Thought Leaders in Online Education: Dror Ben Naim, CEO of Smart Sparrow (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the emerging trends in the space and what are the open problems? If you were starting a company today, where would you start one?

Dror Ben Naim: I’m a CEO of a company and I’ve got lot of people working for me. They would be very unhappy to hear that their CEO is starting another company!

Sramana Mitra: That’s not the question. The question is pointers for young entrepreneurs.

Dror Ben Naim: If I had to open another company, it would probably be the same company. In terms of what’s interesting in the market, that is a definition of what the market is. There’s a big trend in EdTech to evolve talent. They’re moving from K12 and higher education to corporate training. We >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Dror Ben Naim, CEO of Smart Sparrow (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are you seeing in terms of adoption in the school systems?

Dror Ben Naim: Everywhere we look, we’re seeing great interest in the area of personalized learning. It’s not just a buzzword. It’s a reality. What we also see is that certain schools are ahead of others. The classic example is to talk about ASU which is truly leading the pack in terms of their institutional adoption of innovative learning and teaching technologies and practices. It’s not just about adopting technologies; it’s mainly about changing your practice as an organization.

On the other side of the spectrum, we will see laggards who still don’t believe in digital learning. Professors are still upset that they’re expected to >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Dror Ben Naim, CEO of Smart Sparrow (Part 3)

Dror Ben Naim: We can base adaptation on many factors. We can base it on how students are doing right now on the problems they are working on. We can adapt in a more complex way not only by looking at what they’re doing now but also by what kind of mastery level they have on the learning objective that they are currently dealing with.

For example, I’m giving you a quadratic problem. If you don’t know how to solve the quadratic problem, I can choose to give you an easier one. If I’ve got statistical information that shows that, overall, you’re doing poorly on quadratic, I may choose to take you down a different path which starts explaining in simpler ways how to solve quadratic. In this example, I talked about adapting the sequence of learning experiences. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Dror Ben Naim, CEO of Smart Sparrow (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is it software or is it content that you’re delivering in a SaaS mode?

Dror Ben Naim: This is software. We’re talking about a tool for designers, developers, and subject matter experts.

Sramana Mitra: They are designing the content on your tool.

Dror Ben Naim: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a next-generation LMS. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Dror Ben Naim, CEO of Smart Sparrow (Part 1)

This conversation delves into the personalized learning design system space.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself and Smart Sparrow to our readership.

Dror Ben Naim: I’m the Founder and CEO of Smart Sparrow. We are a learning technology platform. We help education providers make their digital learning experiences personalized and adaptive.

Sramana Mitra: Double-click down on that for us and tell us a bit more about what that means. You can use use cases. It’s a perfect way to explain all this complex stuff. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Patrick Mullane, Executive Director of HBX (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Could you switch gears and tell me what you see out there as open problems around which people could be starting new companies?

Patrick Mullane: That’s a broad question. I see a lot of opportunities in the job I’m in that we don’t address and I don’t see anybody addressing. One is how can we very quickly make content that’s compelling and that is custom in nature for a particular company’s needs. I’d argue for a long time, executive education programs were the domain of only large companies because it costs a lot of money to send somebody somewhere.

There certainly are huge benefits to that. I think that it’s a need that’s not going to go away, but there’s probably a whole tier of middle-market >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Patrick Mullane, Executive Director of HBX (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about some of the other trends that you see in this mode of delivering education. Are there international students who are just doing the certification and has nothing to do with applying for the full program?

Patrick Mullane: Yes, for sure. Let me be clear. The number of people who use it explicitly to apply to the Harvard MBA program is exceptionally small. Of that 37,000, I’d be shocked if 500 of them took it for that purpose. Most people are not taking it for that reason. They’re taking it either because they want to apply to some other school or they have some other business needs.

To your point, 40% of our participants are international students so we have a very strong international presence with our programs. Most of them use it for similar reasons that the American students do. Either they’re applying to graduate programs in some other country, or they have no >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Patrick Mullane, Executive Director of HBX (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Now let’s go to the types of programs that you’re running. I’d like to take them one by one and understand better the trends in that. Let’s start with the one where you have people taking it as a preparatory step towards applying for Harvard MBA. What are the trends in that?

Patrick Mullane: There’s a specific product that people think about when they think about the market of people looking to go get an MBA. That’s our product called CORE, which stands for Credential Readiness. It’s a three-course program of accounting, economics, and data analytics. It was originally built as a pre-matriculation program for accepted Harvard MBA students who needed to get up to speed on those disciplines so that when they came to campus and got in a classroom, they would be ready to speak intelligently on topics without the faculty having to worry about remedial training. >>>