A British MOOC Start Up With A 44 Year Old Parent
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
01-13-2014
Much time and attention has been given to the MOOCs started in the US, but as I have mentioned in my interview with Mike Feerick of ALISON, the phenomenon actually first emerged in Europe. Another more recent entry to the MOOC field out of the United Kingdom is FutureLearn. Unlike other prominent MOOCs like Udacity, Coursera, and edX that feature university content, FutureLearn is not led by a former academic. Simon Nelson is a businessman, but he was a logical choice to head FutureLearn given his experience working in a variety of media fields that have been threatened and transformed by technology. As a result, Nelson has been programmed to see opportunity in the chaos.
FutureLearn also has the advantage of a 44 year old pre-cursor to the MOOCs: Open University. The university has many things in common with the MOOCs — it has an open entry policy, and the majority of courses are taken off-campus anywhere in the world. As such, Nelson has been able to work with Open University Vice Chancellor Martin Bean to learn from the decades of experiences and experiments forged, and many of them have translated well to the new format. Therefore, while FutureLearn is a new entrant to this marketplace, it stands to become a formidable one.
Peter High: FutureLearn recently offered its first course online. What course was chosen to be the first offering, and how it was chosen?
Simon Nelson:The first course was “The Secret Power of Brands.” It was a ten-week course delivered by University of East Anglia. We chose it because it is both powerful but also accessible. We used our early MOOCs to test a range of course durations – ten, eight, six, and two weeks – to gain insight into what worked best for learners.
A second run of the course has been scheduled for February this year, along with a number of other courses that originally featured in 2013. The second run of “The Secret Power of Brands” has been re-versioned to run over six weeks.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
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To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Simon, click here.
The Most Influential Person In Education Technology
01-06-2014
I have had the a good fortune of speaking with good number of the leaders in education technology today. Since so many of these players have emerged from academe, the competition between companies is fierce certainly, but there is also a collegial willingness to acknowledge the successes of other companies. In the case of non-profits like edX, CEO Anant Agarawal says, the more companies that enter this space, the merrier. (Stay tuned for my interview with Agarwal on January 20th.) Several of these leaders acknowledge that the most influential person to the MOOC landscape has been Salman Khan. As Agarwal lists the genesis of the MOOCs, he lists Khan and his Khan Academy first among the major players. Sebastian Thrun acknowledged in my interview with him that “I stumbled into this after listening to a gentleman named Sal Khan of Khan Academy. In his speech he noted that he had tens of millions of students in his classes. I was teaching at Stanford at the time and had tens of dozens of students in my classes, and I felt I should try something different and see if we could do what I do and scale it to many people.” In fact, in my podcast interview with Thrun, as he listed those who had been most influential to him over the course of his career, he listed Khan on the short list.
With this in mind, I looked forward to meeting this education guru. I met him in his office, and had a chance to see the microphone he uses for the tutorials that he delivers. He was informal, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, and the microphone that I used to record our podcast interview was perched on a log that stood in between us. He was affable, bright, and the leadership skills that enabled him to be class president of his senior class at MIT and of his class at Harvard Business School before becoming a serial entrepreneur was quite clear. What followed as a fascinating conversation about the genesis of Khan Academy, his thoughts on the future of education, and his beliefs about the balance between technology enabled learning versus classroom learning.
Peter High: Sal, there is the famous story of your cousin, Nadia, who needed some help with her math class in seventh grade as the genesis of the idea that has become Khan Academy. What insights in the early days helped you understand the scale of the need that you hoped to fill?
Salman Khan: I grew up with plenty of smart people. They would beat me at chess, they could solve brain teasers before I could, but then they would struggle in algebra. These were incredibly smart people who simply did not have the foundation in math that I had. I saw the same thing with my cousin, Nadia. She had actually gotten “A”s and “B”s in every math class. Despite that, she had some serious gaps in her knowledge that became more significant as the content became more difficult. This really hit me as a real opportunity.
My background is in software, and I have always had these romantic notions of starting writing software that could help people learn, so I started writing a little tool that would give Nadia and her brothers and the other people I was working with practice problems. I didn’t trust them when they said how long it took them or whatever else. I put a database behind it and that became a useful tutorial tool because I could see where they had gaps, I could intervene appropriately, and I could give them as much practice as they needed…
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Sal, click here.
12-31-2013
2013 was a great year for information technology generally. Several technology stalwarts went public, most prominent among them being Twitter. Though less glamorous in the mind of the average person, business-to-business technology companies like WorkDay and Tableau Software continued to shake up older adversaries, as well. There was plenty of great coverage of information technology in 2013, as well. I have assembled my personal favorite pieces both in written form and in video. They are divided into executive profiles,company profiles, and general topics. As the year draws to a close, and the promise of a new one is before us, I hope you’ll enjoy these selections.
Lessons From The CEO OF The First Ever MOOC
There has been much press for the massive open online courses or MOOCs, including in my series of interviews to date with Sebastian Thrun and Daphne Koller, CEOs of Udacity and Coursera respectively. If one is new to these companies, one might be under the impression that the MOOC phenomenon is less than two years old. That is not the case. The company that many credit as being the first ever MOOC is Advance Learning Interactive Systems ONline, better known as ALISON. Irish-American entrepreneur, Mike Feerick founded that company in 2007, and whereas many other companies in this industry are still trying to determine the business models, Feerick has nearly seven years of testing, experimenting, and succeeding behind him. In this interview, Feerick talks about the genesis of the idea, his rationale for focusing on vocational training, and his vision for the future of the company.
(To listen to an extended audio version of this interview, please visit Forum on World Class IT. This is the fourth in the education technology series. To read the prior interviews, please follow this link. To read future interviews with the CEOs of Khan Academy, edX, and FutureLearn among other companies, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Mike, as a MOOC pioneer, what was the inspiration behind ALISON?
ALISON started with seven computer literacy courses because it was a very practical field of focus. Prior to launching ALISON we charged for the service, however when we changed our model to free, a curious thing happened: our paying clients wanted to continue to pay as they did not believe that something free could also be of sufficient value! We have changed a lot of minds on that score, and in that sense ALISON has helped open up the market for free education for other MOOCS to follow.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Mike, click here.
For the World’s Largest MOOC, Broader is Better
12-16-2013
Last week, I kicked off a series on education technology with an interview with Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity. Daphne Koller who co-founded and is the co-CEO of Coursera, by some measures the largest of the for-profit educational technology companies offering massive open online courses or MOOCs with over five million students across most countries, has much in common with Thrun. They both were foreign-born Stanford professors with backgrounds in artificial intelligence when they started the companies they currently lead. Each has also taken a leave of absence from Stanford in order to pursue their current opportunities.
Though their companies compete, they have chosen very different areas of focus. Udacity, like several other companies that provide MOOCs has chosen to focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. Coursera has chosen a much broader offering, including many disciplines in the humanities. This breadth of offering has been a strength of the company in building a broad student-base, and it has signed up over 60 universities as partners. That said, it has required particularly creative approaches both process and technology-wise in order to facilitate learning, collaboration, and grading.
Koller admits that some of the data surrounding MOOCs might suggest that students are not learning as much as they could, as drop-out rates are substantial, but she argues that new metrics are needed in order to determine success or failure.
(To hear an extended audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the third in the series of Education Technology articles to be featured this month and next. To read the past articles in the series, please follow this link. To receive updates on interviews with the CEOs of Khan Academy, edX, FutureLearn, and ALISON among others, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Daphne, Coursera is still in its relative infancy. What was the inspiration for starting the company?
Daphne Koller: I have been working in the States for about five years, and the pace of change in education innovation has been dramatic. In the Fall of 2011, we put three Stanford courses up on the platform we had developed, and we were pleased to find that enrollment for these courses was 100,000 students or more. I think when we saw that the impact and the opportunities that this open platform had provided in education for this many people at a lower cost, then that caused us to say we really have to live up to that opportunity.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Sebastian, click here.
Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun On The Future Of Education
12-09-2013
There are few entrepreneurs who can compete with Sebastian Thrun in terms of creativity and breadth of innovation. He led the development of Stanley, a robotic vehicle on the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. He was a founder of the Google X Lab, and parlayed his earlier success with Stanley into the Google driverless car system. He also was among the leaders who developed Google Glass. All the while he was a professor first at Carnegie Mellon and then at Stanford.
In early 2012, based on inspiration from Salman Khan of Khan Academy, he co-founded Udacity, a for-profit education company offering massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Thrun’s Stanford course “CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car” was among the first couple of courses offered through Udacity, and it attracted 160,000 students in 190 countries. The youngest was ten and the oldest was 70. Moreover, none of the top-400 students were Stanford students. He was so excited about what he learned, that he gave up his post at Stanford to focus on Udacity full-time.
(To hear an extended audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read interviews with other education technology leaders such as the CEOs of Coursera, edX, Khan Academy, and FutureLearn, please click the “Follow” link above. To read about Thrun’s thoughts on what immigrating to America has meant to him, please read this article.)
Peter High: You have been an entrepreneur in a variety of fields. You have taught and applied artificial intelligence. You helped spawn Google Glass. Now you are the CEO of a prominent education company offering MOOCs. What are the common denominators among the opportunities you have pursued?
Sebastian Thrun: Well there are two things to it, one is I love to pick problems that are really big and important. In education, we seek to address the problem of how to democratize and bring education everywhere. The second thing that drives me is I love to learn, and I love to do things I haven’t done before. And I enjoy the intellectual exercise of doing something new. Ideas like Google Glass emerged from such exploration.
11-19-2013
Cathy Bessant has one of the biggest technology roles on the planet. She runs Global Technology and Operations at Bank of America, and in that role has nearly 100,000 people on her team in 35 counties. She first joined the company in 1982 as a corporate banker in Texas. Since then she has been the President of Bank of America Florida, the National Small Business Segment executive, the President of Consumer Real Estate and Community Development Banking, the chief marketing officer, the President of Global Treasury Services and Global Product Solutions, and the President of Global Corporate Banking. Therefore, she has had an extraordinary breadth of experiences at the Bank, but she did not grow up in IT per se.
The prudent use of data and information is as important in the financial services industry as any other industry. It touches everything that a bank does. In many ways, having someone who has had such a wide variety of executive positions in the company is the ideal candidate for the Technology and Operations role that Bessant occupies. As she notes below, the key to filling in any gaps she might have on the technology side, is having a skilled team, while learning from the various companies whose boards she sits on.
(To listen to an extended podcast version of this interview, please visit this link. To have more stories like this one delivered to you, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Cathy, I thought we would begin with your role. You run what is referred to as Global Technology and Operations at Bank of America. What is your purview in that role, and what functions report to you?
Cathy Bessant: I have CIOs who are responsible for each of our lines of business, as well as for risk and finance, who report into me. For their respective businesses, each CIO manages his or her business’s technology and operations. All told, I have a team of nearly 100,000 employees and contractors in 35 countries. Global Technology and Operations provides the platforms and fulfillment services that sustain the company’s consumer banking, wealth management, commercial banking, treasury services, sales and trading, and investment banking businesses – as well as risk management, finance and other critical support functions. I also have responsibility, of course, for infrastructure, for information security and for business continuity.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Cathy, click here.
The CIO Takes Over Multichannel Commerce
11-18-2013
Red Wing Shoes has been a well-known brand for over a century especially among those who require the highest quality work boots. For those who do not conduct the sort of work that requires work boots, however, the brand may be more familiar due to the oxfords, chukkas, and the like that are sold as the Red Wing Heritage Collection in partnership with retailers such as Brooks Brothers, Nordstrom, and J. Crew.
Joe Topinka brought his size 15 feet to the Minnesota-based shoe company in May of 2008 as the company’s first ever chief information officer. (Foot size is listed on employees’ business cards.) Recognizing the opportunity to leverage technology more creatively to market and sell Red Wing Shoes’ products, Topinka pushed the organization to develop a more creative multichannel commerce strategy. He made the case so effectively that in recent months, he was given responsibility for multichannel commerce for the entire company, taking on a rare but quite logical CIO-plus role that other business-to-consumer companies will likely adopt in the future.
(This is the 16th interview in the CIO-plus series. To be apprised of future articles in the series, click the “Follow” link above. To read past interviews with CIO-pluses from companies like ADP, P&G, Waste Management, McKesson, and Walgreens, please visit this link.)
Peter High: Joe, can you describe Red Wing Shoes’ business?
Joe Topinka: Red Wing Shoes is an iconic, 108 year old footwear manufacturer and retailer. The company has maintained its roots in the city by the same name where it was founded in 1905. Red Wing Shoes operates in over 100 countries, with global manufacturing anchored in Red Wing, MN. For over a century, Red Wing’s purpose-built footwear has been at the spearhead of innovation and the standard of excellence for work footwear.
To explore other CIO-plus Series articles, please click here.
10-28-2013
There are an increasing number of chief information officers who earn upwards of $1 million in salary and bonuses annually. Most of them are unknown, as compensation for CIOs are not necessarily disclosed at public companies, and private companies need not report the compensation packages of employees. The fact that a growing number of IT executives receive such hefty pay packages is a sign for the important work they are doing, their ability to definitively convey the value that they and their teams contribute to the company, and the increasingly important role that information technology has in most businesses.
Janco Associates has compiled a list of 15 CIOs who earned more than $1 million in 2012 leveraging SEC data. (The original list includes 20 executives, but five of them are not CIOs.) There are some interesting trends. First, over half of the people on the list (eight of the 15) held additional titles to that of the CIO during 2012. This is a phenomenon I refer to as the CIO-plus. I profiled a variety of CIO-pluses, some of whom earn more than $1 million, but do not appear on the list, as their companies do not disclose this fact.
It is interesting to assess the “plus” roles, as well:
As changing multiple jobs becomes the norm rather than exception, millenials need to pay attention to not burning bridges with ex-employers.
08-13-2013
It once was the aim of many people to work for 30 to 40 years with the same company, and then to retire with a pension and a gold watch. Pensions are mostly a thing of the past, and for many young people, watches are as well. Retiring from one’s first employer will be rarer still. Talented people in the technology field are more likely than most to hop from job to job with greater frequency than many others. In fact, this analysis of how Yahoo! has made a practice of acquiring less than stellar performing companies with grade-A talent in order to secure them en-masse and lock them in for multiple years underscores the point.
Unfortunately, as the millenials hop from job to job, it appears not enough time and attention is put toward ensuring that the bridge that has been built with an employer remains strong even after one’s departure. Carelessly burning bridges or even simply ending one’s tenure with a company on a sour note needlessly can have negative ramifications. When one needs a recommendation for yet another job or for a graduate program down the line, these slights will be remembered. In order to make a great last impression, it is important to follow these seven steps.
Create a plan to hand-off all outstanding work and responsibilities before tendering a resignation
Nothing is more frustrating for an employer than to have many loose ends to tie, without ample time to tie them prior to a colleague’s departure. Even before announcing the intent to leave, an employee should prepare a plan on who can logically take over his or her responsibilities. Having an actionable plan that can be implemented immediately after announcing the intent to depart will go a long way toward easing the minds of one’s soon to be ex-employer.
Meet with each of the people who you have proposed to take over responsibilities, and agree to spend time with each to ensure that each activity is in good hands post departure, and to give each person ample time to ask questions wherever necessary.
To explore the full collection of Beyond CIO Series articles, please click here.
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