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In front of the jury as in reality, the bottom line is that you only get one shot. Your partners, investors and prospects have to be convinced that your idea will solve their problems. I believe a good presentation is the key to success, so here are some guidelines I give in my sessions:

"Here's what happened," he continues. "First, when one student has the right answer and the other doesn't, the first one is more likely to convince the second-it's hard to talk someone into the wrong answer when they have the right one. More important, a fellow student is more likely to reach them than Professor Mazur-and this is the crux of the method. You're a student and you've only recently learned this, so you still know where you got hung up, because it's not that long ago that you were hung up on that very same thing. Whereas Professor Mazur got hung up on this point when he was 17, and he no longer remembers how difficult it was back then. He has lost the ability to understand what a beginning learner faces."

"I often find it difficult to convince those in "real" colleges that they are in dialogue with for-profit higher education. After all, they're not "our kind of students". This juxtaposition of MOOCs and for-profits is the first time I think this has worked particularly well. As I said at the lecture, we get to MOOCs by way of the lessons venture capitalists have learned from for-profits' uneven success in penetrating the real currency of higher education: prestige. As the founder of 2tor has been rumored to have said, they can't build prestige so they'll just borrow it from existing institutions."

"But I continue to make videos because I'm convinced that the only way I will improve on my craft is by making more videos. See, I believe in a philosophy of beta."

"I am convinced of two things: The education will be the most important growth business of the 21st century. That whatever comes next in education will emerge from India."

"I am trying to answer this question that Learning Program Designers ask me, when I propose that we can include blogging as an activity for learners in their program design: 'Why should we invest time in convincing a learner to blog?'."