Leading Links 2023 – Issue 3

It’s time for another round of Leading Links, our monthly resource round-up to help you boost the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business. Before we get to the links, we want to share this job opening from the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA): 

• Director, Event Education & Programming
  We know from having worked with them for many years, that the folks in NRECA’s Education, Training & Events department are top-notch. It’s a great team and this is a great opportunity for the right person to become a member of it. 

As noted before, we’re always happy to share job opening announcements in this newsletter and/or on our social media accounts. Just let us know by sending them to leadinglearning@tagoras.com. 

Now, on to the links. 

[Leadership Strategy] The Business of Online Education: A Deep Dive Into Coursera’s Financials
The Report from Class Central is a great source of news and insights in the online course marketplace. This article analyzes publicly available financial documents from Coursera to determine how the company makes money. One insight is that the company offers a “product at every price,” an approach that very much aligns with our Value Ramp concept. The company also has very clear strategies for sales to individuals and sales to enterprises – an approach we advocate for most learning businesses. In general, this is well worth the few minutes it takes to read and could be a valuable basis for discussion with colleagues. 

Microcredentials Confuse Employers, Colleges and Learners 
That’s the bad news that emerges from the three recent studies discussed in this Inside Higher Ed article. The good news though, is that alternative forms of credentialing continue to gain traction – a point also confirmed by a recent report from Wiley that is not covered in this article. The opportunity is in developing relevant credentials for your audience AND ensuring that both employers and learners understand how to use them and get value from them (a topic we also covered in a recent podcast episode with 1EdTech). 

Many thanks to Gayle Claman of the American Society of Civil Engineers for bringing the Inside Higher Ed article to our attention. We always welcome suggestions like this from readers!

The Market Insight Matrix
While we have highlighted the Market Insight Matrix in the past, we were prompted to revisit it based on a recent inquiry about “Using member feedback to influence content development” in a community where we participate. The main idea behind the Matrix is that, to be truly effective, the process of feedback must be ongoing and based upon a diverse range of inputs – i.e., the occasional member/customer survey, while valuable if done right, is insufficient. We discuss this concept as well as use of the Matrix (which is a free tool) in Tool Talk: The Market Insight Matrix.

<<<<  AI Watch >>>>>
ChatGPT-4 has been released in the time between this newsletter and our last one, and the buzz continues to grow. We hope readers are at least playing around a bit with ChatGPT and reflecting on/discussing its potential impact. Here’s a little food for thought:

ChatGPT and Lifelong Learning
ChatGPT can be a very powerful learning tool and its availability is bound to change how our members and customers think about learning, how they go about it, and what their expectations will be for the learning experiences we offer them. This article leverages ChatGPT itself to highlight some of the ways it can be useful for the average lifelong learner. (Mission to Learn, by the way, is a resource we encourage you to share with your learners.)

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That’s it for this edition. Be sure to check out previous issues of Leading Links. There are bound to be valuable resources you missed or have forgotten about. We encourage you to use them as a catalyst for your own learning and for discussions with colleagues. And be sure to follow up on LinkedIn for ongoing resources.