EdTech Insiders Weekly Update (6/12)
Your 5-minute guide to the Edtech world
BANNER WEEK OF FUNDING IN EDTECH
As the US officially enters a bear market this week, we paradoxically saw a run of bullishness in the Edtech space, with seven funding rounds of $50M or more announced:
Multiverse raised a $220M Series D, becoming a unicorn (link)
Guild Education raised a $175M Series F (link)
PhysicsWallah raised a $100M Series A, becoming a unicorn (link)
Go1 raised $100M (link)
Odilo raised $64M (link)
Cuemath raised $57M (link)
Scaler raised $50M (link)
Yes, that’s $766M+ dollars of Edtech funding in one week- more than the global edtech investment for the whole year of 2011.
Is this a lagging indicator of what sure was a great pandemic run for the Edtech space, or an indication that there are still a few optimists with deep wallets left? Watch this space.
BIG FIVE HEADLINES
In case you missed the last Week in Edtech episode, here are the BIG FIVE headlines of the week:
With Money From Facebook, 10 Colleges Turn Their Campuses into ‘Metaversities’
Hosts Ben and Alex continue the conversation on “the Metaverse” and the place of edtech within it. One or many metaverses? Can one company ‘own’ the metaverse? Could there be a public metaverse? Metaverse as public good? Here’s the Insiders’ take.
Guild is a platform for employee benefits, made possible by a B2B payments data layer. This is an updated definition to reflect CEO Rachel Carlson’s discussion of Guild’s product roadmap, which she says will include, “the products that sit around education—everything a worker would need to know to move into the middle class and then thrive there.” Maybe Guild raised this round to defend against the uncertainty of today’s markets, but it is intriguing to read about this new, broader product ambition in the announcement.
Multiverse becomes second European Edtech unicorn with $220M Series D at a $1.7B valuation
Multiverse, founded in London and co-headquartered in NYC, is a company that pairs human coaches, employed by the startup, with apprentices and embeds them together with organizations taking on apprentices, ultimately providing an alterative to traditional higher ed. It last raised $130M in Series C 8 months ago and now just became the newest edtech unicorn.
Sanoma, a media company entering edtech, operates in 11 European countries with over 5000 employees. It will acquire Pearson’s local K12 learning content in Italy (one of the largest K12 learning services markets in Europe) and a small exam prep business in Germany, with agreed enterprise value of EUR 190 million. Once the acquisition is closed, the company plans to invest EUR 10 million in development of digital learning platforms for secondary education over three years.
Despite news of a slowdown and layoffs, there have been some big rounds in India.
ANOTHER BIG FOUR
All caught up with the Edtech Insiders’ episodes? Here are some other major headlines you may not want to miss:
Stereotypes begin as early as 6 years old for girls in STEM
A study found that by the third grade, children already believe boys are more interested in engineering and computer science than girls. These stereotypes likely discourage girls from taking the STEM path early on.
“These beliefs then, as they get older, get linked to their own motivation and their interest,” said Allison Master, assistant professor at the University of Houston College of Education and lead author of the study. “Stereotypes are self-fulfilling prophecies.”
Combating the Commodification of Higher Education
Steven Mintz—history professor at U of Texas at Austin—draws a comparison between higher ed and healthcare, saying both systems are now marketized and largely transactional. He suggests 5 ways to combat this commodification in order to preserve the original spirit and purpose of higher ed: “to provide a transformational, developmental, relationship-rich education”:
Empower a number of individual faculty members to organize cohorts with a thematic focus.
Create a wide variety of cohorts to serve students with differing interests.
Recognize active participation in a cohort program with a special designation on the student’s transcript.
Expand opportunities for students to interact with faculty.
Showcase undergraduates’ research and creative achievements.
An Expansive Look at School Segregation Shows It's Getting Worse
A recent report by U of Southern California and Stanford shows that segregation in schools has not changed much since the 2000s. Sean Reardon, a professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford, identifies residential patterns as the root cause of the problem:
“The bulk of segregation in the United States is still from district-to-district, because districts disproportionately enroll different demographics of students, which can be linked to broader geographical segregation, the report says. But within large school district boundaries, some neighborhoods tend to be richer and more white than others and those tend to get an influx of resources and better teachers.”
READ
Raj Chetty gets a lot of the headlines in the education and inequality world, but Sean Reardon, one of the world leaders on the topic of combatting residential segregation— points out racial and economic disparities as some of the causes of the problem.
Check out Stanford’s Learning Rate Explorer here to compare learning rates by county and socioeconomic status.
If you’d like to dive deeper into this topic, we also recommend Nicky Case’s Parable of the Polygons, an interactive article exploring the emergent property of residential segregation through a series of gamified simulations.
LISTEN
Enjoyed the game above? Let’s talk games then! In the latest Edtech Insiders’ episode we spoke to serious games expert Sarah Toms, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Wharton Interactive:
“When you think about a movie or a TV show that you've been engaged with, you do get pulled into that narrative. We're storytellers naturally. What we care about within alternate reality courses is that narrative helps with that retrieval process exactly because you become so engaged. So when you get immersed into a narrative; when you get drawn into all of these high stakes decision making situations; when you are really playing the starring role in this experience, those connections start to really come to life.”
To hear more about Sarah’s work on gamified learning in higher ed, listen to the full interview here or on any platform where you get your podcasts.
PLAY
In the last This Week in Edtech episode, Ben and Alex play a game of $100 Club.
Rules are simple: 1) you have $100 to invest, 2) you get 3 real companies to invest in at their current valuations.
How are you spending your money and why? (And don’t try to cheat—an equal split means you lose the game right here, right now.)
Your 3 companies are:
In Ben’s words, where would you put your buckaroos? Let us know by leaving a comment down below!
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I would buy 2U as the current value is very low? It may be the perfect target for M&A.