Expert Network: Learning launch    I am using this assignment to demonstrate the application of learning launch tools.    Introduction:    I lead Global Communications at Coursera. ​Coursera was founded by Daphne Koller and  Andrew Ng with a vision of providing life-transforming learning experiences to anyone,  anywhere. It is now the world’s largest online learning platform for higher education. 190 of the  world’s top universities and industry educators partner with Coursera to offer courses,  Specializations, and degrees that empower over 40 million learners around the world to achieve  their career goals. There are more than 6,000 instructors from these top universities teaching on  Coursera platform.     Challenge:     While Coursera platform has thousands of professors, many of them being world-renowned  voices and subject matter experts, their use of the Coursera platform is often limited to  producing and distributing learning content. In the process, they reach out to thousands of  learners around the world. This is incredibly impactful and gratifying in its own way for both  professors and learners. However, we wanted to create a second-order effect that goes beyond  courses.     Our idea was to create a web destination that houses all the professors on our platform, who  are searchable by their expertise area, and a way for media to connect with them for their  stories. We have these amazing thought leaders on the platform, and Coursera often receives  media requests to connect with these experts, on an average about 10 a month. We now  wanted to create an easy destination and an automated workflow that gets reporters connected  to experts.       Selection:     I found tools proposed in the Learning launch a perfect model to apply. There are a number of  reasons for that:

● Idea validation​ - To ensure professors and university partners feel excited about  participating in the launch, we had to first interview many of them to gauge their pulse.  On the other hand, we also had to talk to various reporters across the world to  understand if they would genuinely appreciate a platform that can help them connect to  expert voices for stories they are working on daily basis.

● Specific Person - ​Two specific personas this idea was meant to serve. One is the  professor who would be interested in sharing their knowledge with the world and growing  their school’s brand. The second is the everyday reporter who is often on a deadline,  running around looking for renowned experts to provide credible quotes for his/her story.

● Has a specific need ​- Its not easy for media to navigate through a university system to  connect with professors. Yes, there are certain savvy professors who are accessible, but  the large majority remain inaccessible. In order to meet the demand, we need a system  that scales to many professors, easily searchable, and has built-in requests flow. This  may have limited appeal in the US where reporters are well-connected with academic,  but imagine a reporter in India wanting to connect with a Stanford professor on machine  learning for a story on biases in machine learning systems. Or a reporter in Argentina  wanting to connect with Rosanna Gonzalez of University of Virginia on a story she is  working on design thinking principles.

● How idea meets the need - ​We created a a website that is accessible worldwide. It has  indexed 300 professors to start with (from a base of 6,000) since we are want to learn  and optimize. We tagged them with their expertise areas and made it searchable. We  also embedded a form through which reporters can submit their requests for connection.  The backend is where the fun starts. Coursera team filters out the requests and sends it  to the professor and university marketing team, which in turn respond to the reporter.  When a reporter is searching for experts, the website shows 3-4 options so if one  professor is busy or unresponsive, the reporter can reach out to others.

● Why our solution is better than other alternatives - ​Most alternatives out there are  run as speaker bureaus who offer a limited choice of experts with a varying degree of  expert reputation. They also charge a fee for the service -- one of reasons why media  mostly avoids using them. Our solution is totally free, screens for highest quality experts  from some of the best schools in the world. These are often authority figures in their  domains.

Insights:    There are a couple of important insights we discovered while applying the tool.

● It was quite important that we don't try and boil the ocean by onboarding all 6,000  instructors on our platform. It would have been time-consuming and complex. Instead,  we prioritized the list to 300 top instructors based on a scorecard we developed for the  highest probability of demand and success. We also wanted to ensure that instructors  we are including in the first round are not only well-known but also enthusiastic about  participating in the Expert network.

● We understood in the hypothesis validation phase that for attention-deficit reporters the  recall of Expert network will start fading after a few weeks of launch. We had to find a  way to keep it top of mind. That is when we adjusted the website architecture to go  beyond a searchable index to also start being a site where professors are commenting  on issues of the day. The site has 3-5 mins videos, audio interviews, podcasts with  professors which constantly gets updated with new short-form content. We also push  this out to reporters on a weekly basis. This gives story ideas to reporters, keeps the site  top of mind, and showcases the quality of professors on the site.

What I might do differently next time:

● I underestimated the technical challenges of creating a website that draws on data from  different data warehouses. Next time, I’d have a data engineer on the project from the  start.

● I also discovered that a lot of skills originally tagged to professors in our existing data  systems are not broad enough or simply too technical that a reporter may not  understand them. We had to rewrite many such skills tags to make it comprehensible for  media. Again, it is something that we underestimated in terms of efforts initially. But glad  that we only did the learning launch with 300, as that allowed us to create a system that  we can now roll-out to thousands in due course.

