ETCH Weekend Reading 1/21/23
ETCH Weekend Reading 1/21/23
Healthcare high schools, MBA unemployment, and AIs who are good at math
Hello!
Back to our regularly scheduled programming with this newsletter - a short roundup of this week’s news in EdTech, including Funding, M&A, People, and General Interest news.
You’ll see one more note from me later this week that delves deeper into each of the financial transactions below. That note is for paying subscribers, who also get access to the ETCH Funding Database. Please feel free to respond to this email with any questions; it goes directly to my inbox.
On to the update!
Funding / M&A
Forta raises $55M / US, Special Education / Insight Partners, Alumni Ventures, Exor Ventures
Oxford Medical Simulation raises $12.6M / US, Training Provider (VR) /Frog Capital, ACF Investors
Leemons raises €1.5M / Spain, Content Platform / Swanlaab Venture Factory, Ship2b Ventures, Stella Maris Partners
Ceridian acquire eloomi / Canada (Denmark)
GetSafe acquires deineStudienfinanzierung / Germany, Student Financing
To be named in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ with verifiable institutional investors, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+
ETCH Funding Database
All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to Founding Members. Team and Enterprise access can also be provided upon request, email matt@etch.club to learn more.
People Moves
Linda Feng, Kim Moore, Keith Osburn, and Jeff Rubenstein join the board of 1EdTech (fka IMS Global) / via PRWeb
Kelly Rogan joins Ellucian as COO / via Yahoo Finance
Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!
Links
Early Childhood
How New Mexico funds and executes providing pre-K childcare for the state’s citizens. / via 74Million
Related, maybe more states will follow New Mexico’s lead? Georgia Republicans propose spending $100M on preschool care. / via Associated Press
K12
Michael Bloomberg donates $250M to open 10 healthcare-focused high schools in Boston, Charlotte, Durham, Houston, Nashville, New York, Philadelphia, Demopolis, and Northeast Texas. A very different focus, but with a similar goal to Emerson Collective’s XQ Institute, which also helps incubate new secondary-school models. I would love to see more philanthropic initiatives like this. / via Bloomberg.org
There are two notable factions in the US K12 school system right now, those advocating for school choice and those advocating for more community schools in the public school system. Both concepts have been around for a long time but they are emergent in the sense that their battle lines are being redrawn post-COVID. You will see a lot of content on this topic in this US election year.
Including! Pilot project at Denver Public Schools supplies $1,000 debit card for extracurricular activities to 4,000 students. Sort of a hybrid choice/community effort in Denver, and a reminder that traditional school hours are not aligned to traditional working hours (which many non-traditional school options help remedy). / via Colorado Sun
Also, as private school choice grows, critics push for more guardrails. Sort of entertainingly, one of the key unlocks to this debate is going to be intensive, individual tracking of how voucher dollars are spent. / via Education Week
And! Boston rethinks the role of its public school facilities. Most of the *debate* around school choice centers on the philosophy behind it. That is fine, but there are also practical/tactical considerations - many of the facilities that might house community schools, even in wealthy coastal cities like Boston, are in poor shape. / via Facilities Net
Higher Ed
Northeastern partners with Multiverse, granting transfer credit to apprentices who complete Multiverse’s analytics program. This partnership should now be the standard-bearer for work-integrated degree programs in the US. / via Multiverse
Spelman College receives $100M donation. Continued support for the theme, also noted last week, that HBCUs are one of the few cohorts of post-secondary institutions that have emerged from COVID looking strong. / via Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Workforce
The creator economy is ready for a workers’ movement. After decades of capital-first labor policies, the workforce pendulum is swinging back toward labor unions. This is happening across the economy, from Starbucks baristas to Costco cashiers to university employees to software engineers to Youtubers. / via Techcrunch
Why? More and more workers are recognizing that independent contractor roles stink. For a qualitative description of this, consider the evolution of the truck driver role - once a high-paying, middle-class position, now basically paying minimum wage. (Yes, AI, automation, etc. That doesn’t change the macro narrative.) / via Harper’s Magazine
The MBAs who can’t find jobs. The post-graduate unemployment rate of new MBAs started spiking in 2022 and rose sharply last year. This seems more a function of reduced hiring at big tech companies and big banks/consultancies, but still something to keep an eye on. / via Wall Street Journal
Using “Digital Academies” to close the skills gap. Corporate universities have been around a long time, but I give Learn In credit for re-popularizing the concept and encouraging their development beyond the big consultancies and Fortune 10. I think we’ll see a lot more “Digital Academies” content this year and next. / via HBR
EdTech
AI is coming for math now, too. Last year the consensus seemed to be that AI was mostly bad at math. It appears that consensus will be short-lived… / via New York Times
Everyone’s favorite teacher may soon be a chatbot. No particularly novel arguments here, but validating of the concept that a “synthetic personality” teacher is closer to your child’s future than you expect (and maybe yours too). / via Bloomberg Opinion
If you’re skeptical about my timeline, how about this? Microsoft makes its AI-powered reading tutor available for free. Will integrate it with Canvas.1 / via Techcrunch
And! AIs enrolling as students at Ferris State University. The main criticisms of this appear to be that the AIs will interact with and collect data on students. This…is already happening at nearly every school in the country, just less explicitly. Which leaves me mostly excited to see where the experiment goes. / via Inside Higher Ed
More and more rumors are emerging that UpGrad - founded by Indian cable TV baron Ronnie Screwvala - is going to buy US MOOC provider Udacity for somewhere around $100M. Based on the volume of rumors, it seems like a deal will happen, but price is still being negotiated. / via Startup Story Media
Driving up the price? Udacity launches GenAI nanodegree program. / via VentureBeat
Coincidentally(?) timed with Udacity’s AI course launch, Coursera’s CEO announced that Coursera users signed up for an AI course every minute of 2023. I’d like to thank Rent for teaching us all that this means exactly 526,600 people signed up for their AI courses last year. / via Reuters
EDIT: I apologize, the correct number is 525,600. I try not to make excuses for errors, but I swear I knew the correct number and just typed it wrong!
Predictions! Lots of great prediction pieces this month, helpfully rounded up by Everett Reiss in this week’s Jobs of the Week newsletter. Hoping to get a few of my own out soon. / via ETCH
Related, a late-breaking addition to Everett’s list is Tyton’s 10 Predictions for 2024. / via Tyton Partners
Xeet of the Week
This is a parody Twitter account, but a very real problem for today’s parents to navigate.
This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing 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!
The Techcrunch article says the integration is with Canva, a popular design app. This is incorrect - the Microsoft press release clearly states the integration is with Canvas.