalized way. We deliver both the platforms to institutions. Often, institutions or organizations will have their own curriculum and instructional design team that can build courses and programs on our platform, but we also have services where we can provide that function either in partnership with them or for them. We build courseware and programs in partnership with their faculty or subject matter experts.

Sramana Mitra: Could you pinpoint what the core differentiation is in what you do?

Jon Mott: I’d say it’s a couple of things. One is, it fundamentally begins with this notion of starting with learning goals. In many learning platforms, you start with content and you start maybe with activities. We explicitly say that activity and content should be the last thing you think about. You should really start with learning goals first. What should my students look like when they’re done with the program. That’s built into the authoring system. It’s built into the workflow of building programs.

The other thing that’s really a differentiator is instead of presenting students with a list of courses and maybe dates on which they completed them, we instead focus on a more programmatic view. If I’m working on a certificate as a network engineer, or if I’m working on a degree as a mechanical engineer, what we provide is that above-the-course view. Where am I in my academic journey as I work towards that bigger goal? Certainly there are smaller activities like courses or modules or segments that would be on my learning plan but we really keep the focus above that more granular level so I can see a larger and more contextual map of where I am in my journey to achieving my larger goals.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Jon Mott, Chief Learning Officer, Learning Objects
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