e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Business & Economics

The “Business & Economics” category covers the business aspects of ed tech, including the financial health and business models of individual companies, economic aspects of selling in education that shape the available offerings, and coverage of markets and investment.

  • Some Notes On Lumen Learning’s $3.75 million Funding Round Led By Follett

    Some Notes On Lumen Learning’s $3.75 million Funding Round Led By Follett

    Today’s biggest ed tech news was Lumen Learning – co-founded by David Wiley and Kim Thanos and focused on getting deeper adoption of OER in higher education – and their new round of funding. And this news goes beyond pure investment, as Follett, the large campus retailer that “serve[s] over half of the students in the United States, and work with 80,000 schools as a leading provider of education technology, services and print and digital content”, led the funding round.

    First up a disclosure: Lumen Learning is a client of MindWires (the consulting side of e-Literate, or our capitalistic alter ego), and we have had a consulting relationship with Lumen for almost 18 months. We mostly don’t blog about our consulting work, and I do not plan to describe our advice to them, but we are not neutral observers on this one.

    As described in the press release:

    Follett will offer Lumen Learning’s OER solutions to more than 1,200 colleges and universities where Follett manages course materials delivery. Given Follett’s ongoing mission to improve access and affordability for students, the company has invested in Lumen Learning to help fund future growth and expansion of OER courseware.

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  • Cengage and OER Podcast Series: Two steps forward and one step back

    Cengage and OER Podcast Series: Two steps forward and one step back

    Last fall I wrote about Cengage, one of the big three publishers for higher education, sponsoring and releasing a survey on Open Education Resources (OER). The survey headline:

    Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education have the potential to triple in use as primary courseware over the next five years, from 4 percent to 12 percent, according to a survey of more than 500 faculty by Cengage Learning. In addition, the use of OER for supplemental learning materials may nearly quadruple in size, from 5 percent to 19 percent.

    But the hidden headline could have been viewed by skeptics as “a publisher fully interested in OER – what’s the catch?”. As time goes on, it is looking more and more like there is no catch other than Cengage promoting OER and trying to understand the nature of OER internally while sharing those lessons. Today’s news is that on the company’s OER resource page they have launched a new podcast series titled “Journey to OER”.

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  • Recommended Reading: CBE platforms represent a truly niche market

    Recommended Reading: CBE platforms represent a truly niche market

    Triggered by the news that we broke here at e-Literate that “Ellucian Stops Support for Brainstorm, its CBE platform”, Carl Straumsheim at Inside Higher Ed has a valuable follow-up article today looking more broadly at the CBE platform market. In “Finding a Niche in a Niche Market”, Carl interviews chief product and strategy officer at Ellucian, and several ed tech CEOs active in the market. The lede:

    Last year, Ellucian partnered with the consulting and research firm Eduventures and the American Council on Education to survey 251 colleges on their competency-based education strategies. The survey identified one major reason why the competency-based education market may be a tricky one for vendors to build a profitable business model in: most colleges aren’t ready to go all in yet. [snip]

    Additionally, Ellucian’s own customers told the company that they were not prioritizing spending money on platforms specifically for competency-based education when they could use their existing learning management systems for those experiments, [chief product and strategy officer] Williams said.

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  • Recommended Reading: IHE coverage of NBER paper and critiques

    Recommended Reading: IHE coverage of NBER paper and critiques

    For those following my two recent posts about the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper claiming to analyze “The Returns to Online Postsecondary Education”, there are two articles I recommend for broader coverage – both from Inside Higher Ed. The first article is “Online Ed’s Return on Investment”, where Carl Straumsheim summarized the report itself as well as early critiques from me, Russ Poulin from WCET, and Jeff Seaman from Babson Survey Research Group.

    “Even a quick check with one of the databases they did use … would show they are off on their counts and should have made them rethink their assumptions,” Poulin said in an email.

    Jeff Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group, called the methodology “seriously flawed.” The Babson Group previously produced annual reports on the size of the online education market but began to focus more on in-depth surveys after the federal government began collecting and reporting online enrollment data.

    The second article, titled “Impressions of the Hoxby Study of Online Learning”, came out today where Doug Lederman asked for impressions from a dozen higher ed observers. Most observers were critical of the data issues as we have noted at e-Literate, but there were a few with positive reactions. I think that Deb Adair (from Quality Matters) has an excellent response, concluding with the following [emphasis added]: (more…)

  • One More Thing on NBER Report: Where did pre-2011 data come from?

    One More Thing on NBER Report: Where did pre-2011 data come from?

    Earlier today I critiqued the new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) report on the “The Returns to Online Postsecondary Education”, calling it “a hot mess that that conflates online students, enrollments, programs, institutions and uses a bizarre and misleading data set for its analysis”. That post looked mostly at the interpretation of Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data to define which institutions were exclusively online or substantially online based on the author’s definition. But this report has a bigger flaw that I initially missed – it shows historical data on online enrollments from the late 1990s and claims to analyze in detail online enrollment data from 2009 – 2014, yet IPEDS did not collect distance education data until 2011.

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  • New NBER Study on Online Education is Deeply Flawed

    New NBER Study on Online Education is Deeply Flawed

    Caroline Hoxby from Stanford University just published a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) claiming to analyze “The Returns to Online Postsecondary Education”. tl;dr This report is a hot mess that that conflates online students, enrollments, programs, institutions and uses a bizarre and misleading data set for its analysis.

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  • Winter Is Here: EdTech investments and M&A dropped significantly in 2016

    Winter Is Here: EdTech investments and M&A dropped significantly in 2016

    With the long-term rise in Ed Tech investments – starting in roughly 2007 – many analysts have been predicting a fall for several years. Maybe not a bubble burst like we saw in 2001, but a real drop in activity and volume. Now we also find out that there is also a 70% drop in mergers and acquisition values for the education industry according to a new analysis by the investment bankers Berkery Noyes.

    Throughout 2016 we had plenty of signs that the change was finally here. I got into the act in response to a ludicrous TechCrunch article that concluded that Ed Tech was “2017’s big, untapped and safe investor opportunity”. By the end of the year, there were several reports that investment (venture capital, private equity) had definitely gone down in 2016. Audrey Watters reported “The total dollars invested in 2016 are off by about $2 billion from this time last year”. EdSurge reported a drop of 31%. CB Insights reported a drop of 32% (based on estimates for Q4). (more…)