ETCH Weekend Reading 5/19/24

Union-driven teacher apprenticeships, professors use AI to cheat too, and a new type of writing assignment

Hello!

Before we get to the news, I need one moment of self-indulgence. My wife graduated from medical school AND business school today after 6 years of training (7 if you include a DIY postbaccalaureate program + MCAT study year). I am really proud of her.

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Funding / M&A

• Elevate K12 raises $25M from Trinity Capital / US, K12 Curriculum/Services / Trinity Capital

• Anthropos raises $2.7M / US (Switzerland), Corporate Training / Founderful, Eden Ventures, Exor Ventures, Zanichelli Ventures

• Teachino raises €2M / Austria, K12 Curriculum/Services / Klett Group

• Avathon Capital acquires Summit Professional Education / US, Continuing Education

• ETS acquires Mastery Transcript Consortium / US, Assessment (Credentialing)

• Wiser Educação acquires Conquer Busines School / Portugal, Degree Provider

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named, searchable institutional investors and disclose the amount raised, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

Other Transactions

• CyberNut raises $800K

• Liledu raises €550K

• Battery Future to take Class Over public via SPAC

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ETCH Funding Database

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People Moves

• Jim Carlson joins Untapped Learing as CEO / via Newswire

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Links

K12

• Teachers’ unions are starting teacher prep programs. For all the discussion of teacher pipelines, apprenticeship programs, and career pathways it was pretty surprising that Washington state just started the first union-driven teacher apprenticeship program in the US. (I am calling this an apprenticeship program in the spirit of fighting parlance profusion, though that is not its official name.) / via Education Week

  • Related to career pathways in education, Hawaii considers new incentives to build back school administrator workforce. / via EdSurge

• Rapid guessing on tests increases after lunch. There doesn’t seem to be a “right” answer here, because (other) studies have shown early school start times hurting academic performance. Pick your poison. / via K12 Dive

Higher Ed

• For all the complaints about students using technology to cheat, it turns out the professors are cheating too. And cheating in sufficient numbers that it is more practical for Wiley to shut down 19(!) journals and take a $25-40M revenue hit than try to combat the problem. / via Wall Street Journal

• The long, steep fall of an online education giant. A real Rorschach test of an article. To me, the two important details were: / via Wall Street Journal

  • 1) the company seems to be spending less time defending the edX acquisition, which makes me think CAC for degree remains stubbornly high even when you have 50M+ reasonably engaged learned to pitch to

  • 2) UNC, one of 2U’s stronger and more elite clients is at least skittish about the relationship (and has their own $100M investment in online education, though that is not going particularly well either).

• Berea College students vote to form a union. Given Berea’s core value proposition is providing students with work experience, it is a little puzzling to me that 1) they don’t focus on providing an *excellent* work experience and/or 2) embrace the concept of students learning how to advocate for themselves in a professional environment (advocacy doesn’t *have* to come via a union, but it is an obvious choice). / via Chronicle of Higher Education

Workforce

• A new hope for pay-for-success financial models in workforce training? / via New York Times

EdTech

• You may have read something about AI this week. If you’re not all the way caught up, I recommend

  Claire Zau
  ‘s overview. I don’t have much to add other than I am impressed that Khan Academy managed to make the cut for OpenAI’s GPT-4o demo and Google’s LearnLM announcement. / via OpenAI and Techcrunch

  • There’s been some discussion of the demise of language learning - Duolingo’s stock price dropped ~10% on Monday after the OpenAI presentation before quickly recovering. And on Wednesday the Defense Department dropped 13 degree programs in languages. I am not yet compelled by this line of thinking. Just because you can speak a language doesn’t mean you understand the culture behind it. There remains great value in understanding how other cultures think, and the process of learning a language is one of the best ways to unlock that value.

    • And, FWIW, Duolingo’s CFO capped last quarter’s earning call by saying customers seem willing to pay more for AI-enabled language learning, not less. / via Inside Higher Ed and Wall Street Journal

• A new type of homework assignment: write an essay that is better than ChatGPT’s answer to the same prompt. I find this super compelling. You have to 1) understand the assignment, 2) are effectively deterred from using ChatGPT because the ChatGPT answer is a given, and 3) have to think about what makes your response “better” than the stock robot answer. / via Inside Higher Ed

• Reach Capital’s EdTech Playbooks. Building a great, impactful company in EdTech is hard. The Reach team went to great lengths to put these resources together for entrepreneurs to make the journey a little easier. / via Reach Capital

• Thoughts on building and leveraging video games for learning. / via Nafez’s Notes

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