e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: 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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  • 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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  • 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…)

  • TechCrunch: “EdTech – 2017’s big, untapped and safe investor opportunity”

    David Bainbridge, CEO of UK-based Knowledgemotion, wrote a post on Saturday in TechCrunch titled “Edtech is the next fintech” calling out the huge, untapped potential of EdTech. Thanks to Alan Levine for sharing this one. Spoiler alert:

    But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The opportunities edtech promises the world’s largest content providers, the biggest educational institutions and any investor looking for a “sure thing” are almost endless. While it might be slightly late to the “digital-first” party, edtech is poised to be the biggest and possibly most profitable digitalized sector yet.

    This is exciting! Not only could EdTech be the biggest market sector yet, it is also “also the safest bet for investors”. Oh my goodness, tell me more. (more…)

  • In Which I (Partially) Disagree with Richard Stallman on Kuali’s AGPL Usage

    Since Michael is making this ‘follow-up blog post’ week, I guess I should jump in.

    In my latest post on Kuali and the usage of the AGPL license, the key argument is that this license choice is key to understanding the Kuali 2.0 strategy – protecting KualiCo as a new for-profit entity in their future work to develop multi-tenant cloud hosting code.

    What I have found interesting is that in most of my conversations with Kuali community people ,even for those who are disillusioned, they seem to think the KualiCo creation makes some sense. The real frustration and pushback has been on how decisions are made, how decisions have been communicated, and how the AGPL license choice will affect the community.

    In the comments, Richard Stallman chimed in.

    As the author of the GNU General Public License and the GNU Affero General Public License, and the inventor of copyleft, I would like to clear up a possible misunderstanding that could come from the following sentence:

    “Any school or Kuali vendor, however, that develops its own multi-tenant cloud-hosting code would have to relicense and share this code publicly as open source.”

    First of all, thinking about “open source” will give you the wrong idea about the reasons why the GNU AGPL and the GNU GPL work as they do. To see the logic, you should think of them as free software licenses; more specifically, as free software licenses with copyleft. (more…)

  • Kuali, Ariah and Apereo: Emerging ed tech debate on open source license types

    With the annual Kuali conference – Kuali Days – starting today in Indianapolis, the big topic should be the August decision to move from a community source to a professional open source model, moving key development to a commercial entity, the newly-formed KualiCo. Now there will be two new announcements for the community to discuss, both centering on a esoteric license choice that could have far-reaching implications. Both the announcement of the Ariah Group as a new organization to support Kuali products and the statement from the Apereo Foundation center on the difference between Apache-style and AGPL licenses.

    AGPL and Vendor Protection

    Kuali previously licensed its open source code as Educational Community License (ECL), a derivative of the standard Apache license that is designed to be permissive in terms of allowing organizations to contribute modified open source code while mixing with code with different licenses – including proprietary. This license is ‘permissive’ in the sense that the derived, remixed code may be licensed in different manners. It is generally thought that this license type gives the most flexibility for developing a community of contributors.

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  • Kuali Student Sunsetting $40 million project, moving to KualiCo

    The changes with Kuali are accelerating, and there are some big updates on the strategy.

    Earlier this week the Kuali Foundation distributed an Information Update obtained by e-Literate on many of the details of the transition to Kuali 2.0 and the addition of the for-profit KualiCo. Some of the key clarifications:

    • KualiCo will be an independent C Corporation with a board of directors. KualiCo will not be a subsidiary of Kuali Foundation. Capital structure, equity allocations, and business plans are confidential and will not be shared publicly for the same reasons these things are rarely shared by private companies. The board of directors will start out with three members and will move to five or seven over time. Directors will include the CEO and an equal number of educational administrators and outside directors. One of the educational administrators will be appointed by the Kuali Foundation. Outside directors will be compensated with equity. Educational administrators will not be compensated in any way and could only serve as a director with the explicit permission of their university administration with attention to all relevant institutional policies.
    • KualiCo’s only initial equity investor is the Kuali Foundation. The Kuali Foundation will invest up to $2M from the Foundation’s cash reserves. [snip] For its equity investment, the Kuali Foundation will have the right to designate a director on the KualiCo Board of Directors. The Kuali Foundation, through its director, will have an exceptional veto right to block the sale of the company, an IPO of the company or a change to the open source license. This helps ensure that KualiCo will stay focused on marketplace-winning products and services rather than on flipping the company on Wall Street.
    • The Kuali Foundation is not licensing the Kuali software code for Kuali products to KualiCo as Kuali software is already fully open source and could be used by anyone for any purpose — as is already being done today. No license transfer or grant is needed by KualiCo or anyone else.
    • The copyright for the AGPL3 software will be copyright KualiCo for the open source distribution that is available to everyone. It would very quickly become untenable to even try to manage multiple copyright lines as various sections of code evolve through the natural enhancement processes of an open source community.

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