EdTech Insiders Weekly Update 9/12

Your 5-minute guide to the edtech world.

Ana Peykova

and

Alex Sarlin

Sep 12, 2022

1. LAUSD CYBERATTACK

Last weekend, Los Angeles School District — the US’ second largest, serving over 500 000 students — was hit with a ransomware attack. Students and staff lost access to email and other platforms, and the district’s website went down; L.A. schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho said no sensitive data was leaked. The FBI joins the investigation and schools are going back to normal, but the problem with increased cyberattacks stays. At least 26 schools have been affected so far in 2022 and ransoms make deep cuts in already limited school budgets. Cyber security investments will likely go up. The big question is, should schools pay ransoms on their own or should (and can) the government allocate funding and set systems in place to tackle the issue at a national level?

2. LEARNING LOSS & PANDEMIC RECOVERY

The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) report for the 2020-2022 period revealed the largest drop in math and reading scores since the 1980s. The results are pretty bleak across all groups, but low income, lowest performance schools and black students show bigger learning loss.

The US had one of the longest closures (77 weeks compared to Japan’s 11, UK’s 27 and Australia’s 46), which also had a negative effect on learning.

If anything, parents don’t seem as worried: several surveys reported that only 9-15% parents are concerned about their child’s learning loss; many even said that their child’s performance improved during the pandemic. This improvement, however, might be the result of grades inflation and not actual learning gains.

It’s rushed to fully discard online learning, but the results are a big wake up call for the industry.

3. AROUND THE WORLD

acquisitions around the world: CHINA: innovation pre-K & post secondary. BRASIL: very large market, language barrier. native language content for upskilling, foreign companies can't penetrate. AFRICA: OAE, QATAR: BYJU'S pass to IPO. give up on what's going on.

CHINA

Educational service provider China Liberal Education acquires Wanwang Investment Limited, a company that runs two independent colleges. New investments are on the rise, but mostly outside of K-12, following the crackdown on private enterprise in education during the pandemic.

BRAZIL

Vitru Limited acquires Rede Enem, a distance learning company offering platform + content for secondary education student. Native language content is specifically good selling point in Brazil, which has a big market but language barrier makes it difficult for foreign companies to penetrate.

AFRICA

Despite challenges like low purchasing power, competition from established companies, and lack of capital, Africa is a promising edtech market, given the continent’s growing and young population (70% aged under 30). The industry has a long way to go: as of 2022, only 4 edtech companies in the whole continent have reached a unicorn status (compared to India with 105 unicorns and a similar population size).

MIDDLE EAST

Maybe it’s time to give up on trying to understand what’s going on with Byju’s. While the company is yet to receive $250 million from Sumeru Ventures and Oxshott and the Ministry of Corporate Affairs has inquired about their delay in filing financial results, Byju’s is in talks with Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund (SWF) and Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) for raising $400-500 million and $250-350 million respectively. The money will be used to further their US expansion.

4. METAVERSE

Back to our newsletter’s permanent section: the Metaverse. As part of its $150 million Meta Immersive Learning project, Meta brought 10 colleges across the US into its metaverse. Facebook’s parent company supplied institutions with their Quest 2 headsets free of charge and helped finance the building of their digital campuses, powered by VictoryXR. VictoryXR, which also provides labs and travels experiences, is becoming a lead vendor for university XR.

Oxford University Press partners with Immersify Education on the company’s interactive dental platform, Immersify Dental.

“In line with our mission, we are actively looking for opportunities to translate our gold-standard research and training manuals into higher-impact immersive technologies and our agreement with Immersify Education is a positive step in that direction,” said OUP’s Andrew Sandland.

Bottom line is, virtual really is happening and it's inevitable. Some use cases are better in the metaverse (dental), but it’s likely these are only very specific curriculum-embedded cases. Along with implementing more and more new tech in education, the challenge is to strike the right balance of in-person and immersive XR learning.

For more, listen to the full episode with guest Anjuli Gupta, Head of Academic Partnerships at Outlier.org.

ANOTHER FIVE

1. COLLEGE FINANCES

Princeton is extending its free tuition and room and board offer to families earning up to $100,000, thanks to the university’s endowment returns. They will implement this program starting in fall 2023, and it is expected to benefit more than a quarter of undergraduates.

“Does it change the world? No. Will it make life better for the small number of people who are fortunate enough to get into Princeton? Sure. … I’m not really worried about these Princeton students. I’m worried about all the people who don’t go to Princeton,” said economist Sandy Baum, expert on college access, pricing and financial aid issues.

2. AMERICAN SCHOOLS GOT A $190 BILLION COVID WINDFALL. WHERE IS IT GOING?

In March 2020, $13.2 billion was allocated for the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund; in December 2020, $54.3 billion was added (ESSER II); in March 2021, another $122 billion (ESSER III). Districts and schools have used the money to develop online learning infrastructure, create safer in-person spaces and provide diagnostic tests and outreach to families about vaccines.

The fund expires in 2024, leaving schools with no ongoing federal funding for recurring costs, like new teacher salaries and tutoring contracts. If districts can show how the funding directly improved outcomes for students, they may be able to plead for more, but this is easier said than done.

Tennessee is the only state that has successfully used the ESSER funding to help prompt changes in how the state funds education long-term. The Tennessee Accelerating Literacy and Learning Corps model and the Best for All district-recognition program provide schools with concrete guidelines and incentives to support students through research-driven initiatives.

3. LEAD LAUNCHES INDIA’S FIRST STUDENT CONFIDENCE INDEX

LEAD has launched India's first Student Confidence Index, assessing confidence levels of students across regions and demographics, surveying 2800+ students across Classes 6–10 in 6 metropolitan cities, 6 non-metros, and 3 Tier 2/3 cities. The index measures students’ confidence in 5 areas: conceptual understanding, critical thinking, communication, collaboration & exposure to opportunities and platforms.

Overall, India stands at a Confidence level of 75/100. The results reveal a gap between students in metro and non-metro cities, with the former outperforming their peers by a significant margin.

4. RESEARCH TO IDENTIFY EFFECTIVE MATH TUTORING DESIGNS FOR UNDERREPRESENTED STUDENTS BEGINS IN U.S. SCHOOL DISTRICTS

Littera Education partners with three school districts across the country on running data-driven experiments to determine the most effective tutoring design from a cost and academic perspective, targeted at historically underserved students. The goal is to design sustainable tutoring programs through experimenting with group size, frequency and other parameters.

5. STUDENT LOANS & RISK-SHARING

Biden’s loan forgiveness plan continues to stir debates, especially about the burden it puts on tax payers.

In the mean time, many call for risk sharing for colleges and universities, saying that it would make them more accountable for their students' debt.

“If we want colleges to pay attention to rising costs and failing students, then they need to bear some of that cost, too. Colleges reap all the benefits of student loan funds while students and taxpayers bear all the risk,” says Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

In 2017, Warren co-authored a bill that would force colleges and universities to pay a share of the outstanding debt if 15% or more of their students defaulted on their loans. The proposal never came to be. As of now, universities and colleges bear no accountability unless 30% or more students default over three consecutive years. In that case, they might lose access to federal loans but this has only happened to 11 schools (out of 4,754 operating institutions!) in the 1999-2015 period.

Risk-sharing could discourage colleges from accepting students who might default on their loans. This will disproportionally affect schools that serve the most vulnerable students. There are other concerns too:

“Many schools will simply pass the cost of the risk-sharing on to the borrower. It’s a basic law of economics that externally imposed increases in the cost of doing business get passed on to consumers, and that is what will happen here at an awful lot of places,” says Terry Hartle, Senior VP for Government Relations and Public Affairs at the American Council on Education.

FUNDING + M&A

LISTEN

In the latest episode, we talk to Ribbon Education co-founders Lisa Jiang and Joe Burgess:

“Data only matters in contexts. So there are plenty of data dashboards that give a lot of details at an individual student level or a snapshot in time. But it's much more useful to see how that student is doing in the context of the whole class or over a period of time. And there's actually a lot more signals that go beyond what you typically get within a LMS.”

Listen to the full episode »