10/22/2018
By Peter High. Published on Forbes.
Shafiq Khan was remarkable digital leader at Marriott International. First as the Senior Vice President of eCommerce and then as the Senior Vice President of Channel Strategy and Distribution, he helped grow the company’s digital sales from $150 million to $15 billion. Under Khan’s watch, the company became one of the top-ten companies in digital sales in the United States.
A native of Pakistan, Khan would return frequently, and the state of the country’s education system for the poorest members of society were stark. Khan began to connect the dots between the work he did at Marriott and a way to help solve global literacy. Teach the World Foundation was born.
The company has developed digital tools to help teach those children who cannot afford basic education Pakistan, and the program has expended to Bangladesh, as well. Later this year, Malawi will be added as the third country. Khan makes the point that global literacy is not only a worthy undertaking to help the most vulnerable of the world’s citizens, but it should also have much broader economic and societal benefits. He describes his journey herein.
(To listen to a podcast version of this interview, please click this link. To read future articles like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: You are the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Teach the World Foundation. Could you describe the foundation and its mission?
Shafiq Khan: In a macro sense, our vision is to enhance human potential by furthering knowledge and learning, specifically by increasing literacy. Two out of seven people worldwide are not functionally literate, which is a huge cost for the world. To help minimize this issue, we decided to use our digital background to make a social impact on the world by enhancing human potential. Digital technology has clearly made a massive impact on every domain, and our world has changed as a result. However, this change has not translated effectively into the education space. Because education is a non-profit and non-competitive space, we have not seen digital technology leveraged there. Our mission is to establish and deploy models of literacy and learning effectively and with scale through the power of digital technology. We want to prove that we have a new way of learning that will address two massive issues that the world has.
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By Peter High, published on Forbes 06/05/17
Andrew Ng is one of the foremost thinkers on the topic of artificial intelligence. He founded and led the “Google Brain” project which developed massive-scale deep learning algorithms. In 2011, he led the development of Stanford University’s main Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform. His course on Machine Learning would eventually reach an “enrollment” of over 100,000 students. That experience led Ng to co-found Coursera, a MOOC that partners with some of the top universities in the world to offer high quality online courses. Today, Coursera is the largest MOOC platform in the world.
Most recently, Ng led Baidu’s Artificial Intelligence Group. Under his watch, Baidu became one of the few companies with world-class expertise in every major artificial intelligence category: speech, neuro-linguistic programming, computer vision, machine learning, and knowledge graph, and his team introduced two new business units to the company: autonomous driving and the DuerOS Conversational Computing platform.
In late March, Ng announced that he would step away from Baidu, and in a Medium post, he noted, “Baidu’s AI is incredibly strong, and the team is stacked up and down with talent; I am confident AI at Baidu will continue to flourish. After Baidu, I am excited to continue working toward the AI transformation of our society and the use of AI to make life better for everyone.” I was curious how his plans have taken shape in the couple of months since the announcement, so I caught up with him at his office at the Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University. Given how influential his career has been to date, I was curious where he would focus his attention from this point forward. We also covered his recommendations for companies that are nearer to the beginning of the journey of implementing artificial intelligence, the emergence of roles like the chief artificial intelligence officer, and the industries that are most likely to be impacted by AI, as well as his comparison between the business cultures in the United States and China, among a variety of other topics
Peter High: Andrew, since we last spoke, you have departed Baidu. Where do you see your career evolving from this point forward?
Andrew Ng: Over the last few years, AI [artificial intelligence] technologies have taken off. There are so many things that we can do now that were not possible three or four years ago. This creates tremendous opportunities for large tech companies like Baidu, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many others. It also creates opportunities for smaller teams to do meaningful work, whether they are for-profit, nonprofit, or startup organizations. In the same way that electricity and the internet changed everything, over the next few decades, AI will change everything. I am looking into quite a few ideas in parallel, and exploring new AI businesses that I can build. One thing that excites me is finding ways to support the global AI community so that people everywhere can access the knowledge and tools that they need to make AI transformations.
High: Artificial intelligence is a broad topic. What are some of the areas that are most exciting to you and represent the biggest areas of opportunity in the near term?
Ng: People often ask me, “Andrew, what industries do you think AI will transform?” I usually answer that it might be easier to think about what industries AI will not transform. To be honest, I struggle to think of one. For example, I was speaking at a conference and I said that my hairdresser’s job is probably safe from AI because I do not know how to build a robot to cut hair. A friend of mine, who is a robotics professor, was in the audience, she stood up, pointed her finger at my head and said, “Andrew for most people’s haircuts I would agree, we cannot build a robot, but for your haircut, I could make a robot do that.”
It is difficult to think of a major industry that AI will not transform. This includes healthcare, education, transportation, retail, communications, and agriculture. There are surprisingly clear paths for AI to make a big difference in all of these industries. I have heard you say, Peter, that sometimes AI feels like a far off thing, but it is just over the horizon. I agree, and a lot of the work that will get us there is happening now. Certainly, the smartest CEOs and CIOs, and maybe some new chief artificial intelligence officers, are accumulating the talent and tools necessary, and maybe already using them, to transform their businesses.
High: What suggestions do you have for CEOs, CIOs, and CAIOs that are fairly early in their journey of exploring the implications of AI for their business?
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by Peter High, published on Forbes
3-28-2016
Anne Margulies is the Chief Information Officer of perhaps the best known university on earth, Harvard University. She has been an education technology pioneer for much longer, however. She was the founding Executive Director of MIT OpenCourseWare, the internationally acclaimed initiative to publish the teaching materials for their entire curriculum openly and freely over the Internet. As such, she was involved in some of the earliest precursors of today’s MOOCs.
It should come as no surprise that Marguilies was intricately involved in HarvardX, Harvard’s contribution to edX. For her own team, she has developed what she calls the IT Academy, aggregating training materials to provide common IT skills across her entire department. Therefore, Margulies is a remarkably innovative CIO, especially when it comes to training and education.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read future articles like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Anne Margulies, you are the Chief Information Officer of Harvard University, one of the biggest brands in the world. Could you could give a definition of what is within your purview?
Anne Margulies: Harvard is a large, complex, decentralized university. As the University CIO I am responsible for information technology strategies, plans, and policies, as well as all of the University-wide infrastructure and applications that serve all of our schools. In addition, I am directly responsible for end-to-end technology for the central administration and for the faculty of Arts and Sciences, the largest of our schools. It includes our undergraduate, college, as well as our graduate school of Arts and Sciences. It is a large portfolio.
High: You mentioned that strategy is one of those areas that is under your watch. Can you talk about your method of crafting strategic plans and maybe share some of the details of your latest plan?
Margulies: Absolutely. We have an important leadership group here at Harvard called the CIO Council, which I chair. It is comprised of the CIO councils of our professional schools, as well as our Chief Technology Officer and our Chief Information Security Officer. This leadership group is responsible for developing Harvard’s IT strategic plan. The way that we do that is we focus much on those things that make sense and are most important for us to work on together as a university, as opposed to those technologies that should be done separately school by school. Five years ago we developed a strategic plan with key strategic initiatives for the University, and the CIO Council has now also been responsible for overseeing the implementation of the strategic plan. Since then, we have updated and revised the strategic plan because we finished some initiatives and we have added some new ones. It is a process that I think is actually working quite well for Harvard.
1-4-2016
Tom Reilly has had an illustrious career of joining high growth companies and putting them on a path to continued growth and significant events such as an initial public offering (ArcSight) and acquisition (ArcSight by HP and Trigo Technologies by IBM). For a little less than three years, Reilly has been the CEO of Cloudera. Reilly describes Cloudera’s business as developing “open-source software for a world dependent on Big Data. With Cloudera, businesses and other organizations can now interact with the world’s largest data sets at the speed of thought — and ask bigger questions in the pursuit of discovering something incredible.” With investments from the likes of Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, and Google Ventures, Cloudera has achieved a valuation of over $4 billion, allowing it to join the upper ranks of the so-called unicorns.
Among the largest unicorns, the CEO is typically a founder of the company. Tom is an exception to that rule, though co-founder and former CEO Mike Olson remains with the company as chief strategy officer. Reilly describes a productive relationship with the co-founders, and his goal of continuing their success. In this conversation, he also describes the future plans of the company, including speculation on the company’s public offering, the sectors they focus on, the methods he has used to attract and retain talent, and how he thinks about strategic planning in such a dynamic environment.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this podcast, please visit this link. This is the third interview with CEOs of the so-called “unicorns.” Past interviewees have included Sebastian Thrun of Udacity and Marc Lore of Jet.com. To read future interviews in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Cloudera is an organization that allows others to store, process, and analyze all their data all in one place, which has been a challenge that a lot of organizations have had in recent years. Could you talk a little bit about where the company stands now, its current iteration and evolution, and your current priorities and strategic plan.
Tom Reilly: Let’s talk about the initial value proposition. Traditionally, enterprises have always had a lot of data to grapple with and liked to have it all in one place, but it has become exacerbated in recent years because the world has become interconnected. There is a whole new set of data in volume and complexity that enterprises have not seen before. So our value proposition is to help enterprises and corporations capitalize on all this new data that is coming from the connected world. If they can get this new data they are going to have better understanding of their customers and will be able to service them better, they will be able to introduce new data-driven products and services, and increasingly we are seeing that they will leverage platforms such as ours in gathering more data to mitigate risk and address regulatory pressures. So the theme of that statement there is that our value proposition is to help enterprises transition and transform to this new, interconnected world, which is different in the last ten to fifteen years. That is why technology such as ours is of great interest to these enterprises.
Now what is different today than if you and I talked two years ago is that enterprises now understand the use cases they need to work on to maintain a competitive advantage in this connected world. We are seeing high value business applications come to market at a feverish pace, and that is what is exciting. Two years ago, I think people were still trying to understand: What does this connected world mean? How is it going to affect my industry? What are the technologies I have available to me? And we have seen a fast shift in the last two years to industries transforming.
High: I cannot help but thinking as you say that, Tom, that the path towards developing and combining all of one’s data in a single place is going to be much more complex for an older organization that has been gathering data for years – versus those newer organizations, digital native organizations, for instance, or those created in more recent times, where that complexity is not quite the same. Having collaborated with companies in both of those buckets, can you talk about the path towards success for one versus the other?
Reilly: I will frame it this way. There are what traditionally are called the Web 2.0 companies: the new, modern companies like Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Facebook. These enterprises are gathering data and using data to their competitive advantage and the core part of the services is why they are so successful. I think that a lot of what we are doing in this market that we call Big Data, or we like to think of ourselves as delivering the modern data management analytics platform, is to help traditional enterprises become more like those modern enterprises. The challenge traditional enterprises have is the different silos of systems. When they were doing automation twenty years ago, it was all process-centric, application-centric. Today we are helping them become more data-centric and more information-driven than more process-driven. That is our role in this. I often say we are helping traditional enterprises transition and look more like Google. If we can help them do that – whether it is an insurance company, retailer, bank, telecommunications company, or healthcare provider – and make them operate more like Google, Yahoo, or Facebook, they are going to be servicing their customers better, and are going to have more competitive products and services. There are just tremendous advantages.
I would like to introduce a new series, which I refer to as “Education Technology Innovation.” It will includes interviews and strategy discussions with some of the leading names in the field:
In the kick-off article to the series, I set the stage for some of the questions that will be explored in the interviews in the series:
“What does the future hold for these innovative companies, and how will it change the way in which our children and their children are educated? Will it serve to lower the costs of education? Will it create pressure on high cost private universities with less prestigious brands, as one can spend much less and learn from the top professors from Ivy Leagues schools?“
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Mike Feerick leads a company that has been credited as being the first ever massive open online course or MOOC. He founded ALISON in 2007. Unlike other prominent MOOCs such as Udacity, Coursera, and edX, ALISON’s content is not drawn from elite US-based universities. Rather, the Galway, Ireland based company focuses on practical workplace skills that can be tested by employers to gauge growing competencies. Since I last spoke with Feerick, the company registered its five millionth user, and much of the growth has been in the developing world. India, for instance, is the company’s fastest growing market. ALISON has thrived on serving traditionally underserved education marketplaces.
As Feerick probed for opportunity to serve additional groups of people that have been underserved, perhaps the most marginalized group of all became a target: the population of formerly incarcerated people. In the US alone, 20 million people are among the formerly incarcerated, and one of the triggers of recidivism is a lack of solid job opportunity. As Feerick describes in this interview, he believes ALISON is perfectly suited to serve this often marginalized population while reducing the rates of recidivism in the process.
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Stanford and MIT receive well deserved recognition as hotbeds of entrepreneurship, but neither of those is as singularly influential in the US as the Israel Insitute of Technology, better known as the Technion. Since the university’s founding over one hundred years ago, a quarter of the university’s graduates have started businesses. Since 2004, graduates of the Technion have won four Nobel Prizes, and a remarkable two-thirds of Israeli companies listed on NASDAQ have been founded by graduates of the Technion. Israel is often referred to as “start-up nation”, and the Technion has contributed more than any other institution to that reputation.
Since 2009, Peretz Lavie has served as President of the Technion. During that time, he has hired faculty who are experts across traditional academic silos, encouraged more professors and students to get involved in starting businesses, and in the process has bolstered the university’s reputation as a hot-house for new businesses.
In decades past, companies derived value from deep knowledge and discipline within specific functional areas. They were strong at operations or in finance or in service, etc. Companies were often strong at multiple of those, but the organization structure that owes tremendously to Alfred Sloan and General Motors was almost militaristic in its hierarchy and in its silos. Just as the military has had to think creatively about how breaking down these silos, promoting people who have breadth of experience as well as depth, companies too have derived great value at thinking about value derived at the nexus of disciplines.
Harrah’s Entertainment (now Caesars Entertainment) leap-frogged the competition in the casino gaming industry by virtue of the insights derived by Gary Loveman, a Harvard Business School professor whose specialty was at the intersection of marketing and technology, together with an extremely talented team in his Marketing and IT departments at Harrah’s, the company was an early winner with customer relationship management (CRM).
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Shai Reshef is an Israeli-born entrepreneur who now lives in Pasadena, California. Although his master’s degree is in Chinese politics, he has made his name professionally in private education. He served as chairman and CEO of the Kidum Group, an Israeli test preparation which he sold to Kaplan, Inc. in 2005. He also led KIT eLearning, a subsidiary of Kidum and the eLearning partner of the University of Liverpool. KIT provided MBAs and Master in IT degrees, and was eventually acquired by Laureate Online Education.
In 2009, Reshef founded the University of the People, which in February 2014 received accreditation from the Distance and Education Training Council, a U.S. Department of Education authorized accrediting agency. This made it the world’s first non-profit, tuition-Free, accredited, online university.
This is the tenth article in the Education Technology Innovation series, and it is fair to say that Nic Borg’s background is unlike any of the other entrepreneurs featured in the series. Like others, he comes from academe, but rather than being a former Stanford professor like Sebastian Thrun or Daphne Koller, or an MIT professor like Anant Agarwal, Borg spent seven years at Kaneland High School in Maple Park, Illinois building web-based tools and learning management solutions. The small-scale innovation that he introduced proved to be a pilot for something bigger to come.
Armed with his practical experience at a Kaneland High School, Borg co-founded Edmodo five and a half years ago. Edmodo is the largest K-12 social learning network, which provides teachers and students a safe and easy way to connect and collaborate; it has been called “the Facebook of education.” It is used heavily in the classroom, but also extends that classroom environment. The mission of the organization is to help all learners reach their full potential, and he believes that by connecting them to the resources and concepts they need, they achieve that goal. It has already had profound implications on students, teachers, parents, and content providers, as he explains herein. He was recently honored by this publication as “30 Under 30” winner.
Umar Saif has done a lot in his 35 years. A Pakistani, he earned his PhD in computer science from the University of Cambridge at 22. He began a post doctorate degree at MIT at an age when most of his peers – age wise – had not completed their bachelor’s degrees. He worked at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where he was part of the core team that developed system technologies for the $50 million Project Oxygen. He collaborated with Anant Agarwal, now the president of edX, among other legendary computer science and artificial intelligence professors. After spending years away from his native Pakistan, he found that he enjoyed the entrepreneurial spirit of MIT and of the US more generally. However, it was a conversation with a colleague about what he wanted to achieve in his life that got him to rethink his plans for the future. He decided that he wanted to help establish a comparable entrepreneurial hot-bed like the one he found at MIT back in Pakistan.
He returned to the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), where he found that his top students were the equivalent of the top students at MIT, but they did not realize the potential they had. His own story became an inspiration for a series of entrepreneurs, many of whom he has started businesses with. He was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2010, selected as one of top 35 young innovators in the world by MIT Technology Review in 2011 and received a Google faculty research award in 2011.
In late 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration put out a request for proposal for a new kind of university program. Recognizing the importance of establishing New York City as a technology hub, he hoped to attract a leading university to establish a graduate school in engineering and computer science in Manhattan, and proposed that it be built on Roosevelt Island.
The proposal submitted by Cornell University was the winner, and though the permanent campus will not be ready until 2017, Cornell NYC Tech has set up shop in Google’s Manhattan offices in Chelsea. Daniel Huttenlocher is dean of the program, and he has an ambitious vision that befits an academic who has experience in the business world. He has hired a Chief Entrepreneurial Officer, and the school has already established deep ties with the start-up community in New York. Huttenlocher measures the success of his program on the number of people who start and who join high growth organizations. Establishing a program with ready access to major corporations, start-ups, and even City Hall means that Cornell NYC Tech is in an enviable position, and will likely be a key player in pushing New York to be the tech start-up hub that has longed to be for some time.
MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Anant Agarwal has personified the educator-entrepreneur, as he has had a foot in academe and a foot in new ventures for more than a decade. He has led CSAIL, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, just as he was a founder of Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor. He led the development of Raw, an early tiled multicore processor, Sparcle, an early multi-threaded microprocessor, and Alewife, a scalable multiprocessor. He also led the VirtualWires project at MIT and was the founder of Virtual Machine Works. His start-ups have largely been focused on his areas of research and areas of interest, but he had not focused on the education space itself until late 2011.
It was at that point that Agarwal taught what would become MITX’s first massive open online course (MOOC) on circuits and electronics, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. This overwhelming response showed the promise of having his academic and his entrepreneurial pursuits coincide. Agarwal developed a partnership between MIT and nearby Harvard to establish edX. Unlike rivals Coursera and Udacity, edX is a not-for-profit. Therefore, when Agarwal thinks about the competitive landscape among the MOOCs, his perspective is “the more the merrier.” In fact, in June of last year, edX became open sourced, and the source code, OpenedX, has led to interesting collaborations with Google, Stanford University, and even with countries such as France and China.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Education Technology is in its Infancy, but it is Growing-up FastMuch has been written of late about the need for healthcare reform in our country. Whether one is a fan of the Affordable Care Act or not, the case for change is quite clear. The fact that healthcare makes up such a high proportion of our gross domestic product (north of 17 percent), and has grown at such a fast clip relative to the consumer-price index (one and a half times) underscores the need for change. However, there is an industry the fundamentals of which have not dramatically changed in hundreds of years, and yet its costs have risen at a rate three times as fast as the consumer-price index. That field is education.
The classroom setting with a professor standing at the head of a class talking at a roomful of students is largely the same model that existed when the first universities were established in the United States. It is no wonder that some creative people have stepped forward with truly innovative ideas in the education space to attempt to turn the traditional model upside down.
7-21-2015
As Feerick probed for opportunity to serve additional groups of people that have been underserved, perhaps the most marginalized group of all became a target: the population of formerly incarcerated people. In the US alone, 20 million people are among the formerly incarcerated, and one of the triggers of recidivism is solid job opportunity. As Feerick describes in this interview, he believes ALISON is perfectly suited to serve this often marginalized population while reducing the rates of recidivism in the process.
(This is the 14th article in the Education Technology series. To read past articles with such luminaries as the CEOs of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Mike, I was intrigued to hear this announcement about ALISON getting involved with the formerly incarcerated to provide training to make them both more employable and presumably less inclined to recidivism. The data is actually quite stark. There has been a lot written recently on the incarcerated population in the United States. The data indicates that 2.3 million people are currently incarcerated in the United States, there are up to 20 million ex-offenders, and that up to six million people are still under supervision of one kind or another. There certainly is a big population you might serve. Could you talk about the genesis of this idea?
Mike Feerick: I enjoy using new technologies and business systems to organize solutions to address social issues. With ALISON, we are making education more accessible the world over, but some marginalized groups have greater challenges than others in accessing what we provide – incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people among them. The need is huge, not just in the USA, but globally. For instance, there was one article in the Guardian yesterday that said that 92 percent of those being released from UK prisons feel unprepared for the world outside the penitentiary. These people have some of the greatest educational need in society.
The percentage of the US population in prison is just extraordinary. You have 25 percent of the world’s prison population, and yet America has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. Something is seriously wrong. For the 20 million people you mentioned who are already out of prison—if you have a felony, it is hard to get on with life as there are so many roadblocks. The one thing a formerly incarcerated person can do however is educate themselves, and the beauty of ALISON providing a massive number of free courses at many different levels is that the starting point can vary to suit every potential student.
As we have been leading this education revolution, I have had an eye on this social group and I thought, “OK, there are very few education dollars left for these people when they get out, yet it costs $100,000 on average per year to keep prisoners in jail. But when they get out, the government pays very little money to keep them out.”
A Conversation With The President Of World’s First Non-Profit, Tuition-Free, Accredited, Online University
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
03-03-2014
In speaking with Reshef, I was curious about his mission, the hurdles the company had to go over in order to achieve its unique distinction, and his plans for the future. As one would expect with a serial entrepreneur, he believes that now that the foundation is in place, the University of the People is well positioned to rapidly grow its business, creating new opportunities for many of the world’s least fortunate people in the process.
(To read the prior nine articles in this series including interviews with the heads of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Shai, what is the University of the People’s mission?
Shai Reshef: The mission of UoPeople is to offer affordable, quality, online, higher education to any qualified student. We believe that access to higher education is a key ingredient in the promotion of world peace and global economic development. We view higher education as a basic right, and believe that it can both transform the lives of individuals and can be a powerful force for societal change. We believe that education plays a fundamental role in strengthening respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and in promoting understanding and tolerance. We also hope that in the future, other institutions will replicate our model in order to open the gates of higher education to as many students as possible around the world.
Peter High: You have an elite group of partners, including the Clinton Global Initiative, Yale Law School, HP, and the UN among others. How did you go about establishing partners in this mission and what role do they play?
Shai Reshef: Many corporations believe, as we do, that education should be a right and not a privilege, and would like to take part in revolutionizing higher education. Since so many people identify with UoPeople’s mission, more often than not our partners seek us out without any solicitation from our part. By joining us, they also create their future potential employees. Our agreement with Microsoft is the very example of this. Launched in September 2013, the UoPeople Microsoft4Afrika scholarship program will support a total of 1,000 African students to graduate with a world-class academic degree from UoPeople in either Computer Science or Business Administration. The scholarship not only includes financial support to cover all costs associated with studies, but also extra-curricular opportunities including professional training from Microsoft, being mentored by Microsoft employees and internship and job opportunities with Microsoft and their affiliates in Africa upon their graduation. This comprehensive program is providing students with a degree, experience in their industry, a professional network and important life skills and competencies. The program is fostering a new generation of leaders equipped to succeed in the global business and technology world, to enhance their country and region’s social and economic development and help improve the lives of people across Africa.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
Why were these chosen?
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Forbes 30-Under-30 Honoree, Nic Borg, On Technology Enabled Education
02-10-2014
(To listen to an unabridged audio interview with Nic Borg, please visit this link. To read the prior nine articles in this series including interviews with the heads of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Why was there a need for more of a digital platform and a means of communication with students in new ways? Was there something there saw as lacking in the traditional means of educating their students that was particularly stark to you?
Nic Borg: New ideas developed so rapidly outside the classroom that to really capture students’ attention, teachers had to be just as dynamic and even have to do a bit of a catch-up. Without those tools, without simple ways to get their classrooms online, it just wasn’t possible to get the attention needed from their students to drive that learning process.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Nic, click here.
A Professor With A Western Past Remakes Pakistan’s Entrepreneurial Future
02-03-2014
In 2011, Saif became the Chairman of the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB), heading all public-sector IT projects in the province of Punjab province. In 2013, Saif was appointed the founding vice-chancellor of the Information Technology University (ITU). At the age of 34, he became the youngest vice-chancellor of a university in Pakistan. Saif has accomplished a lot, but, as he explains it, he has only just gotten started.
(To listen to an unabridged audio interview with Umar Saif, please visit this link. This is the ninth article in the education technology innovation series. To read the prior eight articles including interviews with the heads of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Umar, you recently joined the Information Technology University as the founding vice chancellor. What is the charter of the new university and what role do you plan to play there?
Umar Saif: ITU is focused on cross-disciplinary teaching and research to solve locally relevant problems. It is a publicly chartered university, but run like a private-sector university, much like the land-grant universities in the US. We are focused on research with real-world impact. One of the keystone courses at the university is the Design Lab, where students work with grassroots organizations to build solutions to problems like clean drinking water, maternal healthcare and off-grid energy solutions. The curriculum philosophy is inspired by Olin’s design-oriented learning.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Umar, click here.
For The Largest Not-For-Profit MOOC, edX, Experimentation Is The Path To Innovation
01-20-2014
I spoke with Agarwal multiple times in recent months to ask him how edX is evolving, and what he foresees for the future of edX and for the academic institutions that they draw from.
(To hear an extended audio interview with Anant Agarwal, please visit this link. This is the seventh article in the Education Technology Innovation series. To read past interviews including interviews with the CEOs of Udacity, Coursera, and Khan Academy, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: As edX enters its third year in existence, what key lessons have you drawn thus far?
Anant Argawal: The power of edX and of MOOCs more generally is to democratize education. People want to learn no matter their circumstance or their age, and the experience of our students shows definitively that this is the case. We have many people who are in the workforce who use edX to develop new skills to employ in their jobs. Therefore, we are thinking more broadly.
A related example is our partnership with global steel manufacturer Tenaris. Through their adoption of the Open edX platform, Tenaris will enhance their existing training programs delivered through Tenaris University to nearly 27,000 employees worldwide. We have established a comparable relationship with the IMF.
We also have announced a partnership with Davidson College and the College Board to host Advanced Placement (AP) course modules for high school students, as well. So what began as university-centric idea is migrating to the pre and post university settings.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Anant, click here.