Online education next wave: peer to peer learning

ABSTRACT

Online education is no longer a trend; it is slowly but surely becoming a norm. It has become a global phenomenon driven by the onslaught of coronavirus pandemic, emergence of new learning platforms, and wide acceptance of teaching and learning in online synchronous and asynchronous modes by diverse stakeholders. Current online education technologies and platforms emphasize interactions between professors and students. Through the holistic model of online education, we emphasize in this article student-to-student (peer-to-peer) learning in the online mode similar to what exists in the traditional F2F mode. The evolving student-to-student interactional SolveitNow model at present covers tertiary education students. With requisite changes, it can be easily applicable to secondary and primary education students. SolveItNow is currently in beta testing on a large scale at multiple levels of Mathematics education.

EVOLUTION OF ONLINE LEARNING

The ubiquity of information technology has impacted almost all aspects of our lives: the way we work, live, drive, entertain ourselves, interact with others, process, analyze, and share information. E-evolution or e-revolution (Palvia, 2013) has witnessed e-mails, e-work (telecommuting), e-commerce, e- government, and now e-education. E-education, or online education, is changing the way we approach teaching and learning. Changes in education delivery models have been profound and have generated huge interest among researchers, educators, administrators, policymakers, publishers, and businesses.

Dziuban and Picciano (2015) describe the evolution of online education in four phases. The first phase began in the 1990s and universities like Penn State World Campus and University of Maryland College, which already had well-established distance learning programs, were able to quickly adapt their programs for online delivery leveraging the capabilities afforded by the Internet. During this time, University of Phoenix also entered the online education market and soon became a key player. The demand for online programs continued to grow and by 2002 approximately 1.6 million students in the U.S were enrolled in at least one online course (Allen & Seaman, 2015). The second phase of online education (2000 to 2007) saw tremendous growth in enrollment – the Babson Survey Research Group estimated that by 2008 there were approximately 4.6 million students in the U.S enrolled in at least one online course. Dziuban and Picciano (2015) refer to the third phase (2008–2013) as the MOOC phenomenon, when a new model of online education called “MOOC” (Massive Open Online Courses) evolved. The MOOCs are a different model of online education, where the goal is to offer online education at a large scale with no or very little cost to students. Several MOOC platforms, like Udacity, Coursera, and EdX, emerged. The period from 2012 is called the Fourth phase – during this time online education enrollments continued to grow outpacing traditional higher education enrollments. The Babson Survey Research Group has been tracking the growth of online education in the United States since 2002. The 2018 report (Seaman et al., 2018) notes that enrollments in distance education programs have continued to increase despite the decline in enrollments in higher education. By 2016, there were more than 6 million students in the U.S enrolled in at least one distance education course, representing 31.6% of all students. The report also highlights that online and distance education is not limited to graduate education; in fact, there are nearly five times as many undergraduate enrollments (4,999,112) compared to graduate enrollments (1,022,993) among students taking at least one online course. Globally also online education has been growing steadily. The World Economic Forum (WEF report, 2020) estimates that the overall market for online education is projected to reach $350 Billion by 2025.

To address the changing needs of students, an increasing number of business programs have been incorporating online and blended education in their undergraduate, graduate, and executive education programs. According to the Market Research firm Asfanian (Friedman, 2016), business administration remains the most popular discipline for online graduate programs. AACSB data collected from 521 accredited schools representing 36 countries, shows that there is an increase in the number of schools offering fully online degree programs at all levels (Nelson, 2016). According to the report, the proportion of schools offering online degrees increased from 25 to 37% in the period 2011–2016. While online MBA programs continue to grow, significant increase (more than 67 and 80% increase) is seen at the online specialized courses (like preparing for CPA exams) graduate and undergraduate levels.

Despite the increase in the popularity of online education over the years, growth in online learning has been concentrated in just a few institutions (Seaman et al., 2018). Acceptance of online education among faculty has also been low. In annual surveys conducted by Inside Higher Ed and Gallup, faculty attitudes toward technology and online education have improved slightly over the years, but still, many faculty members had not fully embraced online learning (“Inside Higher Ed, 2019 Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology”). Only forty-two percent reported that they had taught a fully online class. Faculty have continued to remain skeptical about the effectiveness of online learning compared to face-to-face.

While online education had been growing steadily in the ten years since 2011 and gradually becoming prominent, COVID-19 pandemic forced institutions to embrace online education quickly on a much larger scale. The pandemic caused school closures worldwide and more than 1.2 billion children in 165 countries were impacted (WEF report, 2020). This crisis changed education dramatically and required faculty and students to abruptly transition to online learning. Before the pandemic, there were only a few universities that fully embraced and strategically used online education. Most of the other universities had online offerings but these were not a primary component of their offerings. The pandemic prompted institutions and faculty to rethink their approach and views toward online education. Govindarajan and Srivastava (2020) state that the current crisis has created a perfect storm and opportunity for higher education institutions to examine their approach and strategy toward online education. They note that “The current forced experiment with online education has significantly lowered the psychological barriers to change among parents, students, faculty, and university leaders.” However, the growth in online education has been uneven and remains concentrated in just a few institutions. This suggests that not all institutions can easily leverage online education. The varying degree of acceptance for online education among students, faculty, and administrators; inadequate technology infrastructure, and low quality of the online experiences may explain this disproportionate adoption of online learning.

Changes in educational delivery have also been driven by external factors. Economic factors, changing student demographics, and emergence of new technologies have contributed to the evolution of online education. Year 2012 is considered a watershed for online education, when a new model of online education, namely, “Massive Open Online Courses” was introduced. This led to increased online offerings and different models of programs such as competency-based education, and alternate credentials (badges, nanodegrees, micrometers, industry certifications, etc.). The year of 2020 will go down as the year of rapid and revolutionary adoption of online education. COVID-19 pandemic transformed many economic and social sectors including delivery of education at all levels. Delivery of education at tertiary level was no exception forcing institutions and instructors to quickly adopt online learning in an effort to provide continuity in learning for their students. Administrators and faculty worldwide are trying to evaluate their experiences of transitioning to online during the epidemic, so that they can use these insights to develop the right delivery model for their students in crisis or even non-crisis times.

WHAT IS LACKING? PEER TO PEER LEARNING

At the Micro level, four factors (Kumar et al., 2019) that interact with each other are: Technology, Students, Courses, and Professors working toward achieving desired learning outcomes (Figure 1). For students, the sub-factors include motivation, culture, learning style, and IT skill level. For professors, the component factors include, but are not limited to, role (e.g., moving from “sage on the stage” to “cyber guide on the side”) or teaching mode (cognitive, affective, managerial) and IT skill level. Course factors typically include discipline, vocational versus liberal arts, physical science versus social science; and learning outcomes using perhaps Bloom’s well-known taxonomy. Technology characteristics that can be considered are platform (LMS type) used and perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use.

Figure 1. Online education interactions

In online education, student-to-student interaction is generally facilitated with an Asynchronous Discussion Board which is under the supervision of the Professor. We refer to this as Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Learning. In physical space, students in the olden days used to sit down in the library or dorm lounges to discuss homework assignments and learn from one another. They also used to prepare for quizzes and exams in a similar fashion. How do we provide this facility in the online education environment?

PAST EFFORTS TOWARD PEER TO PEER (P2P) LEARNING

P2P Learning can be described as a way of moving beyond independent to interdependent or mutual learning (Boud, 1988). Researchers from the University of Ulster identified ten different models of P2P learning (Griffiths et al., 1995). These included traditional models in which senior students tutor junior students; having more innovative learning spaces for peers in which students in the same level form partnerships to assist each other; discussion seminars; private study groups; buddy-system; peer-assessment schemes; collaborative project work; and community activities.

Students learn a great deal by explaining their ideas to their peers and by participating in activities in which they can learn from their peers. They develop skills in organizing and planning learning activities, working collaboratively with others, giving and receiving feedback and evaluating their own learning. Some students do not participate in class due to the fear of answering the teacher incorrectly. This severely hinders the student’s expression in the classroom. Most students fear judgment. Peer-to-peer learning removes all these impediments thus improving their academic and collaborative skills.

Formalized P2P learning has the potential to make learning more effective. At a time when university resources are stretched and demands upon staff are increasing, IT offers students the opportunity to learn from one another without any geographical or time barriers. It gives them significantly more practice than traditional teaching and learning methods. P2P learning interactions result in students taking responsibility for their own learning and more importantly learning how to learn. It is not a substitute for teaching and activities designed and conducted by faculty members, but an important addition to the existing repertoire of teaching and learning activities.

Web Technology is now an important driver toward innovation in peer to peer learning. Through the Web technology, it is highly improbable, if not impossible, for a teacher to interact individually with a large number of students. When tried, it becomes hopelessly time consuming compared to such individual interaction in F2F teaching. Professors have office hours as part of F2F teaching and that can also keep them hopelessly busy. But, students of today prefer to interact through the web. Hardly any student shows up during the office hours. Students don’t want to meet anymore in the library or elsewhere in a physical space to continue the good old P2P learning. P2P learning through Internet provides a key solution to these challenges. It allows tutors the flexibly to use their own time to deal with the high-volume of interaction emerging from discussions among groups of students. It has been argued that collective forms of peer to peer F2F learning suit only some students but not all (Chalmers & Volet, 1997; Slavin, 1995). This has been particularly true for women and students from certain cultural backgrounds, as peer to peer learning activities nurture and value co-operation and not competition within groups and encourage mutual respect for the gender, age, and cultural backgrounds of the participants.

P2P learning enhances deeper understanding of concepts, leading to the information being retained in long-term memory, rather than short-term memory. This situation inspired the first author to innovate a P2P learning method dubbed SolveItNow, similar to the WhatsApp method for communication and information sharing.

EVOLUTION OF SolveItNow

Teachers teach, students learn. That’s the current hub-spoke model of education. Just like networks evolved from hub-spoke to peer-to-peer architecture, we surmise that student learning has been also slowly but surely evolving from primarily teacher-student to both teacher-student and student-student architecture. This evolution is particularly true for professional and high-schools & college students.

Traditionally students are accustomed to instant solutions from live tutors or from Question-Answer banks. It is important to validate the concept of students asking questions and then wait for solutions in an iterative manner. Asynchronous learning is key to deeper understanding of complex concepts as it avoids instant answers and instead facilitates the problem-solving process. This approach can lead to Eureka feeling among the questioners when the solution is achieved. We tested this concept by problem-solving discussions on WhatsApp with one student and his couple of friends.

This WhatsApp experience gave us confidence that we can indeed evolve the current teacher-centric hub-n-spoke model of education to a learner-centric peer-to-peer model. It was an essential validation for our model primarily for two reasons:

1. Scale: Globally, peer-2-peer networks have outpaced hub-n-spoke networks in terms of growth and impact.

2. Monetization: Traditionally, time is sold as a premium, making tutoring very costly and not accessible for many. Solving in one’s own free time can dramatically lower the cost as well as enhance the outreach.

For the innovator (first author), this evolution started in June 2016, as a WhatsApp chat with a student to help him solve his rather complex problem in Physics by giving hints & ideas to encourage insight discovery. Traditional Internet-based forums lack the tools to have effective utilization of a problem solver’s time to facilitate filtering out the right questions to discuss and ultimately solve a problem in an iterative manner.

Innovator had to reflect and reimagine the following:

How to go from a Teacher-led process to a Peer-led process to solve a Math & Science problem?

What-if we encourage students to go through peer-to-peer micro-tutoring for problem-solving?

After several months, the product SolveitNow, a peer-to-peer group-study app, was born in May 2018. It’s primarily meant for high-school and college students who create their study-groups to ask relevant study-problems and do follow on discussions to find the best answers to their questions and help others answer theirs. It’s as simple as sending a WhatsApp message and as effective as StackOverflow¹ to get insightful hints/solutions. In a nutshell, SolveItNow is like StackOverflow meets WhatsApp for STEM subjects. As luck would have it, SolveitNow received significant early traction!

ANALYSIS, DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT OF SolveItNow

While innovating SolveitNOW, it was intriguing to learn how someone gets an insight to solve a complex problem. Specifically,

1. What kind of adaptive-hints can make students better at solving mathematics and physics problems?

2. And how AI can enable students to get better with smart-hints?

With these questions in mind, the first author innovator decided to work full-time to build SolveItNow. Clearly, the mission was to help millions of kids across the globe to excel at problem-solving in STEM subjects by connecting them with relevant friends, peers, and experts.

While designing SolveItNow, the goals were the following:

1) Design experiences so that students do productive struggle and make connections,

2) Give support when they need it and provide positive feedback when they are successful.

3) Train students to take increasing ownership of and control over their own learning and reduce reliance on teachers to curate all their learning.

Our initial discussions with several students revealed the following key insights about smart students:

1. They don’t want to be spoon-fed.

2. They really like to see their competence being valued and of value to someone else.

3. For them, the joy of problem-solving trumps just money-based incentivizing. This concept is similar to how Wikipedia has been developed and continuously updated by knowledgeable people around the world.

Our design goals for SolveitNOW were the following three key attributes which are pronounced by World-Economic-Forum (WEF-report: Schools of the Future, 2020) as transformational:

1. Problem-based and Collaborative Learning – P2P interactions must impact student-to-student engagement to solve questions and develop insights.

2. Personalized and Self-paced Learning – P2P learning must be based on diverse individual needs and flexible enough to enable each learner to progress at his/her own pace.

3. Lifelong and Student-driven – P2P learning should help learners continuously improve on existing skills and acquire new ones based on their individual needs.

Guided by these goals, we developed the following four components that deliver value to problem solvers (hint givers) and insights to problem askers (learners):

1. Submitting Attempts: Askers are expected to show their work via submitting their attempts rather than just asking for help for an answer. It helps solvers to understand the askers’s perspective and help him where he is stuck. This makes the learning active and also builds the feeling of being understood on both sides.

2. Upvotes/Downvotes: Good questions and smart answers do get up votes from the community. SPAM is down voted. This reputation check helps askers/solvers keep the discussion to the point and provide relevant feedback. This makes the follow-on discussions highly effective. High impact on the community builds a feeling of competence and mutual respect.

3. Nano Practice: Every learning is goal based so we provide goal-based Nano Practice sessions. This helps us identify learning gaps with students who could not do well on these Nano Tests. Those who perform excellent on these nano tests are identified as smart-peers for solving of questions of askers in the future.

4. Smart Study Groups: Learners can only send their Questions to their study-groups and based on their activity SolveItNow helps them build a global-peer-group. This helps in keeping the platform spam free.

With SolveitNOW, one can share/develop insights as they progress from K9 to College. It empowers the student community with peer collaboration, personalized life-long learning, and more closely mirroring the future of work.

TESTING of SolveItNow

We observed students’ behavior on Quora and learned what students were asking. We engaged them to try SolveitNOW to get better help. We noticed the following:

1. When someone is stuck, he/she is already under cognitive load, so the app has to be cognitively simple and engaging.

2. Students loved the follow-up discussions and insight discovery built into SolveItNOW.

3. Students, especially females, hate spam and love privacy.

4. All users loved to follow and connect with bright-peers. This led us to build several self-curated peer-groups.

5. Participants loved to see the impact of their contributions. This resulted in “ThanksPoint” feature that enables community members can up-vote a problem and/or its solution to thank the problem poser as well as the problem solver. ThankPoints can be redeemed for cash cards.

6. Several users wanted to contribute more to problem-solving by utilizing their active time. So, we built “Pencil-Points” that can be earned via answering or explaining a time-sensitive question. Pencil-Point can be redeemed into cash cards.

PRINCIPAL FEATURES OF SolveItNow

The principal features are:

1. Ask SolveitBuDDy: This feature help askers to connect with peers outside of their friend network.

2. Micro Tutoring: It’s a small-sized explainer session in which the askers get solutions explained in a step-by-step way to clear all points of confusion.

3. Pencil Points: A solver can earn pencil-points as a reward, based on the impact of their solution, e.g., a solution is upvoted by many community members. These are the reward points one has to part with when askers ask the questions. One can also earn pencil-points if one posts really good questions and these are bookmarked by other community members.

4. Thanks Points: Users earn Thanks-Point for their contribution to the community based on the quality of the contents and interactions.

5. Nano Practice:- Students are nudged to invest a small chunk of time to build competence rather than waste on social media. In 15 minutes of available time, one may pick up a concept to master, and our AI engine will create a nano-practice session of 3 questions. Performance in these nano-practices will help SolveitNOW discover a student’s study needs and recommend a personalized learning path.

HOW SolveItNow is BETTER THAN THE COMPETITORS?

Among several others, main competitors include Khan Academy, YouTube, Google Search, WhatsApp. Broadly there are three levels (zones) of online apps/tools students refer to when they get stuck -:

1. Tutoring Apps – Yup.com, GotItApp, TopprDoubts, HashLearn, SnapAsk, Vedantu, Tutorme.com, Kunduz (First Zone)

2. Content Apps – Khan Academy, Byjus, Chegg, Doubtnut, Socratic/Google, WolframAlpha, CK12.org, Brilliant.org (Second Zone)

3. Social Learning Apps – Quora, Brainly, Piazza (Third Zone)

We’re building SolveitNOW for the Fourth zone as a Virtual Group Study App for high time-pressure needs that requires discussion with multiple solvers. And with time SolveItNow aims to also capture the high-value part of the above three zones too. Figure 2 above captures these 4 zones based on Time Pressure and Single versus Multiple Problem Solvers.

Figure 2. Learning zones according to High/Low time pressure and Single/Multiple problem solvers

For private group interaction, students currently use WhatsApp. In WhatsApp, you can only ask within your group, and only group members can respond. Posting in several groups leads to several separate conversations. On SolveitNOW you can ask from multiple study-groups in just one click to get the step-by-step solution in a single conversation thread, and all this with zero time-waste. If you’re on a time-sensitive task you can ask for an Explainer Session to get timely solutions.

We believe that using SolveItNOW can easily deliver 10 times the efficiency that students might get from using WhatsApp. SolveitNOW has the following distinctive advantages over its competitors:

1. It is transforming learning experiences accessible through an empowered network of Peer-to-Peer askers and solvers.

2. P2P networks have outpaced hub-n-spoke models in growth and impact. Hence SolveitNOW is a better alternative for Insight Discovery, and it’s highly affordable.

Teachers love it, as they can create a study-group of their classes and post intriguing problems or recommend learning material that can spark curiosity and help build competence.

FUTURE of SolveItNow

SolveitNOW’s potential to deliver value to students is truly transformational in at least three ways.

1. Innovation and creativity skills – Problem-solving and learning about alternate solutions build up innovation skills in students.

2. Interpersonal skills – Discussing with peers outside your friend circle, to solve Math/Science problems help to build empathy, cooperation, leadership, and social awareness.

3. Global citizenship skills – Using SolveItNow results in cross-cultural and cross-country interactions among students thereby facilitating awareness about the wider world and motivating them to play an active role in the global community.

SolveItNow is clearly headed to become a meaningful disruptive educational technology. To give a perspective, recently SolveItNow was scouted by Antler,² a global early-stage accelerator. In Feb 2021, their investment committee adjudged SolveItNow to be among the world’s top 3% startups that have the potential for global impact.

SolveItNow is laser-sharp focused on solving high school and college-level problems in Math/Science for now with an ambitious plan to enlarge the scope to other subjects. The goal is to serve students and the teacher community with tools and content for a very satisfying learning/teaching experience.

Very soon SolveItNow will launch Solveit.ai, a mock test engine that will:

1. Advocate micro tests to help test takers assess their competence.

2. Suggest micro-content to bridge the learning gaps determined in the previous step.

In the long term, SolveItNow will work on:

1. Adding millions of users and adding geographies other than the USA and India.

2. Creating a computational AI engine that can provide smart-hints based on the questions asked by students.

3. Building a TeachYourself AI Engine that will help create a learning pack automatically from the web and also create mock tests from the previous year’s questions.

All the above will have a global perspective and go beyond STEM subjects to other academic and non-academic subjects.

LONG TERM BUSINESS MODEL FOR SolveItNow

Offline group-study is a well-established behavior. However, virtual collaboration is still a new phenomenon for students worldwide. SolveItNow aims to first get stable user behavior on the app and then plan to monetize the existing user base with a freemium model.

While basic use of the app shall be almost FREE – only $1 a month. SolveItNow has experimented with three revenue streams:

1. Time-sensitive urgent solutions and video-based 1:1 explainer sessions.

2. Nano Practice and MockTest (premium service).

3. Teach Yourself problem-packs for Guided Learning path (premium service).

Expert students will earn pencil-points on the app and create an impact among peer communities. Users will buy subscriptions and spend pencil-points to avail services on SolveItNOW.

On average, we want to lower the cost of tutoring by 7 times through peer-to-peer learning and acquire new users who can’t afford tutoring as of now. We’ll empower nerdy students to be bright-peers for micro-tutoring.

FUTURE OF ONLINE LEARNING

Creativity is a fundamental skill for the 21st Century. The complex problems that modern-day society faces – e.g., climate change, housing shortage, healthcare delivery – needs innovative solutions, which are the end products of creative problem-solving. Further, our economy itself is relabeled as the creative economy. Whilst the need for creativity is an all-time high, the ability to think creatively has declined over the past 20 years (Bloom and VanSlyke-Briggs, 2019 & Kim, 2011). Therefore, strategies are urgently required that can reverse this trend. Without action, the next generation will be unprepared for the needs of the future, creating risks for both productivity and social cohesion.

World Economic Forum (WEF-report: Schools of the Future, 2020) has enumerated eight critical characteristics in learning content and experiences to define high-quality learning for the creative economy:

1. Global citizenship skills: Include content that focuses on building awareness about the wider world, sustainability, and playing an active role in the global community.

2. Innovation and creativity skills: Include content that fosters skills required for innovation, including complex problem-solving, analytical thinking, creativity, and systems analysis.

3. Technology skills: Include content that is based on developing digital skills, including programming, digital responsibility, and the use of technology.

4. Interpersonal skills: Include content that focuses on interpersonal emotional intelligence, including empathy, cooperation, negotiation, leadership, and social awareness.

5. Personalized and self-paced learning: Move from a system where learning is standardized, to one based on the diverse individual needs of each learner, and flexible enough to enable each learner to progress at their own pace.

6. Accessible and inclusive learning: Move from a system where learning is confined to those with access to school buildings to one in which everyone has access to learning and is therefore inclusive.

7. Problem-based and collaborative learning: Move from process-based to project- and problem-based content delivery, requiring peer collaboration, and more closely mirroring the future of work.

8. Lifelong and student-driven learning: Move from a system where learning and skilling decrease over one’s lifespan to one where everyone continuously improves on existing skills and acquires new ones based on their individual needs.

Online Learning has to adapt and align as per the above to empower learners to excel in the 21st-century creative economy. Peer-to-Peer learning in an online mode can be termed Online Education 2.0 with a focus on Solve-to-Learn, leading to relaxed exam taking. This second generation of online learning is likely to trump Education 1.0 which is Instructor led with a focus on Learn-to-Solve leading to Exam Anxiety. Education 2.0 is a vast improvement over the current genre of online tutoring which is essentially cheaper tutoring by college students or teachers. The long-term viability of Online Education 2.0 will be obviously derived from the peer-to-peer network-based knowledge exchange for discovering and sharing insights.

We invite the JITCAR readers to experience www.SolveitNOW.app and join more than the current 50 K users and still growing users who are enjoying peer-to-peer virtual learning to:

1. Ask and get Step-by-Step Answers to their toughest Math/Science questions.

2. Discover new insights from discussions with peers and experts.

3. Take 15-minutes NanoTests³ to assess self-knowledge and build competence.

We’re piloting with After-School Programs in the US and India to expand our P2P student network and to jump the next growth curve.

Case Study

1: https://medium.com/@harshdeep33.k/doubts-kill-more-dream-than-failure-so-just- solveitnow-3b1cd94ee07c-4d3ef2dd27ee

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shekhar Chandra

Mr. Shekhar Chandra is an EducationTech entrepreneur who has over a decade of entrepreneurial experience and leadership excellence. He is on a mission to help every student excel at his/her studies and to be successful in life. He is currently heading SolveitNOW with the laser-sharp focus to help high-school and undergraduate college students to discover insights for their STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) subject needs. Mr. Chandra also engaged with YouLEAD as a growth—and—innovation consultant using Applied Brain Science principles to benefit individuals and organizations. He is currently coauthoring a self-help book ‘Stand-Out’ to empower you to lead, work and live more persuasively. He has an Integrated B.Tech. (B.S.) and M.Tech. (M.S.) degree from IIT-Delhi in Mathematics & Computer Science. He is an expert in Applied Brain Science, personalized search algorithms, and AI technologies.

Shailendra Palvia

Dr. Shailendra C. Palvia is Professor Emeritus of MIS at Long Island University (LIU) Post. At LIU, he was Director of MIS during 1997-2004. He received his Ph.D. and M.B.A. from the University of Minnesota, and B.S. in Chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India. He has published over 150 articles in refereed journals and conference proceedings including Decision Sciences, Communications of the ACM, MIS Quarterly, Information & Management, and Communications of AIS. He is Founding Editor (1999-2007 and 2013-2020) and currently advisory editor of the Journal of IT Case and Application Research (JITCAR). During 2002-2013, he chaired eleven annual international smart-sourcing conferences in USA, India, and South Korea. He was nominated by the LIU Post to receive Robert Krasnoff Lifetime Scholarship Award in 2012 and 2016. Dr. Palvia has co-edited four books on Global IT Management and one book on Global Sourcing Management. He spent four months of January to April, 2017 at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India as Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar. He has been an invited speaker (including keynote speaker) to Germany, India, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, and USA.

Notes

¹ StackOverflow.com is a community-based platform to find and contribute answers to coding questions.

² Antler is a global early-stage VC enabler and investor in exceptional entrepreneurs.

³ A Normal test lasts 2 to 3 hours, a Mini test will be of 1 hour duration, a Micro test will last for 30 minutes, and a Nano test is of 10 to 15 minutes duration. We want to leverage the association of iPOD Nano. These Nano tests are really small time investment but deliver huge results for learning.