Extension Engine
Blog

Warren Buffett’s right hand man, Charlie Munger, coined (or made famous) the idea of the “too hard pile.” Back in the day when communication was by physical letters and memos, you would have three bins on your desk: inbox, outbox and the “too hard pile.” In Charlie’s world of investing at Berkshire Hathaway, the key was to look at an investment opportunity and decide where it belonged. If there was “hair on the deal”, his rule was to put it in the “too hard pile” and move on.

ExtensionEngine teamed up with Jennifer Gormley, Senior Director, Product at McKinsey Academy to present a webinar on “Using Open edX for online training to generate revenue or create impact.”

From time to time, we like to take a look at the learning experiences other organizations are creating to help sharpen our own edge in instructional design and user experience.

Please, not another “we ought to put this online” idea….

Recently we’ve been speaking with companies that deliver training and generate revenue from it. Most of these companies deliver this training in-person. They’ve done it this way for years, they know how to get students, deliver the training and generate good revenue. And when we suggest to them that they think about moving it online, we often hear “No! We’ve tried that and it didn’t work. It was hard. The students didn’t like the experience. We never got the results we hoped for. I am not going there again.”

It’s always gratifying to read an article that validates your position and provides evidence that you have, indeed, been making the right decisions and are providing a valuable and much-needed service.

For us, one such publication is a recent white paper, Report on Coursera online course for University of Chicago and Booth School of Business written by John H. Cochrane. The white paper enumerates various “lessons learned” from Cochrane’s venture into online course development as he adapted a Ph.D. level course, Asset Pricing, for the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) environment.