e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Coursera

  • Coursera: The pivot to corporate learning becomes clear

    Last week I had a post in the Chronicle titled “MOOCs Are Dead. Long Live Online Higher Education.” triggered by the departure of Daphne Koller from her day-to-day role at Coursera.

    Mr. Ng left Coursera in 2014 for Baidu, focusing on deep learning research. Mr. Thrun stepped down as chief executive of Udacity in April of this year to reduce his day-to-day responsibilities. He is now president of Kitty Hawk, a company focused on the development of flying cars. And Ms. Koller recently left Coursera to become chief computing officer at Calico, a company that researches human aging.

    Addressing the question of business models:

    So will these changes in corporate vision and leadership change the long-term trajectory of MOOCs?

    I would argue that there never was a viable vision for MOOCs in higher education in the first place. The big three MOOC providers’ trial-and-error efforts to find a viable business model are what led to their shifts in strategy and ultimately the departure of their founders for fields outside of education. It may be that making meaningful changes in higher ed is more difficult or at least more frustrating than designing flying cars or tackling the complexities of aging.

    With today’s announcement from Coursera, their pivot continues, building on their move over the past year to go to on-demand courses. Coursera is making a big shift to corporate workforce development as described by CEO Rick Levin on the company blog this morning. (more…)

  • Pitchbook Lists Most Valuable Ed Tech Companies

    Update: Jeez – sorry about the multiple typos (mistakenly showed in thousands instead of millions). Fixed now.

    Pitchbook – a database service for M&A, private equity and venture capital – listed in Hot Topics what they saw as the top ten most valuable ed tech companies based on public valuations ((Note that estimates are as of the end of 2014.)). The definition of startup is a little loose, as one company (D2L) was founded in 1999 and public companies are excluded.

    Below are the market valuation estimates, to which I have added the year each company was founded along with the total funding by each company in parentheses, according to Crunchbase data.

    Company (year founded, funding total)  Market Valuation

    1. Pluralsight (2004, $169m)            $1.0 billion
    2. Instructure (2008, $79m)               $554 million
    3. Lynda.com (1995, $289m)             $456 million
    4. Coursera (2012, $85m)                   $367 million
    5. Open English (2006, $120m)        $350 million
    6. Craftsy (2010, $106m)                   $339 million
    7. D2L (1999, $165m)                        $330 million
    8. Lumos Labs (2005, $68m)           $265 million
    9. Clever (2012, $44m)                      $247 million
    10. Edmodo (2008, $88m)                 $236 million

    (more…)

  • LinkedIn: I Told You So (Sorta)

    In December 2012, I tweeted:

    https://twitter.com/mfeldstein67/status/276406235564220416

    At the time, Coursera was the darling of online ed startups. Since then, it has lost its way somewhat, while Lynda.com has taken off like a rocket. Which is probably one big reason why LinkedIn chose to acquire Lynda.com (rather than Coursera) for $1.5 billion. I still think it’s possible that they could acquire a MOOC provider as well, but Udacity seems like a better fit than Coursera at this point.

    I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: LinkedIn is the most interesting company in ed tech.

  • The Quotable Justin Reich: MOOC research needs to reboot

    Thanks to Audrey Watters I just read a new article in Science Magazine and publicly posted here by Justin Reich, the lead researcher for HarvardX (Harvard’s implementation of edX and associated research team) ((Note that Science Magazine access requires a subscription or purchase or individual article.)). Justin calls out the limitations of current MOOC research that focuses on A/B testing and engagement instead of learning, single-course context, and post hoc analysis with proper course design. While praising the field for making available cleansed data for any type of analysis, his core argument is that we need new approaches that cannot be solved just by research teams.
    Update: Added link to publicly-available DOCX article.

    While the whole article is worth reading, there are quite a few insightful quotes should get past the journal paywall.

    • Big data sets do not, by virtue of their size, inherently possess answers to interesting questions.
    • We have terabytes of data about what students clicked and very little understanding of what changed in their heads.
    • It does not require trillions of event logs to demonstrate that effort is correlated with achievement.

    (more…)

  • The Battle for Open and MOOC Completion Rates

    Yesterday I wrote a post on the 20 Million Minds blog about Martin Weller’s new book The Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. Exploring different aspects of open in higher education – open access, MOOCs, open education resources and open scholarship – Weller shows how far the concept of openness has come, to the point where “openness is now such a part of everyday life that it seems unworthy of comment”. If you’re interested in OER, open courses, open journals, or open research in higher education – get the book (it’s free and available in a variety of formats).

    Building on the 20MM post about the ability to reuse or repurpose the book itself, I would like to expand on a story from early 2013 where I happen to play a role. I’ll mix in Weller’s description (MW) from the book with Katy Jordan’s data (KJ) and my own description (PH) from this blog post.

    (MW) I will end with one small example, which pulls together many of the strands of openness. Katy Jordan is a PhD student at the OU focusing on academic networks on sites such as Academia. edu. She has studied a number of MOOCs on her own initiative to supplement the formal research training offered at the University. One of these was an infographics MOOC offered by the University of Texas. For her final visualisation project on this open course she decided to plot MOOC completion rates on an interactive graph, and blogged her results (Jordan 2013).

    (more…)

  • Coursera shifts focus from ‘impact on learners’ to ‘reach of universities’

    Richard Levin, the new CEO of Coursera, is getting quite clear about the new goals for the company. At first glance the changes might seem semantic in nature, but I believe the semantics are revealing. Consider this interview with the Washington Post that was published today in the Washington Post [emphasis added in both cases below]:

    Richard C. Levin, the new chief executive of Coursera, the most widely used MOOC platform, wants to steer the conversation back to what grabbed public attention in the first place: the wow factor.

    Sure, Levin said, the emerging technology will help professors stimulate students on campus who are tired of old-school lectures. The talk of “flipped classrooms” and “blended learning” — weaving MOOCs into classroom experiences — is not mere hype.

    “But that is not the big picture,” Levin said in a visit last week to The Washington Post. “The big picture is this magnifies the reach of universities by two or three orders of magnitude.”

    Contrast this interview with Daphne Koller’s December article at EdSurge:

    Among our priorities in the coming year, we hope to shift the conversation around these two dimensions of the learning experience, redefine what it means to be successful, and lay the groundwork for products, offerings, and features that can help students navigate this new medium of learning to meet their own goals, whether that means completing dozens of courses or simply checking out a new subject. [snip]

    Still, we are deeply committed to expanding our impact on populations that have been traditionally underserved by higher education, and are actively working to broaden access for students in less-developed countries through a range of initiatives

    There are valid criticisms of how well Coursera has delivered on its goal of helping students meet their own learning goals, but now it is apparent that the focus of their efforts is shifting away from the learner and towards the institution. Below are a few notes based on these recent interviews.

    Changing Direction From Founders’ Vision

    This is the second interview where Levin contradicts the two Coursera founders. In the case above Levin shows the point of Coursera is not primarily impact on learners but is reach of great universities. In a New York Times interview from April he made similar points in contrast to Andrew Ng. (more…)

  • Why Unizin is a Threat to edX

    In the week since we published our Unizin exposé, there has been nary a peep from the group to us, or apparently to the traditional news outlets either. When we ran the piece, we emailed Indiana University CIO Brad Wheeler to request comment or corrections. We have not heard back from him yet. Brad, if you’re reading this, our door is always open. Talk to us.

    Luckily for us, we don’t need to rely on new pronouncements from Brad to give us more insight into what’s going on. It turns out that he’s been speaking in public about this idea for years. He just hasn’t called it Unizin. And from what I can tell, it should give edX cause to worry.

    (more…)