Dan Avida

CEO and Co-Founder of Engageli, Inc. / General Partner at Opus

During his career, Dan has scaled several companies from small founding teams to over $100M in revenues and valuations of over $1B. As co-founder of Decru, he led the company from inception to acquisition. He also served as Chairman and CEO of EFI, where he oversaw the development of its flagship product from its earliest days and achieved market capitalization of over $3B. Dan was a Coursera board member at the company’s inception and holds a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering.

Presentation

[Featured Presentation]

Utilizing technology to meet the imperative of providing quality educational outcomes at scale

Meeting the demand posed by the rapid global growth of individuals seeking higher education simply by building additional buildings/campuses and hiring more faculty members is difficult and expensive. Moreover, the disruptions caused by rapid technological advances require retraining the workforce more frequently, which further increases the demand. Distance learning institutions, such as a pioneering Open University in the UK and online offerings such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) attract millions of students annually. These students are generally presented with the traditional educational model in which the instructor imparts knowledge through lectures while students mostly passively receive the information. Recent advances in AI, data science and immersive video enable online learning to offer modern, interactive and student-centered pedagogy. These methods encourage students to engage actively with the material and collaborate with their peers, leading to stronger learning outcomes and higher student satisfaction.