Thought Leaders in Online Education: Clara Piloto, Director of Global Programs at MIT Professional Education (Part 1)

Clara discusses MIT’s professional education initiative that is run in an online-offline hybrid format.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as your work at MIT that is relevant to online education. 

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Are you saying that you have opened up your platform to software developers who want to augment your platform that you then offer to your 40,000 sites?

Greg Smith: Yes, we’re doing that. We have some people who have been doing that for quite some time. We are opening it up more and more to others. The other thing that is a great way for entrepreneurs to get started is to start with services.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific (Part 4)

Greg Smith: Another trend is the mass adoption of online learning. People
across all socio-economic demographics are going to online learning as the first place to look for things. It’s becoming more and more acceptable.

In fact all the marketplaces out there for online learning have helped build this trend. That is the pull behind the whole industry. If everyone is going online to learn, that creates this massive demand. That allows companies like us to go and say, “I’ve got something I want to teach these people. Let’s put it online.” I see that continuing to grow.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much of this is pure content subscription versus interactive tutoring or teaching? In 1M1M, we have a digital curriculum. Our basic program is a monthly subscription. In the premium, it’s an all-you-can-eat annual subscription. Additionally, in the premium program, we have online mentoring that goes with the asynchronous curriculum.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What trends are you seeing on your platform? What are the top topics that people are teaching and what are the top topics that people are learning?

Greg Smith: This is a question I get a lot. There are trends within different areas. There’s a lot of training and education around health and fitness. There’s a lot around levelling up in your career and profession. That can span everything from corporate finance to software development. There’s a lot around crafts and hobbies.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific (Part 1)

Online education is a booming field that is seeing entrepreneurship both on the platform and technology tool side as well as on the educator side. This interview covers both.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and Thinkific.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Paul Kellenberger, CEO of zSpace (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How do you find and recruit these developers who are very important to your success?

Paul Kellenberger: Over the course of the last three or four years in the education industry, there’s a set of events and a lot of conferences that we go to where both developers as well as end users and resellers traditionally go to.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Paul Kellenberger, CEO of zSpace (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s elaborate on the platform and your own applications versus third-party applications. What’s in the platform? What part of that platform is yours versus from Unity? Where are the third-party developers adding value to this?

Paul Kellenberger: Let me start at the bottom and I’ll talk about the technology from a hardware perspective. We have two proprietary components that are unique to zSpace. One is the way we do the display module that creates the stereo 3D  effect.