Interview with Sameer Bhatia, ProProfs.com: Innovators in E-Learning Series

Thanks to improvements in access and bandwidth management, massive open online courses (MOOCs) are rapidly gaining in popularity. Two different types of MOOCs have emerged: the first, the x-MOOC, emphasizes content mastery and incorporates self-grading activities; the second, the c-MOOC, emphasizes learning through collaboration and incorporates connectivist learning theory. The x-MOOCs are making learning and assessment an automated, 24-7 endeavor. The big challenge for organizations that wish to get involved, however is finding a platform that is robust and flexible enough to handle huge volumes and highly variable content. One company that has dedicated itself to overcoming that problem is ProProfs, a popular, easy-to-use provider of tools that allow the easy construction and deployment of quizzes, courses, tests, and surveys, all of which are ideal for creating MOOCs. Welcome to an interview with Sameer Bhatia, visionary and founder of ProProfs.com.

1.  What is your name and your relationship to e-learning?

I am Sameer Bhatia, founder of ProProfs.com, an online learning community which provides comprehensive tools for building, testing and applying knowledge.

Over the years, I have worked with many trainers and educators, which has helped us in developing market leading elearning tools such as our popular quiz software and an all-in-one online learning management system (LMS) that are geared towards solving the core issues that teachers and trainers face while creating online courses and assessments.

I feel the biggest contribution to elearning that ProProfs has made so far is in making online education accessible and affordable to people from all walks of life. We have not only made an enterprise level LMS, which would traditionally cost tens of thousands of dollars, available at a fraction of the price but also taken this a step further with our free offering of public courses. Our products are free when you share content such as courses or quizzes with the world. This has made us one of the largest MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platforms with hundreds of thousands of free quizzes, tests and courses. I have received many emails from educators and trainers about how the free courses and quizzes have saved them hours of time and effort.

2.  What are some of the future directions and potentials of MOOCs, in your opinion?

Where a university class could only accommodate a maximum of few hundred students, MOOCs can help educators and trainers reach out to millions of learners. The potential of MOOCs as a platform through which education and training can be created and disseminated instantly to a vast population is one worth investing in and exploiting.

In the coming years, we could see more universities using MOOCs as the primary mode of creating and disseminating learning. However, currently there are a limited number of courses on a few topics that MOOC platforms are offering. The potential of MOOCs will be fully realized when open online courses are available on multiple disciplines and topics. I feel the ability of anyone to freely build and share knowledge will be a motivational factor for people to use MOOCs as the primary platform for creating and disseminating learning.

Such a cohesive system would mean the crumbling of economic and geographic barriers, since anybody from any part of the world would be able to freely access education and learning.

3.  Why might an organization want to host a MOOC, and how can they benefit?

Firstly, irrespective of the industry an organization belongs to, MOOCs can help it establish itself as a thought leader in its field. A company can achieve this by creating a knowledge resource consisting of open online courses which answer the questions of their audience. For example, a company manufacturing fire fighting equipments can create open courses on fire safety; an automobile company can create a certification course on driving motor vehicles, so on and so forth. The possibilities are limitless. By providing solutions to the questions of potential customers, a company can establish itself as a brand and thought leader.

Secondly, as it is said that the best way to learn is to teach, organizations can quickly collect aggregate learner statistics from their courses and learn about what exactly are the knowledge gaps. For instance, when you create a course using ProProfs, you get advanced reports and aggregate statistics based on data across all attempts to a particular course. These reports help instructors learn and understand what questions are commonly wrong, difficulty level of each question, what information the course is not addressed well and so on. All of this can be used to make improvements to the course and to identify and bridge knowledge gaps.

4.  What are some of the "must have" elements in a MOOC?  Why are some organizations nervous about offering a MOOC?  What are some of the barriers that must be overcome, and why might it be difficult for an organization to do it on their own? 

Creating an online course is not enough. For MOCCs to be really successful as an alternative learning model there must be comprehensive course statistics such as detailed course and assessment reports as well as learner feedback reports accompanying an online course.

Course and assessment reports are essentials parts of an online course as they help instructors judge whether learners have actually understood the course. For instance, ProProfs test making software, provides users with detailed assessment reports such as the total attempts made on the quiz, the average time taken to complete the quiz, the average percentage score and the difficulty level of each question in the quiz. The statistics are presented in a clear and concise manner, which help instructors understand how each learner performed in a given test as well as identify the areas where knowledge gaps may exist so that they can revise their teaching and training materials to improve learners’ performance.

Likewise, gathering learners’ feedback at the start, middle or end of a course helps in judging the relevance and efficaciousness of a course. Regular learner feedback surveys drive up instructor-learner engagement, which is crucial for the success of online courses.

One of the reasons why business organizations are wary of online courses is regarding cost and infrastructure requirement to support large batches of learners. Expenses related to maintenance, data back-up, software hosting and administration are some of the difficulties that organizations looking to create online courses on their own face. They can avoid these issues and simply put their focus on course creation by adopting SAAS and other third party solutions that effectively solve this problem. We get a lot of questions and concerns about this as well. So we created a Trust page that gives people an insight into our infrastructure that scales to serve million of users each month.

As for educational institutions, the question seems to be whether open online courses can compensate for actual classroom experience. However, there are many tools such as feedback surveys, discussion forums, crowd-sourcing etc which help in bridging the virtual divide and driving up instructor and learner engagement.

5.  What are some of ProProfs products, and how are they used within a MOOC?

One of our popular products is our online training software, which allows users to create a course and deliver it to their learners. It is an all-in-one software, which comes bundles with our other products and provides a complete e-learning solution to companies who want to create online training program or educational institutions looking to create academic coursework.

We also offer a powerful online testing tool called ProProfs Quiz Maker. Our testing tool provides comprehensive features such as the ability to create different types of tests such as matching, checkboxes, true or false, multiple choice and even a timed test - which helps in preventing cheating in online tests. The results of the assessments are fully downloadable and instructors can share them with their learners as well as other stakeholders.

Another import elearning tool would be our learner feedback tool. Our survey software allows users to create course evaluation surveys and learner feedback surveys, making their online courses much more effective in enhancing the learning process.

Besides these online tools, we also offer poll maker and learning aids such as flashcards which make the online courses more engaging and effective.

ProProfs offers hundreds of public online courses. The course categories cover a range of topics such as business, computer science, education and many more. Since our training software is an integrated product, which includes all our other products it is the most ideal for being used within a MOOC. Our Quiz software, is one of the largest online quiz libraries and there are millions of free quizzes on various topics. Another software very popular with learners is our Flashcards Maker, which also consists of millions of flashcards, free and accessible for all. Our Survey Software is a relatively new product but we already have a large bank of surveys which are free for our users to share and reuse.

6.  How is ProProfs helping organizations develop and host MOOCs?

ProProfs Training Software is used by many organizations to create open online courses. One of the primary reasons why organizations prefer using our software is because we allow them to completely focus on course creation, while we handle the course hosting, delivery, data-backup, administration and maintenance. The fact that organizations do not have to download or learn any software coupled with the benefit of not having to hire an IT team to maintain and administer the software, encourages organizations as well as individuals to create and share online courses through our platform.

Since open online courses are taken by thousands of learners at a time, the load spikes are massive and we conduct regular system maintenance so that we maintain a robust system uptime and learners don’t have to face any disruptions. We keep our system maintenance records completely transparent and that is why many organizations believe and trust in us.
 
We are different from other MOOC platforms because we also provide our customers the option to go fully private and even create paid courses - a great revenue model for teachers who wish to create and sell online courses. This makes us the most flexible platform. So you can start off by making an open course, create a private and secure course/training for the company you work at, and another one where you charge users across the web to take the course ....the flexibility is amazing.

Organizations also do not feel locked in, as we give them complete and absolute ownership of the courses they create with us. They can fully brand, customize and embed their courses onto their website or blog as well as integrate the payment gateway with their site and use ProProfs only for the delivery of the courses.

7.  Do you see any new directions arising for MOOCs and their potential to help organizations achieve their missions? 


The current trend is in making the online courses more efficacious by providing accreditation, where learners at the end of an online course get a degree or a completion certificate, which they can use to further their education or career. Once this is fully realized, MOOCs will become all pervasive. In this respect, we have a certification program already set up, where organizations can create custom course completion certificates using their logos, colors and signatures and award it to deserving candidates.

I believe the new directions will be in the adoption of MOOCs by companies and people from different walks of life as opposed to just academic education - wherein universities have so far been the early adopters.

8. Any final thoughts?

We have already witnessed the potential of MOOCs in making quality education accessible to the public. Premier educational institutions such as Harvard, Stanford and many others have effectively used MOOC to reach out to a global learner base.

However, we believe that not just premier institutions but anybody who is willing to share his/her knowledge should be able to have access to the technological resources to do so. The driving force behind ProProfs being free for open courses has been our strong belief that anybody can and should teach. Everyday people from all walks of life create hundreds of courses, on all kinds of subjects, using our learning management system. Our public courses range from simple fire safety courses to complex Java programming language courses. Also, people learn in different ways, not only through courses but tests and quizzes as well. We’ve realised this because we get many emails from our users telling us about how the quizzes in our site helped them do well in their tests.  A case in point are the DMV quizzes, which are taken by thousands of our users everyday and have helped many pass their driving tests with flying colors.

This I feel should be the future of MOOCs where education and learning is not limited to predefined notions of traditional academic courses but is a healthy mix of different types of knowledge resources on a vast array of subjects and interests.

Interview with UWINPro on ProProfs Training Maker: Case Studies in E-Learning

Online training providers are increasingly under pressure to provide quick-to-market, easy-to-implement solutions that avoid cumbersome learning management systems. At the same time, the proliferation of devices and apps has created an environment where solutions have to be simple and elegant enough to work on many devices in situations where bandwidth can be a challenge. This case study examines the experience of UWINPro, who offers training programs in SAP for companies that use SAP for database integration and management. They have been using ProProfs.com and are sharing their experience here.

1) Can you tell us briefly about your company and your relation to e-learning?
We at UWINPro  (www.uwinpro.com) are one of the leading IT Training providers in Canada. We offer Online Training programs to our globally located corporate clients in the fields of SAP, UNIX and ERP courses. We have been focusing on SAP courses like SAP CRM, SAP HANA, SAP BOBJ, SAP ECC, SAP SRM etc.

2) In what ways have you used e-learning while developing your online training programs?
We are using elearning to offering online access to training courses. Currently we are using ProProfs (http://www.ProProfs.com/training) for developing our e-learning courses. To create a comprehensive and an engaging learning experience we use different components inside the courses such as PPTs, Videos, Mind maps, Flash cards, Quizzes and Surveys. These courses can then be accessed by our learners anytime / anywhere at their own convenience.

We use multiple ProProfs products such as Training Maker, Quiz Maker, Survey Maker and Flashcards to create elearning courses.

3) Do you think that online training still has many hurdles to overcome? For instance can online assessments, which are a major part of online training, be trusted? 
Most of the online training software do not work across multiple devices, so a learner using a laptop might be able to access the training program, while someone trying to access the same training program from an iPad might not. A successful online training program must take into account that learners are geographically dispersed and use different devices.

As for online assessments, they are an integral part of online training without which you cannot test the learning of trainees. Again, online assessments need to be device compliant as well and there are a number of ways in which you can make online assessments secure. You can use privacy control features such as password, availability protection &  ID verification. You can also prevent cheating in online assessments through settings available, for example features such as timed assessments, question pooling, randomized question order, answer shuffling and more. With the help of technology, it’s possible to make online assessments completely secure.

4) What is ProProfs Training Maker?
ProProfs Training Maker is an online tool to develop e-training courses by incorporating training materials like PPTs, PDFs, Docs, Pictures, Videos, Quizzes, YouTube videos etc.
Since the Training Maker also includes the Quiz Maker, we have found it easy to create assessments and attach them to our e-courses. Besides this, there are a numbers of key features within Training Maker which you can use to create e-training courses.

5) What are the key features?
Well, our use of the features vary with the requirements of each course but on a broader scale the key features are:

• Reporting & Tracking: We use this to track and capture the information of learners taking our courses. The information can be the name, email, phone as well as the data of individual course takers through which we check compliance issues and defaulters.

• Embedding YouTube Videos & Web links: Since today’s learners want their classes to be more interactive, we import YouTube videos and other web content, through ProProfs platform, to enhance our training course. These training courses can be easily embedded on our website www.uwinpro.com  and added to the existing content in our website

• Use Existing Material:  We like that we are able to create courses using our own existing training materials such as PDFs, PPTs, videos and documents. We also use the existing quizzes in Quiz Maker as it helps in creating assessments quickly.

• Mobile Compliance: With more and more learners using smartphones to access the training programs, all of our course are accessible from any mobile device by leveraging the in built HTML5 conversion in ProProfs.

6) Can you give a few examples of successful implementation?
We have successfully developed few of our SAP training courses and Quizzes, which are also embedded on our website. Visit http://www.uwinpro.com/interactive.html and http://www.uwinpro.com/quiz.html  for more details.

7) What is the future of online training? How do you think it can be improved?
With the upsurge in smartphones and tablets, a geographically dispersed workforce prefers online training rather than the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom. Online training courses are ideal for a geographically-dispersed workforce, as they can take the training from anywhere, anytime and also saves companies the costs on transportation, lodging and trainer fees. Companies have realized this and many are rapidly adopting online training programs to train their employees.

Moreover, online training has become a better, cheaper and faster way of spreading theoretical knowledge and technical know-how for companies as well as educators. So, I think that online training will become the primary channel to teach and share knowledge in the coming years.

The improvement has to be on the interaction side – many learners are still not used to interactive online training and may have some initial learning curve with certain features like online whiteboard. In terms on improvement in Training software, we would like to incorporate advanced security features so that multiple instructors from different parts of the world can securely create courses together and collaboratively.

Build-Your-Own Flashcards: Online and Mobile Devices

If you want to make the most of your downtime while waiting in line, in the doctor’s office, or getting ready for an event, flashcards in on your phone or tablet can help you build your vocabulary. The nice thing about flashcards is that there are many places that allow you to build your own flashcards, as well as access ones that have been created and are being shared.

If you’re interested in creating your own online flashcards, you may wish to check out the following free resources:

Quizlet:  http://www.quizlet.com
You can make cards in English, Spanish, or French, and can incorporate images. You can share your quizzes with your friends or students. It’s also mobile-friendly, and can be used on the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Android, Windows Phone, Kindle Fire and Nook.  You can also generate matching games that include a clock to give you practice working under time pressures.

Braineos:  http://www.braineos.com
Free online flash cards that you can create and share. You don’t have to sign up, but can simply log in with your email address. You can use questions as well as terms. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to add graphics at this time, which limits the ways you can use it. For example, for Human Anatomy, it would be good to include at least a sketch.

Scholastic Homework Hub: http://www.scholastic.com/kids/homework/flashcards.htm
This is a very easy-to-use interface designed for young users. You can print the flashcards. It does not support graphics.

Flashcard Machine: http://www.flashcardmachine.com
The interface is easy to use. No graphics are supported. The existing archives of shared flashcards contain cards with very weird definitions. This is a great example of how you must be careful to align your flashcard definitions with official content.

ProProfs Flashcard Maker: http://www.proprofs.com/flashcards/
Can create downloadable flashcards so that it is not necessary to be connected to the cloud. Can also print flashcards.  Does not allow graphics to be uploaded.

FlashcardExchange:  http://www.flashcardexchange.com
Can create and save flashcards in many languages. According to the website, there are more than 47 million flashcards in their flashcard library.  There is an amazing array of topics in the library, in subject matters as intriguing as Canine Acupuncture points. Unfortunately, there are no graphics. The ads are pretty intrusive.

Anki: http://ankisrs.net/i
This is a very versatile app that does not say it creates flashcards (except in its very thorough and easy to follow manual), but the approach and the functionality are very similar.  The overall learning goals are to reinforce active recall. Anki is functional across a surprising number of platforms and mobile devices. I also appreciated learning that it's optimized for low bandwidth, to reduce data transfer costs. The app is free for download, and the interface is refreshingly clear of annoying and intrusive ads. For that reason, I recommend donating to support it.

Interview with Sameer Bhatia, ProProfs.com: E-Learning Innovators Series

Effective assessment in an online course is not easy to achieve. Courageous developers have tackled online quizzes. It is interesting to look behind the scenes and see the challenges. Welcome to an interview with Sameer Bhatia, founder of ProProfs.com.

1. What is your name and your involvement in e-learning?

I am Sameer Bhatia, the founder of ProProfs.com, an online learning community. Prior to ProProfs I ran an IT certification products company that has been in the business of providing e-learning centered around Cisco certification products.

2. What is ProProfs.com and the learning philosophy behind it?

ProProfs.com is the knowledge FREEway, providing free resources and tools for online knowledge sharing. ProProfs is dedicated to offering new services and content that reflects the diversity of interests and topics in which today's users are engaged. Founded on the idea that knowledge should be freely available to people from all walks of life, ProProfs.com features free schools on SAT & IT certification, and offers an ever increasing portfolio of tools for social knowledge sharing including quizzes, flashcards, blogs, forums and games.

3. What is your view of how best to assess whether or not students have achieved learning outcomes in an online course?

We created ProProfs Quiz Maker (http://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/) to address this need. By allowing educators to create tests, practice questions and quizzes around any topic and then embed them directly into their class websites, learning management system or e-learning courses, we allow educators to ascertain if students are achieving the learning objectives. We also aggregate the data across all attempts so a teacher can better understand what areas of learning the class as a whole needs more attention on.

4. How might assessing if students have achieved learning outcomes be different in a mobile learning course?

While content created using Quiz Maker (http://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/) displays fine in most mobile browsers, we are in process of creating a special version so assessments can be distributed to a classroom easily via mobile devices such as iPhone and iPad. Watch out for this in our upcoming version.

5. what is Quiz Maker and how does it work?

ProProfs Quiz Maker ( www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/) is a free learning tool that enables educators to utilize the power of the Internet to create online quizzes and practice tests for their students. The Quiz Maker provides an easy access for students and educators, without the hassle of downloading bulky software. In addition to the ability to create custom quizzes, we also offer the largest collections of freely available online quizzes, ranging from K-12 education to topics such as technology certification, SAT, GRE and even general trivia.

6. Are there any really bad quizzes or quiz styles that should be avoided at all costs? If you don't mind, describe a very bad (ineffectual or even potentially problematic) quiz and then compare it with a very good quiz. What makes the difference? What do instructors and instructional designers need to keep in mind?

One of the key issues we have seen is the choice between long/short quizzes. Educators need to choose the test style after careful consideration. Long tests have their place in education; for example, many instructors use them during mid-terms or finals. However, to ensure that students are understanding the material, short quizzes in practice mode (with answers revealed immediately after a question is attempted) work much better. These create a stress free environment and students feel encouraged to take the quiz repeatedly. The repetition brings remembrance and helps students master the subject. Using short quizzes in conjunction with larger tests for mid/end of term, have reported strikingly positive results.
With a lot of feedback from teachers we have built features to allow secure & timed long tests as well as short quizzes that can be run in practice mode with customizable results to make learning fun. Educators however need to choose carefully based on the learning objective.

7. Do you have any plans for the future?

Our next version will be available in just a few weeks. Key features would include tracking of who took the quiz, ability to store results and provide more customization of end of quiz results.

8. Please share the name of two good books you've read lately.

The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steven Gary Blank is a must read for entrepreneurs. The other book I read recently is Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson. While both these book are not directly related to e-learning, they have had a big positive influence on how we build our e-learning products. We have stepped up on our feedback loop with educators to ensure we build something that they totally love.