Interview with Sameer Bhatia, ProProfs, E-Learning Innovations

Welcome to an interview with Sameer Bhatia, founder of ProProfs, innovators in interactive elearning elements which are used in mlearning and elearning, with degrees, including online teaching degrees. 

1. What is your name and your relation to elearning?

I am Sameer Bhatia, the founder of ProProfs. ProProfs provides comprehensive elearning tools for building, testing and applying knowledge. Through its Quiz and Training products, ProProfs offers trainers and educators powerfully-simple features that allow them to create elearning courses, quizzes and managing their classroom online.

2. How do you see the role of mobile learning evolving in the future?

By 2013, more people will use mobile phones than PCs to get online. Mobile is having a significant impact in elearning and helps learners stay engaged anytime and anywhere. Learners expect that the mobile experience will be as good as the desktop experience, however there are restrictions around screen size, support for technology, etc. The challenge for instructor is to cater to multitude of devices, browsers, screen sizes & operating systems that the learner may be on. At ProProfs, we simplify that process so any course or quiz created once works across all devices so the instructor is ready for the ways today’s learners interact with elearning content.  

3.How can we overcome the problems of a) rented digits, rather than being able to download information for later access when there is no connectivity; b) intermittent connectivity creating a digital divide?

The web is growing and accelerating at mind-boggling rates. The quality of connections has continued to improve, limiting the impact of issues like intermittent or no connectivity. There is also increasing adoption of interactive & adaptive content that simply cannot run offline.  However, there is also content that is authored offline such as PDF or word documents. Today's instructor has the dual problem of taking offline content online and dealing with content that needs to downloaded to go from online to offline. We focus on solving that problem by essentially handling that issue end to end for the instructor. As an example, our new technology allows instructors to upload PDF or Word docs, which can then be converted to a webpage automatically - or instructors can simply click "Allow Download" and content becomes accessible as downloadable content. 

4.  What is QuizMaker and how can it be used in mobile applications? 

Quiz Maker allows users to create custom quizzes quickly and easily by using the largest library of pre-made questions (more than 3,000,000) and quiz templates (more than 300,000) on the Web, and track performance through a powerful new reporting tool.  Quiz Maker is fully mobile compliant and works across all devices & browsers.  It even converts any user uploaded documents into HTML5 so they can be loaded seamlessly across mobile devices. Any video uploads are also converted into a mobile friendly format, so it essentially does all the work for the instructor to ensure compliance with mobile while still allowing them to use their existing teaching or training material.

Welc

5.  What are new capabilities of QuizMaker?  What are the pedagogical purposes of products / activities made on QuizMaker?  

We just added several new features including pre-made quiz templates and questions, as well as the ability to create and track quizzes for separate classes or groups.  Users also now have access to an enhanced statistics dashboard that allows them to generate reports by quiz-taker, individual question, quiz and group or by custom meta data, view quiz data by average time spent per question, percentage of correct/incorrect answers, and more.  These new Quiz Maker features are focused on giving users a powerfully-simple, comprehensive tool set that helps them not only gather and manage quiz data, but also apply that knowledge, empowering them with valuable insight about their quiz-takers.  And through Quiz Maker’s dashboard, educators and trainers now have the ability to reveal knowledge gaps, helping them create more efficient and productive learning environments.

6. What do you think will be the future of mobile learning?

I can sum that up in one word: "ubiquitous"

Interview with Mickey Levitan, Courseload: Innovators in E-Learning Series

Delivering course materials is being accomplished in innovative ways. Welcome to an interview with Mickey Levitan, co-founder and CEO of Courseload, an aggregator and distributor of digital textbooks and course materials. 

Screen Capture #1: Courseload

1.  What is your name and your relation to e-learning?
 Mickey Levitan, Co-Founder/CEO of Courseload. We are a device-and content source-neutral aggregator and distributer of digital textbooks and course materials.  The Courseload model and and platform address the major impediments that have slowed the transition from print to digital course materials in higher education, helping colleges and universities to lower the cost of education and leverage tools that contribute to better educational outcomes.

2.  What is Courseload?  How does it work?
Courseload is an end-to-end solution that enables schools to harness the benefits of digital course materials.  It is software platform that works in conjunction with a school's Learning Management System (LMS), aggregating requested content, distributing the content to students based on classes they have selected and providing a set of tools for highlighting, annotating, collaborating, searching and evaluating that can be used across content from multiple sources. It also handles interfaces with publishers and school systems.

3.  What do you think are some of the core issues facing e-learners and e-learning organizations today?
Not unlike the issues faced by the music and film industries a decade ago, the education industry is currently constrained by measures put in place by publishers to constrain piracy – measures that impede adoption and diminish user satisfaction. Courseload’s approach was conceived to overcome these major impediments that are inherent with all digital content.  The approach is designed for schools that can charge students for their course materials along with tuition, thereby eliminating the economic incentive for illegal copying.  If all students have already purchased the content, who needs to steal it?

This approach changes the economics for publishers who lose revenues to the used book market and piracy and then react by raising prices on new texts. With 100% sell-through guaranteed and illegal copying eliminated, publishers can lower prices dramatically and improve their own profitability. They can also eliminate the cumbersome restrictions on copying, printing, offline access, number of devices, or length of access that historically have made digital content less attractive to end users.

By creating conditions in which eTexts can be more widely used, schools can harness the teaching and learning advantages that come with broader application of digital tools and richer course content.  By creating a platform that can aggregate and distribute content from all sources – proprietary, open source, self-generated, audio and video – academic institutions can take advantage of the growing choices the digital world provides.

Screen Capture #2:  Courseload

4.  What are some of the "disruptive technologies" that will continue to impact elearning in the next few years?
 Successful and disruptive platforms in Courseload's space will:
•    Show demonstrable contribution to improved learning outcomes
•    Enable learners and instructors to collaborate outside the traditional classroom molds
•    Accommodate a variety of teaching and learning styles
•    Leverage technology to provide insight into how students are learning and how instructors can help them succeed.
•    Can consume a variety of content types and formats - both text-based and interactive multimedia – so that users have a common experience with a single set of tools to perform basic functions. These platforms will need to consume proprietary, open-source, and self-generated content
•    Help control escalating cost of education

5.  What are some of the new digital platforms for course texts?
The focus among newer platforms is on "self-publishing".  As self-published texts proliferate, it will be interesting to track what new models emerge to ensure the kind of rigorous editing & review process that has been the hallmark of proprietary content. Some of the newer platforms include: Apple iBooks2, Thuze and Inkling. The Flagship Flock includes Courseload, CourseSmart, VitalSource, Kno and Nookstudy.  A major distinction between platforms is whether they are designed to go direct to consumer or for institutional partnership.  The latter offers potential advantages on cost, collaboration and analytics.

6.  Is it necessary for students to be connected to the internet in order to access the textbooks via courseload? How do you deal with the issues of bandwidth and people who do not necessarily have universal and persistent access?
Courseload is a cloud-based SaaS platform that is content source, device-, and LMS-agnostic. It can be accessed both on and offline. The Courseload platform does not have bandwidth issues in and of itself as it is a cloud-based, light weight platform that does not consume much bandwidth. Where access or bandwidth issues arise, Courseload has an offline capability. Thus far, we have not encountered bandwidth issues with schools using our platform. In schools where all students do no have access to a computing device, the potential cost savings of $600/year with digital provides ways, through financial aid, to justify the up front purchase of a capable device.

7. Are there contingency plans for individuals who are using a smartphone for access and whose provider has blocked or slowed access? How do we keep from creating "bandwidth hogs" when we insist that everything be streamed / accessed from the Cloud? How can we overcome the problem?
Courseload's contingency plan for access is our offline capability. Once the user logs in to the online version of the Courseload platform, the Courseload application can be quickly downloaded to the user's personal device. All digital content associated with the user's courses is then also available without being tethered to the internet.  Courseload has not encountered bandwidth issues because our platform is very light weight in terms of the bandwidth required.

8.  What do you see as high-growth areas in terms of textbooks / course content / course materials?
We expect the growth to come in three areas:
1.    Applications that support school priorities and preferences, e.g. content-source, device, and system agnostic; offer capabilities that truly make a difference in cost and educational outcomes
2.    Publishing tools that make it easier to create, harness and adapt digital courseware (interactive, multi-media, adaptive, self-paced, assessment, analytics, etc.) that will supplant traditional textbooks
3.    Platforms that provide a common set of digital tools that can be used across content from all sources across all courses and that are built to integrate with the veritable explosion of offerings and applications

9. What would you like to see happen in the near future?
One of the potential benefits of moving from digital to print is to lower supply chain costs.  There is a potential win-win for content developers and content users if there is a fair and equitable redistribution of the available economic rents. If this happens quickly, it will accelerate the transition to digital.

Interview with Michael Schutzler, Livemocha.com, Innovators in E-Learning Series

New approaches to online learning take advantage of new mobile devices and the willingness of learners to engage across platforms, technologies, and infrastructures. Learning languages is no different, and the focus now with new technologies, which are used in online forums, bachelor degree programs, graduate programs (for example, and online master's in Spanish), and even Ph.D. programs is all about interactivity. Welcome to an interview with Michael Schutzler, CEO of Livemocha.com.

What is your name and your relation to eLearning?

My name is Michael Schutzler. I am the CEO of Livemocha.com, the world’s largest online language learning community. I have been formally trained as an instructor in several disciplines including Telecommunication Systems Troubleshooting, Water Safety, Zen Meditation, and Executive Coaching. I am an avid technologist, internet entrepreneur and angel investor. I am PASSIONATE about providing teachers useful technologies to make learning both exciting and effective.

What is Livemocha?

Livemocha.com is 13 million people helping each other learn skillful conversation in 38 languages. The company was founded in 2007 and is dedicated to creating a world in which every human being is fluent in multiple languages.

What is Livemocha's instructional philosophy? How does it help with learning language?

First, the team at Livemocha believes that language is a performing art, not merely an intellectual pursuit. Therefore, we emphasize skill development - in particular, we emphasize conversational competency.

We encourage and reward every language learner to try to communicate using the tools he or she learns in each lesson. Since the advent of the Internet and especially with the explosive growth of Skype, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many other forms of communication - we encourage both typed and spoken conversation skills. Of course, we also encourage each learner to share their own native language skills with other members who are eager to learn.

In this way, everyone gets to fumble for a few minutes with a new language and then shine for a few minutes when they share insights into their own language.

In what directions would you like to see education go? Why?

About sixty years ago, our nation had a wake-up call called Sputnik. Suddenly, we were in a race to ensure that our kids were the best at math and science so we could beat the Soviet Union in military and technical development. Meanwhile, funding for public schools has eroded in the past few decades and the result is a public school system obsessed with math and science curricula while jettisoning the humanities.

We do so at our peril. The rest of the world considers bilingual a baseline requirement for higher education and professional advancement. Those powerful communication technologies I already mentioned (Skype, LinkedIn, etc.) are making it possible for even the smallest company to reach global markets. Among the Fortune 500, more than 30% of the current job openings have bilingual as a requirement. Our education system cannot meet that demand.

Livemocha wants to ensure that every person reaches their full potential through skillful conversation in multiple languages. That’s why we created the Livemocha Scholarship program. By donating 5 million dollars worth of Livemocha services to underfunded community colleges and high schools in 2012, we’re hoping to give teachers the resources they need to help students become global citizens.

What is Livemocha doing to promote language learning?

We are partnering with many organizations throughout the country and around the world. Livemocha is already in use in thousands of high schools, colleges, corporations, libraries, non-profit organizations, government agencies, and more.

Our most recent endeavor helps schools build stronger language programs with the help of native speakers and teachers from around the world.

The Livemocha Scholarship Program, which launched on January 11th, 2012, is needs-based and will give US high schools and community colleges the ability to apply for free or deeply discounted language learning solutions with the goal of rebuilding language training programs to serve our nation.

Schools can find additional information and apply for the scholarship program. Simply visit www.livemocha.com/scholarship or email scholarship@livemocha.com.

Maximizing Your Training and Professional Development Return on Investment

How do you value training when your core business is, in essence, built on and around new products and services that involve ongoing training? For example, what do you do if you provide hosting services, cloud hosting, webinars, or learning management systems?

It requires an entirely new way of looking at education in the organization. Training and education used to be the first budget items to be cut in an organization’s budget, particularly among companies that tended to look at education and training as a reward, perk, or worse, a junket. However, the old notions are moving aside as the pace of technological advancement accelerates and training / education become an integral component of the products and services that an enterprise or an individual offers.

For example, if your company has expanded its exploration and development operations and has decided to enter the wild and woolly world of resource plays, it’s imperative that the geology and geophysics staff gain a solid understanding of horizontal drilling, image logs, 3D seismic, pore pressure, and hydraulic fracturing. Without a good working knowledge of those areas, it will be very difficult to make good decisions or to evaluate opportunities.

Your Company’s Ever-Evolving Products and Services: When Training and New Product Development Are More or Less the Same Thing

Training and education on specific topics related to the company’s core business are mission-critical to the general operations of a company. However, the idea that the company offers products and services that it is continually creating and implementing on the fly is rather revolutionary. It’s a characteristic of today’s climate that we are constantly learning / evolving; and clearly the risks are perhaps as high as the rewards.

If your line of products and services is evolving quickly, and you’re counting on innovation to fuel sales and build market share, where and how does the knowledge transfer take place? The flow of information can be trickier than it first appears, especially when the new lines evolve quickly, and may be in the mind of an individual / creator, who may not be particularly adept at communicating his/her vision in a way that is accessible -- either physically or cognitively.

Training and Professional Development Result in Cost Savings

Reducing waste and cutting unnecessary expenditures are time-tested ways to have a positive impact your company’s bottom line. However, cutting costs should not be a “slash and burn” operation. You may be cutting core capabilities or reducing capacity in areas where you need to be building capacity. But, how do you make prudent cost-cutting decisions? Often, it’s a matter of having sufficient knowledge and insight -- insight that can be gained by successfully completing training and education. An investment of $20,000 in providing training to a group of decision-makers in the company could result in $100,000 or more of cost savings in operations.

Training and Education to Avoid Accidents and Mistakes

Further, you could avoid million-dollar mistakes. The challenge is to legitimately measure the cost savings directly attributable to the training. Companies that are concerned with their “education ROI” look at the company’s organization-wide spending / cost reduction decisions, and then they match the areas of training with the areas where the cost decisions have taken place.

Example -- Hydraulic Fracturing: Skimping on Training Could Result In Environmental, Political Nightmares

Many European countries are considering promoting exploration for shale oil and gas, which will necessitate large hydraulic fracs when the time comes to produce. Horizontal drilling will also require large volumes of drilling fluid. What this means is that there is a possibility of accidents, spills, and contamination due to poor decisions and human error. Thus, training / education -- of the service companies, the operators, and the regulatory agents are mission critical.

Compliance

The area of compliance gets into the issue of what happens if you fail to provide evidence that your crew and your professionals have secured the necessary licenses to demonstrate competence in areas that required specialized skill and knowledge. You put yourself and your company at risk if personnel do not have adequate training. Further, you may not be able to obtain licenses or permits.

For example, in order to obtain drilling permits it is often required to demonstrate that the personnel involved have successfully completed training in certain areas, which could include HAZMAT, safety, environment, confined spaces, and corrosion control training.

Cause and Effect: When There’s a Success, How Much Credit Should Training Get?

When a program is successful, there is no shortage of people eager to take credit. Likewise, when a new product or service is profitable, everyone likes to be the originator of it. However, there are often multiple factors and more than one origin of success, several of which are often overlooked. Training is one of those. For example, a creative problem solving course, combined with training on the use of micro-seis and 3D seismic might lead to new ways to envision a reservoir, with the result of more prolific wells.

Training and education clearly played a role, but that role is often overlooked in favor of the technologies, the new products used, and human capital (the technical team, along with leadership). However, it’s easy to leave it out of the equation. The tricky thing about not acknowledging training’s positive role is that when it is cut out, it’s not always obvious that part of the reason for a company’s lackluster performance has to do with the loss of training.

Making a Case for Innovative Training Approaches

It is tempting to think of training as a place where you fight back the urge to sleep as you passively watch a person behind a podium mumble in a monotone as he/she advances all-text slides in a PowerPoint presentation. The most effective training, however, is situated and it is collaborative.

Using Virtual Libraries

What that means in operational terms is that you’re most likely to remember and apply knowledge you’ve learned on the job, in the real-life situation. Further, you’re more likely to be able to synthesize and problem-solve if you’ve learned the material while interacting with others. Share ideas, listen to theirs, and work on problems together. The team approach works in the training space as well as in the work space.

As you consider training, think of it as mobile and on-demand. Seek out online educational solutions, and see how much you can do with your mobile device(s).

Then, above all, as you or your company approach training, look at it from a revenue center approach (rather than a cost center). How can you leverage training so that it actually translates into a revenue stream? Be creative, and be unafraid of unusual combinations.

This column first appeared in AAPG's Division of Professional Affairs newsletter, The Correlator.