Edtech Year in Review 2021 with Ben Kornell

bit new. In 2022. We're going to start a segment on our ed tech insiders podcast called the week in edtech, where we talk about what's most exciting in the field each week. And in anticipation of that, we're going to spend an episode right now talking with then Cornell, who will be the CO hosts of the week in edtech. About the entire year 2021. And how it was a watershed year for education technology. So this is a year in review for 2021 in edtech, then welcome.

be a defining piece of 2021. For everyone. It's this limbo state of are we virtual? Are we hybrid? Are we in person, and what innovations came out of that, as well as what PTSD came out of that? That's my first trend for 2021. In terms of my second one, I believe that the mental health crisis, which has been growing over time, really got some spotlight this year. And when we think about what schools are for, we often think

about academic learning. We saw in the pandemic, they're actually really important for childcare. But third, and now coming to the forefront is social emotional health. And I believe that that mental health crisis coming to the fore will be a trend that schools and parents and learners will be grappling with for years to come. Third major topic is the labor shortage. We are in a moment where that trend of you know teachers are retiring. We're not training enough teachers that has come to roost.

But COVID was like the anvil that broke the camel's back. It's like we didn't get a straw, we got the whole the whole house coming down on that camel. And so we literally have 10 to 20% of positions that are going to be open next year, and especially stem positions, especially in high school. And we're really going to need to rethink going forward. But this year, that labor shortage has

hit home. And then last, an interesting trend emerged in terms of employers dipping their toes, ranging from Chipotle or Starbucks, offering employees, you know, full tuition full rides, to get their degrees, but number of ways in which employers are upskilling their workforces, and playing in the kind of post high school all the way through advanced degree field. And I think that that is one of the most exciting and most unknown areas of our space. And those are my big four.

the mandates. It has been such chaos in the school systems and I think it's really highlighted for a lot of people how the US school system being led by states and districts and all sorts of political sort of threads threading through everything has really, really leaves People are very much on their own to decide what to do.

And I think that's something you really haven't seen in some of the other countries around the world, places like New Zealand and France and countries in Eastern Europe that had much more cohesive policies, they would decide as a, as a country that school, you know, to move to online learning or to, or to close the schools or exactly what the mandates in terms of masking and social distancing would be. And it's been pretty cohesive. It hasn't always

worked in every country. Don't get me wrong, but it's been so fragmented here. Yeah. And what do you think of this sort of back to school pendulum as it applies to the US and how it's played out in other countries?

from the learners. I think one of the elements that you mentioned, of people being on their own, if I had to say, what was the biggest change for any group, it's parents actually playing a really different role in the learning experiences of their children in 2021, than had ever been in prior years, you

know, 2020, to 2021. And so that's given parents voice insight, newfound power, you know, at the college level, for example, people are starting to realize like, hey, if we can do most of this virtually, do we need the country club experience of full on campus college, or for elementary school? If learning is really only happening for an hour and a half to two hours? Do we need the passing periods, the recess and the lunch? Or can we find those

through other means? So a lot of questions, not so many answers, as one would hope. And this theme of fragmentation and incoherence in the US, definitely in contrast to others,

products very quickly. And you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, many edtech companies basically opened up their their platforms to schools as basically almost like emergency aid, they said, Look, we're gonna make it free for you come in and do some dude, news, Ella, do Duolingo, do Kahoot, it's all going to be free as a way to

sort of support the world. And this year, I think there's a little bit of the moment where schools start to think, Okay, now that we've gotten a taste of all of this edtech, what do we do next? What is our contingency plan for a different pandemic? Do we want to think about, you know, incorporating ed tech into our policies, and this is happening both in K 12. And in higher ed in a much deeper way, instead of being seen as

peripheral? I think people are starting to think of online learning is central to their strategies, and it's just been incredibly big deal for the EdTech field. Yeah, I

new technology? I mean, 2021 has been just a really game changing year for our space, for sure. You know, Alex, I'm curious, what are you looking at in terms of trends for 2021? In retrospect,

of it. Now that you sort of take away schooling, I think people are really thinking about how to put together all the different benefits that school can put I had two students, including, you know, childcare, mental health, medical care, transportation, and each one of them is sort of

up for grabs all over again. So there's this enormous, enormous opening up of that, from my perspective that some of the big movements in the EdTech field one is it's really the headline for me is that the EdTech field

really matured this year. I think that you know, if you look at the amount of investment going into the space, the amount of interest for graduates wanting to enter ed tech, rather than you know, FinTech or crypto or investment banking or consulting, it's really been amazing how many people coming out of school now are seeing ed tech as a growing rising field, and one that allows them to combine their idealism of I really want to help people and help the world with actual

business savvy and technology be so you know, being an ed tech product manager or an ed tech customer service representative, or ed tech content creator, they're becoming actually really intriguing jobs for a lot of people. And that includes both recent graduates and career switchers, including teachers. Some of the labor shortage is coming from teachers burning out and leaving the classroom, many of whom are trying to move into edtech. We've also seen a number of IPOs, just from a strict

business perspective. You know, we had Duolingo, Udemy Coursera Power School nerdy, a number of IPOs this year, and it may culminate in what would arguably be the biggest IPO which would be buys us the Indian ad tech company that has been acquiring everybody left and right and it's considered DECA corn, and it is heading pretty rapidly towards some kind of IPO. So you're seeing ed tech, public education companies are very

rare. The number of them that have grown this year has been astounding, fueled entirely by the pandemic. We're also seeing a lot of acquisitions, which has been really interesting. So you mentioned you know, Baidu, but 10 companies this year, but you there are also some really intriguing acquisitions like Southern New Hampshire

University. But the bootcamp Kenzie Academy, which is a really interesting and sort of natural acquisition, because they're trying to serve students really well, and offering bootcamp style or digital skills training, just improves their mission. You also saw American continental University buy a boot camp called Digital craft, so that boot camp acquisition, which has been happening for years has sped up, and you're seeing universities start to jump into that fray, which is fascinating. Yeah.

it's real. And I'm also interested, you know, given how sky high the valuations are, in funding rounds, we're setting ourselves up for at least some of them having down rounds, or choosing an m&a exit, as opposed to raising at a reduced valuation. So I just think that m&a activity, and just the kind of big finance meets at Tech, that's just going to increase over time and 2021 was really the Jumpstart for it. 100%. And

site for college students. You know, this year bought cliffnotes, the classic education brand cliffnotes, I bought a company called Lip charts and a company called quill bought and is basically trying to buy all the pieces, it doesn't yet have to solidify its role as the go to reference site for college students. And I'd be very surprised if that's not all being done with a direct eye towards an IPO if they can get there. They're also still

raising money this year. So you're really seeing companies strategically merge and acquire other companies with real goals in mind, obviously, to us acquisition of edX was made a huge amount of news this year, because it's another very strategic acquisition trying to basically acquire a 50 million plus user pipeline from all around the world, which can then be transitioned into short courses, boot camps and degrees.

So this merger space, I think, is just going to continue and continue, especially as the ad tech space does cool off

a.org. So outschool, for example, has a.org, where they run their scholarships through that Common Sense Media has an incubator, where they're creating, you know, for profit companies that are really around safeguarding for kids. So I imagine these structural innovations alongside the m&a will only increase over time. I agree.

head to an IPO. But Indian Ed Tech has been really on fire this year, there are so many startups there are so many companies just appearing left and right and investors jumping in. And I think India really sees itself as the next big ad tech player building off of the success of some of its mega companies, and all those mergers and all of that money flowing there, I think you're going to hear a lot more about Indian edtech companies sort of moving

into global markets. And then on the flip side, the Chinese edtech market, which is the biggest population in the world, really dried up very quickly in the middle of, of 2021, based very directly on a Chinese government decision to shut down sort of foreign tutoring companies and certain kinds of foreign investment. And it just that government policy put a huge chill, and it was a purposeful chill on the EdTech. landscape.

There's some elements of it that are a really logical swap here in terms of huge market, lots of dynamics, pushing consumerized education, I will just say, I feel like in the Indian edtech market, they're really taking seriously the leap forward, like you might in telecom, you know, where some countries skip the whole, like, Let's build telephone poles and telephone

wires. And let's immediately go to mobile, I feel like India is almost jumping ahead of us and other more developed countries and saying, actually, how would we think about and tech first education ecosystem. And in many ways, China was thinking much more about it, like a centralized government might think, in more of a developed way. I think the Indian edtech market is going to be one to watch for decades, if not the

next generation to come. And you know, American consumers should get used to by Jews is the first of many Indian tech innovators that are going to be coming to the US and being game changers here, too. So very, very exciting. And a lot of good friends who've worked in China. And you can see that their work was really set back by the movement of the Chinese

government. But I think a big learning there was when you have a kind of frenzied marketplace, where there are winners and losers and it's in the education field. The government responded in part because they felt like families were being harmed by some of the swindling or a bait and switch that some of the EdTech providers were offering and so the reputable ones the larger ones really suffered from what was pretty chaotic.

marketplace. And so hopefully that warning will be heated by India and other developing countries as they curate, you know what works best for kids and try to steer families and consumers to the right learning tools for their kids.

juice is all about that. And a lot of the big Indian and tech firms as well as some of the other AIPAC ad tech firms, so places out of Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, are often direct consumer, they're often mobile, first direct to consumer, they know that families in those regions spend a lot of money, disposable income on education, there's a lot of demand and a lot of people who are looking for accelerants and ways to improve

their educational outcomes. And they don't necessarily believe that they need to get them from formal institutions. So there are some enormous ly popular edtech apps in Asia that, you know, we have never heard of, but they have millions and millions and millions of users. They're in the top categories there. And as you say, I think we should all get used to those apps becoming ones that are used in the US and Europe as well.

the guided project. So of course, there also has these $10 short term guided projects, which are created primarily through a sort of network of instructional design creators and community folks, which is not an employer. But it is not a not a university either. So there's really been a movement in the workspace to start working with education providers that aren't always universities, and that has just grown and

grown. And some of the biggest success stories in that space now actually don't come from universities at all. So the original talking points for MOOCs, which is oh, you know, take a Harvard course online, taking your course online. That's what that's what this is really about. It's really shifted so many times at this point. And now you have take a course from Salesforce online to get a Salesforce certification, and then that can be sold to a

company. And a company can train all of its users in Salesforce certification through a MOOC platform. And that is a wildly different story. You also see something interesting, there was a nice article in med surg recently about how even though the Chinese online degree space is sort of slowing down. Chinese book platforms are doing incredibly high volume, and many, many, there are like 20, plus Chinese MOOC platforms that are almost all local to China, the biggest is sure 10x. But

they are still very hot. And there's so many of them are designed to provide academic credit for students and allow people to actually get stackable movement towards formal degrees. So that's a space that I think is going to continue to be

interesting in China. And then of course, as you mentioned, the big news with to you by edX, this, you know, edX being a nonprofit for since its inception with Harvard and MIT, and to you being a for profit, since its inception, has thrown a lot of people for a loop, but what there is really a competition for now for it within these MOOC platforms and other companies too, is to become the go to lifelong

learning solution. I will say it just as clear as day you know, to you calls it the free to degree program of Coursera or the six year curriculum Coursera is has the stackable, stackable model and what they want to be is the company that is synonymous with education throughout somebody's lifespan post high school or later, and they're in direct competition with each other for it. And if one of them can really crack that it's going to be yet another step change for Ed Tech.

ways. I mean, seeing the unbelievable growth of out school or of handshake, or of some of these companies that just emeritus even that went from sort of being mid size players to just becoming very large, very high growth companies virtually overnight, this year, new Zillow, raising $100 million round this year that I miss Ella has been around for years, and suddenly it is like, become a hot property.

That was a surprise to me, even knowing that a tech was rising, I don't think I saw the rapidity of the growth of those companies coming and you know, I've talked to a couple of people from companies like this in the podcast, and it's just always blows my mind how fast they're growing.

tech behaved like Tech Tech. And I guess that's like, both exciting and can also be like worrisome given how Tech Tech has evolved, I think, finding moments here and companies that really are achieving tremendous scale and tremendous power and influence as learners. And it's both an exciting time and a time for us to be really thoughtful.

as I know, you have as well from within companies, but I don't think the sector as a whole has gotten a backlash, and I it's probably going to come. And just to just answer the other part of your question, the biggest surprise Oh, sorry, that was the biggest surprise. But the thing that I think is sort of most obvious, I've got to go with by Jews, I mean, it's been quite a long time, since there was sort of an obvious accompany that was so obviously going to just sort

of eat the world. And buy juice has just been doing it so consistently, throughout the last few years growing at this unbelievable rate, getting funding rounds that are sort of eye popping, and recently, you know, buying out companies just to sort of fill out its portfolio and it's just sort of feels like a an unstoppable force right now, that doesn't mean that it's hard to see where

it will actually go. But the idea that values will become synonymous with like the Fang of Ed Tech, it's been coming, and it's continuing to come and it's gonna, it's gonna happen. So it has not been surprising, but it's been interesting to watch anyway. How about you? What has surprised you? And what have you what's been something that seems inevitable?

company in the entire world. And from cloud to Chromebooks to Google Classroom, to YouTube as like, if you think of YouTube as a learning platform, it's the number one learning platform in the world, and that only their penetration and like core they've become or established themselves as core infrastructure for the entire space. And I think that that will be intriguing to watch. It was coming for a long time. But also strange to have the largest ad tech player in the world.

Look at Tech as like a rounding error on its overall. You know, I think that's something that we as a space when I see building on what you said about by Jews, as more native born ad tech companies come to dominate the space, how will they play with players who are you know, more tourists in our space? And I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I think the Google work has been foundational. It's just not their core business. Right. I think that that will be an interesting thing to play out.

In terms of surprises I'd say on the m&a front. There were a lot of surprises for me one that I was really intrigued by was Chegg buying Busuu, which is a language learning platform. You know, I always think of Chiang as like a higher ed company. But I think the degree to which lifelong learning is a theme or trend, where anyone playing in the kind of higher ed and beyond space understands that they need to be beyond this kind of four

year bucket. And then you need to be tending to the learners journey, that, to me has been the biggest surprise, in part because it was going so well, for many of these companies just doing higher ed. And I was more, this is probably my limited thinking, I was thinking, How are colleges and universities going to survive when competing against or collaborating with the to use of the world and the

checks and so on. And what I realized now, as the two and checks have already moved on and said, That's too small of a bucket for us, we're gonna, we're gonna go even bigger, you know, I'm thinking about my 10 year old and five year old, what am I going to use my college savings plan for with them? Like I don't know, it's a really exciting space to watch. And I think in the next five or 10 years, we're going to have lots more in terms of learning

options beyond high school. So I think 100 as well, just for like the look ahead. You know, I had mentioned that in 2021, Maiev, kind of four themes were virtual back to school mental health crisis, labor shortage, and employers dip their toes in terms of what's coming, I'll start with the last one, I feel like employers are going to take the wheel, it's going to go from experimenting to employers, essentially seeing talent as a key lever for their business,

both recruiting talent. And you know, this is where all of this as a benefit is important, but also upskilling their workforce, to be more dynamic, and to be kind of a competitive advantage. Each week, you're seeing companies making new strategic investments in their talent pipeline. And in part, its

response to the shortage. But it's also in part response to machine learning, new tech advancements where a smaller, more skilled workforce is going to be the optimal, most nimble staffing model for companies to win in the future. I don't know, how do you see that employer piece playing out?

they do. They do a lot of university recruiting, they do some side training companies, like you know, Cisco, or AWS, over the years have created their own certification models, which is now something that almost every company many, many tech companies are doing, but it started a long time ago. I think what's changed to your point is that companies now are saying we have the option to disaggregate the traditional education.

disintermediate, basically, the traditional education system, you know, I've been looking at these amazing statistics about the top companies that that millennials want to work for. They do these surveys. And you know, millennials want to work for Apple and Google and Facebook, but less so. And Tesla want to work for Nike and Disney, a lot of them want to create their own company, because that entrepreneurial sort of tech entrepreneur spirit has made its way into into high

schools in great schools. And if students are already looking to companies like that, looking at Amazon and Google and Tesla as their inspiration, then why wouldn't they take courses from Google and Amazon and Tesla and get certifications from Google, Amazon and Tesla, and go to Tesla University and Amazon boot camp and all of that, there's

really no reason. And I think the companies are starting to realize that and changing their strategies so that they can work in ways that are more direct to to young people, but also to career switchers, because the same not identical, but a similar mechanic applies there. So you know, if I were a university president right now, I'd be pretty nervous about the future of having to compete with marketing budgets, like those of

Google and Amazon. And you know, you have models like Guild and instride right now that are that are putting the pieces together and saying companies can get their employees degrees from traditional universities, but I don't think it's going to be that long before people really start going directly to the companies for training, even starting at a young age. And that's going to be a really strange moment for education in the world and in this country.

So I'm totally with you, I think educator, I mean, I think employers are going to jump in with both feet as they sort of start to realize how much brand power and reach and impact they actually have. Yeah,

use this in real life? Building on that disaggregation theme, as I was looking at 2021, and thinking about, what is the labor shortage going to lead to? And how does the virtual back to school dynamic play into that? I actually think that even in K 12, we're going to see a lot of disaggregating and re aggregating and it's who creates education, who delivers that

education? What's the role of learner, what is the role of parent, all of those are up for grabs, I think it will, you know, in K 12, it will go a little bit more edgy, slow, whereas higher ed, and lifelong learning will be starting to be Tech Tech speed, copywriting those phrases, by the way, I

just love it. But I will say this idea that there aren't enough teachers to teach our kids is making those of us who care deeply around about public schools, think about, okay, how could we take the best educators broadcast their learning their instruction, to as many learners as possible. So I think the rise of educators that has been cultivated on platforms like outschool, I think that's going to penetrate into public

schools. And we'll probably start with STEM classes where you can't find a good AP Physics teacher to save your life in America right now. So it'll start with the really, really hard to staff places. But you'll basically see ways in which those who are really good at creating a classroom environment, caring for the emotional needs of kids, creating the right discussion groups that can be disconnected from having the instructional expertise to talk about AP

calculus. And I think that that could be really exciting, because we can have educators do what they're great at whether that's instruction, or whether that is curating a really great learning environment. And on the learner side, I feel like peer to peer learning is just taking

off. And you can see this in the upskilling space and career management, you know, there's a number of places that I follow, but reforge is one that I'm particularly interested in, you know, it's basically crash courses and sales product, etc, with VPs of the hottest companies in tech. But this idea that you don't need a university professor or someone with decades of pedagogical expertise, you actually need somebody who's near peer, and can teach you the skills that they have that have been

successful for them. I think that that will penetrate the system up and down. And then the last, I think, is this disaggregation is like where education can be had. You know, we did the beyond the wall. With virtual learning. I actually think we're going to see an uptick on early on this trend. But I think we're going to see a

big uptick in gap years. I think gap year was a concept that a few kids would do after high school before college, I think families are going to start taking gap years, if you've been through the pandemic and you've had all these ups and downs, and you have some savings squirreled away or you can work anywhere you want, because of remote work, I think families more and more will take a year and go live somewhere where they haven't lived before, whether that's domestic or

international. And the idea behind it is that you can bring your learning with you through virtual learning, but also through experiential learning wherever you are. Basically, everyone has been geographically constrained by their career and by their kids school. And both of those constraints are now off. I'm very excited for what people will do with their gap years. As we get a following in at Tech we can review. I'd love to hear stories from people you can ask me at at Ben Cornell on

Twitter. What's your gap year dream and Hopefully we can get enough people doing it that we can make everyone's gap your dream happen. What about you 2022 trends? What are you looking at? Alex?

here. What I think they have in common is that they basically, question the idea of education as happening in a particular format, that we've all gotten very, very used to the question, the idea of there being any kind of teacher figure or a sort of master, in some cases, the question the idea that a teacher has to be a teacher rather than

a practitioner. And you know, the idea of taking classes from somebody who is already working in your dream job is a very different model of what teaching has meant than taking classes from somebody who's an expert in the subject you're trying to learn, those are actually really

quite different. And I look at places like business schools within universities, as a as a sort of forerunner of that kind of thinking where many business school professors have been entrepreneurs, or founders, or who have worked their way up in large companies, and then they go into business school teaching. And so they have a different lens on that world. And I think that kind of thinking is now spreading in all directions. So you know, you mentioned that it might go edges

slow in K 12. And you have a lot of experience there. But I've been blown away by how fast outscore has grown, and how there are other models, like Emile, which is basically an AP courses, very similar to the model you just named where you have, you get one unbelievably good AP instructor teaching

many, many, many schools. And then within the school, you can have people doing study groups and support and group work and sessions and you know, everything that everything that goes around the actual instruction, it reminds me a lot of what happened with with textbooks basically, the idea that, you know, not every teacher in every school has to be able to, you know, sit and recite the entire history of

America from 1776. Because everybody is using textbooks, the idea of this virtual textbooks combined with higher touch, community based learning and and Cohort Based Learning where you actually can have contact with teachers is almost, I feel like it's almost unstoppable, it's something that is going to be very, very threatening to the status quo of, you know, you can only take the classes that are in the school you go to, and you can only take the classes in the town you go to, I just think

that this has been some of the promise of Ed Tech since the beginning. And people have have waited for this sort of these moments when somebody can, you know, instead of going to the first year of college, they can go travel to Bolivia and live on a farm and still be taking great classes and still be meeting amazing people and still be doing all of that. And it happened during the pandemic. And so far, it happened with a

very small sliver. But I think just that just tearing the the envelope open and realizing that that is a possibility of what education might look like, has been incredible. Yeah, I've spent a lot of time this year talking to graduates of Minerva

University. And one of the things that's just been fascinating about that group, is that they're incredibly precocious, they're only a couple of years out of school, because Minerva is a brand new university, but they're already making huge strides doing big things, they've lived everywhere, they've been exposed to a huge number of different types of people and different

types of learning. And, you know, I think that when people start to see how sophisticated students are, when they come out of that type of learning, you're gonna have a real gold rush, you're gonna have a lot of parents starting to say, well, how can I get that for my student? It used to be just the best college I could find. But I don't think it's going to be that anymore. There's going to be lots of options.

full access to all kids. Do you see these trends that we've mentioned in this podcast, accelerating educational equity and closing some of those gaps? Or do you see the those gaps widening as a result of this boom in innovation? But is

startup called equity. It's all about emergency funding for college students, and they've given out 10s of billions of dollars to emergency funding, there are definitely people trying to, you know, bend the cost curve, offer more opportunity, I think that actually companies getting into the education space is actually good for equity, because they are able to train people who would not have been able to afford traditional for selective

for your universities. And you're seeing that with, you know, the grow with Google movement. And with Amazon, too. So I think that some of these movements are going to promote equity and then others are not.

And what I'm actually a little bit afraid of, even though I am participate in some of these products is the sort of reforge or on deck or some of these very closed networking based learning, or Maven classes where you're learning from, you know, a Google product manager or somebody, some hotshot in a tech company, but all the other people in your class are also have a have a certain cultural capital to them, or they have achieved something in their lives, and almost everyone else

is shut out. I think there's a little bit of like a country club mentality in that that I worry about, because if that if that model really takes off, I think you will have a new stratification. How about you, Ben, what do you think is going to happen in terms of equity? I know it's gonna be our last question. We're almost done. Yeah. Well, I

insular communities. And so I just think, in every podcast in every product meeting in every curriculum design session, if people are bringing diverse voices to the table and asking this question over and over, I think this could be a new horizon, my honest conclusion from 2021 Is that our industrial model is broken. It is not serving low income learners, but it's not even serving middle

income learners either. And so you know, the alternative of just saying, let's not have as much edtech innovation, let's double down on the system we've got, I don't think that that's the right move either. So I'm just grateful for you, Alex, for pulling this podcast together. 2021 has been an incredible year, both in the good and the challenge. And I'm really excited to kick off 2022 with our ed tech we can review and excited to hear from the listening community for our tech

insiders. Hear what you want to hear about in in our upcoming podcasts and episodes. So thanks so much, Alex.

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