Please note that I transcibed the following interview from a video interview during a coffee break atwork, so there may be some grammatical errors.
Open Learning Ltd's (ASX:OLL) Adam Brimo tells Proactive's Andrew Scott they're one of the world's largest online education platforms with over 1.7 million students around the world taking over 8000 courses. '
Q (Andrew Scott, Proactive): With me this morning I'm joined by Adam Brimo, from Open Learning. Adam, good to see you, good morning.
A (Adam Brimo, OLL): Good to see you as well, thanks for having me.
Q: Give us a bit of an introduction Adam. “Open Learning”, I suppose the clue is in the name, but tell us a bit about yourselves.
A: OLL is one of the world's largest online education platforms. We have over 1.7 million students around the world, taking over 8000 courses, from over 62 higher education providers. What we do is we work with universities, colleges,governments, to help them redesign and deploy and deliver, really engaging online courses, that feature more collaboration, project based learning, critical thinking activities. So we are really looking at how we can enable these providers to deliver courses in line with the future of work, and to deliver outcomes for their students. We also have the expertise to move [the courses] online.
Q: What makes OLL unique amongst other online platforms?
A: There are a couple of things that make us unique: one of the key ones is our approach to education itself. OLL follows a research backed philosophy called social constructivism, which is the idea that students work best when they are actively engaged, intrinsically engaged, working on projects. So,if you think of traditional online learning, or traditional education, where you are just sitting there watching somebody talk,and you are doing a quiz or doing a test, OLL is the opposite of that. [OLL] focuses on being active: learning by doing, problem solving. And what OLL does is that we have the technology that make this possible. We have the learning design expertise to work with these institutions to move their programs into that style, and we also have a global marketplace for education for courses, where we can promote these providers' courses to students all around the world.
Q: What are some of these courses?
A: We have worked with institutions to deliver everything from a one hour long course for professional development for teachers, engineers, nurses, all the way through to fully-online fully-accredited post graduate degrees. For example, a Master of Data Science, Graduate Certificates in Cyber Security,English Programs, and everything in between. So OLL is quite flexible.
Q: And as you suggest you have partnered with some of the big universities in Australia?
A: Yes, exactly. We work with 9 universities in Australia, including UNSW in Sydney, University of Technology, University of Melbourne, we also have relationships across South East Asia, and clients around the world.
Q: In these times, when everyone is working and studying from home, this is a bit of an ideal scenario for you?
A: Well, what's happening is not ideal for anybody, unfortunately, but what we can do is that we can help people get through this difficult time, by enabling them to move, if you are a business or education providers, your business or courses online, and if you are a student, providing things for you to study and learn. So I guess what we are seeing today around the world is that these challenges have accelerated the development or the migration towards online education, in a way we didn't think was going to happen or was possible a few months ago.
Q: Well, tell me more, have you seen an increase in queries and student numbers in the last few weeks?
A: Yes, we definitely have. We have seen a substantial increase in enrollments, in the number of inquiries, in the number of the education providers looking at moving online. I would put it into two categories. The first category are providers looking for stop-gap solutions: pretty much as every thing is shut down and they need to move their content online as fast as possible. In most cases that's a very simple, basic, experience for the students. The lecturers are uploading their PDFs, their Powerpoint slides, their videos, and it's really just there to get the material out, and it's not a fantastic learning experience, to be perfectly honest. But that's unfortunately what a lot of people are trying to do.
The second category, which is where we see the biggest opportunity for us because of our research backed approach and technology, is in designing and delivering high quality programs for the medium to long term. So now the world is going to have to live with the situation where we might have to stay home from university or stay home from school, and we don't want to rely on a sub-par learning experience. So we are working with the top institutions in the world to design what they high quality experience looks like, so you can get the same outcomes, the same standards of education, or maybe even better, from an online platform.
Q: Well what about from a cost and pricing perspective? Where do you guys sit on that spectrum?
A: Our model with institutions is quite simple. We have a self-service model and a professional service model, to help them move online. So when universities or colleges or even small education providers are working for us, it is very cost effective. Our model is designed for scale. We have some providers are running courses with thousands or tens of thousands [students participating]. The cost of the technology is very reasonable. I think the challenge is the actual expertise in designing quality online courses – that takes time.This is usually done by a learning design team. We have our own in-house learning design team. We use them to upscale and train the teams at the universities. So we are doing is capability building fora lot of these institutions so that they can do it themselves and keep their costs down.
Q: Very interesting. Adam, just remind us then, as far as the near term, what to expect from OLL, and what you are working on the moment?
A: What we are working on now, is to really help as many providers as possible, take their first steps online. Now, what that looks like are picking specific courses, looking at targeted projects and partnerships in certain industries. For example, recently we signed a partnership with Alibaba Cloud, which will allow students to access courses on OLL at the same speed they could outside of China. That is a big challenge for students in Australa where a lot of Australia-based students have not been able to make it to Australia. So we work at how we can support our clients, and that is one way of doing it.Another partnership, is for a not for profit called High Results,which runs citizenship and social justice education across highschools around the world, and we are helping them move their classrooms online. That will set the standard for high quality learning experiences for highschools online. I think you can expect enter into these kinds of partnership, [continue to] look at how to support our clients, and also I think the key thing is that we are trying to build for the longer term. There are a lot of education providers out there at the moment that are looking at a stop-gap solution, and whilst we can help with those, our focus is on how do we build long term clients, how do we deliver long term value, and we are working on a number of projects, and a number of deals at the moment, where that has been our focus.
