Not the year of the MOOC but the week of cashing out

June 29, 2021 10:55 AM

Three leading ed tech companies, three major moves for money. To start with, major online program manager (OPM) 2U purchased much of online class provider edX for $800 million. As part of the deal Harvard and MIT will launch a new and so far unnamed education nonprofit.

Announcements from 2U, MIT, Harvard, and what seems to be the nonprofit's placeholder "Transforming Digital Education."
Commentary and analysis from EdSurge and Trace Urdan.

Meanwhile, two other leading ed tech companies launched initial public offerings:

Language learning app and money-maker Duolingo (founded by Luis von Ahn) filed an IPO. (TechCrunch commentary)

Major learning management system/virtual learning environment provider and not money-maker Instructure (maker of Canvas) filed for an IPO, for the second time.

posted by doctornemo (14 comments total)

Might as well add: StackOverflow purchased by Prosus ($1.8B)

And my goodness, has it really been 6 years since Lynda.com was purchased by LinkedIn ($1.5B)?
posted by gwint at 11:21 AM on June 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

And on a tangent, the company Ellucian, which publishes the application Banner (in which many universities store all their educational & financial records), was also agreed to be sold two weeks ago:

https://www.ellucian.com/news/higher-education-technology-company-ellucian-be-acquired-blackstone-and-vista-equity-partners
posted by wenestvedt at 12:06 PM on June 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

There is a lot of thinking, probably initiated by the pandemic, over the long-term viability/necessity of the higher education model. This post leads me to think that we are going to see waves of these acquisitions for a while. Thanks for posting.
posted by zerobyproxy at 12:36 PM on June 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

I don’t understand what 2U is buying for $800 million. I thought a lot of the cache of putting stuff into EdX was to associate your university with the Harvard /MIT brands and be part of the open education movement.

Now that Harvard and MIT are out and the technology is under some private company is that actually worth $800 million?
posted by interogative mood at 1:43 PM on June 29, 2021 [9 favorites]

I don’t understand what 2U is buying for $800 million. I thought a lot of the cache of putting stuff into EdX was to associate your university with the Harvard /MIT brands and be part of the open education movement.

Now that Harvard and MIT are out and the technology is under some private company is that actually worth $800 million?

residual brand echo/trace/goodwill to these schmucks is probably worth $800m of their funny money.
posted by lalochezia at 2:00 PM on June 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Oh my god; they are going to try to make MOOCs work again, aren’t they?

If COVID taught us anything about higher Ed, online courses are a very mixed bag, and will probably cost more to deliver successfully to most undergraduates.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:08 PM on June 29, 2021 [17 favorites]

Mooks, amirite?
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:09 PM on June 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

Agreeing with GenjiandProust.

In my experience, MOOCs are the education option when you don’t really care about the learning outcomes. Online instruction, to be successful for the student — in contrast to just being “successful” for the institution — requires significant connection with the instructor via grading notes/feedback, emails, Zoom Office Hours, etc.

Sadly, even students in regular online (and, for that matter, face-to-face) courses don’t leverage these types of interactions to make their education more meaningful. But in a MOOC it’s virtually (heh) impossible.
posted by darkstar at 2:57 PM on June 29, 2021 [15 favorites]

In my experience, MOOCs are the education option when you don’t really care about the learning outcomes.

My experience distilled, thanks darkstar. Not that these classes are “bad” (I use many of the resources above frequently), but that if you have an active interest in ensuring learning outcomes it’s probably not possible, advisable, or desirable to eliminate direct contact with the teacher, and that contact is still currently better achieved in person.
posted by q*ben at 3:05 PM on June 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

If there isn’t some one with a YouTube channel or a Twitch livestream I’m not going to learn it. I tried to do some MOOCS but if just doesn’t work for me.
posted by interogative mood at 3:29 PM on June 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

2U is probably best known for their coding, data science, and cybersecurity bootcamps around the country, usually in association with (but not credited by) the partner university or college. I went through their webdev bootcamp in the COVID season (early 2020) which was done entirely via Zoom except for the first day (which is in March, when COVID turned really scary)

I can see they may want an archived version of their content plus TA's to answer more urgent questions so they can keep more of the profits rather than hire new live lecturers every session.
posted by kschang at 4:17 PM on June 29, 2021

Online instruction, to be successful for the student — in contrast to just being “successful” for the institution — requires significant connection with the instructor via grading notes/feedback, emails, Zoom Office Hours, etc.

It also really requires students to be self-motivated, especially if the course is asynchronous (and therefore, depending on the instructor's requirements, largely completed at the students' discretion). One of the things this last year confirmed is that online instruction can work extremely well for adult students, graduate students, and advanced undergrads, but is often counterproductive for younger students learning to manage new expectations for independent work.
posted by thomas j wise at 5:11 PM on June 29, 2021 [10 favorites]

Fascinating. Going back to college over the last 13 months has been a real education for me, if you’ll pardon the pun. Online? Hybrid? In-person? I’ve done it, and I have opinions. Much of the hype around virtual learning reminds me of Personal Systems of Instruction from the 60s. Well-designed online courses can work (for a certain class of student) — if they’re well designed (did I mention that?) — but in-person education from a skilled instructor is really hard to beat for the vast majority of students.

Personally, we need more educators reading Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and fewer tech-bro MOOC online revolution fever dreams.

Also, Edsurge puts out a great podcast if you’re interested in education issues. That’s where I first learned about the PSI movement, actually.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 10:03 PM on June 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

Maybe education as a commodity and not a public good will do wonders for our society in the same way that healthcare as a commodity, or housing as an investment vehicle and speculative commodity have helped usher in a truly golden age for the US of A.
posted by nikoniko at 1:54 AM on June 30, 2021 [12 favorites]