EdTech News Roundup - Special Edition

Update on the goals of this newsletter

Hello!

Hope you all had a relaxing holiday. I found that having my toes in the sand was a particularly good place to consider how a for-profit OPM initiates a ~billion-dollar takeover of a non-profit MOOC…Thanks Chip!

As much as I’d like to dig in to that news, Duolingo’s IPO, Instructure’s IPO, and a $300M round led by TPG, I’m going to let the news pile up for one more week.

Instead, this is a short post on what this newsletter is and why I’m doing it.

I write to make sense of the news in Education. This thing started as a series of Friday afternoon Clubhouse discussions¹ - which I hope we can get back to - about the news of the week. These sessions left me wanting to continue digging into the topics, and turned into a newsletter.

Thanks to some generous shout outs (thank you Tonio, Michael, Tyler, and Chris, among others), my small pilot list has now grown to include many folks I have yet to meet in person!

So, both for those I know and don’t yet know, here are my goals when I sit down to write each Sunday:

• Write what’s top of mind: I aim for ~1000 words in each newsletter, roughly 5 minutes of reading. This means I will miss some things. If I miss your thing, send a note and convince me to put it as the headliner in my next roundup : )

• Stay optimistic: There is a lot of negativity on the internet today, other folks can handle that. I enjoy writing tongue-in-cheek, but try to take a generally positive view on both the education ecosystem and technology’s impact on it

• Quality > Quantity: the stat I am most proud of after 3 months of writing is that 65-70% of you read this newsletter every week. I love it when folks encourage friends to sign up, but it is even more important to me that every subscriber _wants_ to read it every week

• Cover the topics in an opinionated, but unbiased way: this is the trickiest one, because I have some inherent biases. But, I will try! I’ve also put together this disclosure page to more clearly delineate where bias might creep in

That’s it! Depending on how things go, I may do another one of these posts in January, but will otherwise keep this feed focused on the news. I hope this was helpful!

1. Thank you Lee, Clayton, Brady, and Tess! And to other folks who attended regularly and jumped on stage!