EdTech Thoughts Weekend Reading - 6/11
EdTech Thoughts Weekend Reading - 6/11
Week of 6/5 - 6/9
Hello!
As a reminder, EdTech Thoughts Weekend Reading (this email) is a Sunday roundup of what happened in the EdTech industry over the course of the week. It includes funding and M&A activities, people moves, and important news articles across early childhood, K12, Higher Ed, and Workforce.
Weekend Reading is the free sister publication to the Weekly Update, which comes out on Tuesdays and provides an analysis of why these events happened — for paying subscribers. I’d love to have you subscribed to both!
Funding / M&A
GSoft raises $93M / Canada, Workforce Skills Assessment / CDPQ
Stepful raises $7.5M / US, Healthcare Training / Reach Capital, Y Combinator, EO Ventures, Company Ventures
UnifyWork raises $3M / US, Workforce Skills Assessment / Northcoast Ventures, JumpStart, OVO Fund
Full Measure Education acquires StudentBridge / US, Student Marketing
Panorama Education acquires Mesa Cloud / US, Student Support
GiveCampus acquires Community Funded / US, K12/HED Infrastructure
Looking for a full list of EdTech Funding + M&A from the past two years? Founding Members receive access to the EdTech Funding and M&A database
People Moves
Asks
If you have an Ask for a future EdTech Thoughts post, please fill out this form.
Links
Early Childhood
A tragically American approach to the child care crisis. / via The Atlantic
Related, Childcare is about to get even more expensive. While federal investment feels important and reasonable, this isn’t really a plan so much as just continuing COVID cash subsidies… / via The American Prospect
Related, The invisible child care workforce. / via EdSurge
K12
New profile of the Khan Lab School’s efforts to incorporate more AI into the classroom. / via New York Times
Stanford study shows charter schools outperform public school peers. / via K12 Dive and Education Week
Phones at schools are a disaster. / via The Atlantic
Carnegie Learning invests in high dosage math tutoring. Note: company still manages to make questionable use of statistics in press release. / via Businesswire
Related, How effective is online high-dosage tutoring? / via EdSurge
How US K12 education spending compares to other OECD countries. / via HeyTutor
At what point does summer camp price itself out of existence? How summer camp became such a hot mess for parents. / via Bloomberg
Related, Philadelphia superintendent to pitch year-round school pilot. / via Chalkbeat
Violence against teachers is on the rise. / via Wall Street Journal
Higher Ed
Student loan payments to resume in August. We are not ready for the chaos this is going to bring. / via Higher Ed Dive
Related, many student loan borrowers likely to face challenges when payments resume. / via Higher Ed Dive
Related, the moratorium on student loans was a bad idea. / via The Economist
Related, new research suggests uncapped government-provided student loans lead to increased tuition prices. / shoutout
and
When the student becomes the teacher. Second-year marketing major grows tiktok account to 350K followers with content from her family farm. / via Chronicle of Higher Education
The state of higher ed amid the great upheaval. A compelling framework for universities to sustain themselves in a post-COVID world. / via Inside Higher Ed
6 new institutions join the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF). / via Inside Higher Ed
Morehouse’s 2U-led online degree programs struggle. / via USA Today
New Jersey funds mental health therapy for college students across state. / via Higher Ed Dive
5 charts break down spring enrollment trends. / via Higher Ed Dive
Columbia drops out of US News undergraduate rankings. / via Inside Higher Ed
College Career Services get a makeover. / via Inside Higher Ed
Education Department look to ban transcript withholding. This is complicated, but ultimately positive for adult learners. / via Inside Higher Ed
Ghost students applying to California colleges in financial aid scam. / via San Francisco Chronicle
EdTech
Apple releases Vision Pro. Yes, it is pricey. Yes, it will take some time to get through the hype cycle. But I am completely, unequivocally in on spatial computing. / via the Verge
Dreamscape Learn continues to wow the media. / via Hechinger Report
Chegg embraced AI. ChatGPT ate its lunch anyways. / via Wired
Related, Coursera joins growing stable of mature EdTech companies building chatGPT into their products. / via the Hindu Business Line
How can ChatGPT get more accurate? Send it to college by training it on better-quality data. This is one of the most fascinating debates in AI, and I’m not sure which way it will break. / via The Washington Post
Byju’s skips $40M loan payment, sues lender instead. More on this in Tuesday’s Weekly Update. / via Economic Times of India and Techcrunch
Related, Byju’s to cut 1000 jobs in cost-saving measure. / via Economic Times of India
60% of the time it works all the time. Turnitin needs to hire some of Carnegie’s math tutors for their plaigarism detection claims. / via K12 Dive and The Washington Post
Related, more schools testing oral examinations to combat cheating. / via Wall Street Journal
Pearson invests in China to grow language learning business. / via China Daily
If you have a link you’d like to see in a future Weekend Reading post, please email matt@etch.club
Tweet Meme of the Week
I have kept my phone on grayscale for the better part of 5 years and written multiple times about my growing concerns about screentime. And yet, I know I am also going to be one of the first in line to play around with Apple’s Vision Pro…
EdTech Thoughts Weekend Reading is the free sister publication of the EdTech Thoughts Weekly Update. It provides links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!
