Welcome to Ed Tech insiders. In this podcast, we talk to educators and educational technology investors, thought leaders, founders and operators about the most interesting and exciting trends in the field. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an educational technology veteran with over a decade of work at leading edtech companies.
Welcome to This Week in edtech, it is the week of March 23. We have all sorts of topics for you today, including web three in education, Master crash, and masters programs outschool For real, and also challenges to US News and World Report's status quo. It's going to be a great show today. And I'm excited to be joined by Ed Tech insiders founder, Alex Sarlin. Hi, Alex.
It's great to be here. And you know, one thing we also wanted to make sure that our listeners know is that the ASU GSB Conference, which is a very big one, and that tech is just around the corner a couple of weeks away, Ben and I will be there, we will be doing some live podcast recording, I will also be moderating a couple of panels, which I'm really excited about. This is my first time at the big rodeo after many years of watching it from afar. So
really thrilled to be there. And if you're a listener come up and say hello, then let's kick it off. Let's talk add score.
Great, well, outschool, as many know, one of the largest companies in ad tech in general, but also probably the biggest winner of the COVID pandemic. outschool offers courses to students that are delivered by a marketplace of educators. And their claim to fame is that these are high quality synchronous courses, ranging from academic subjects to really engaging topics like robotics, theater, art, and drama, how to build a birdhouse, I mean, it really spans the
gamut. What this article really points out is that the COVID transformation has had a lasting impact on user behavior. And our school continues to have supplemental usage, even though many of their students have gone back to school. And the article itself is a big fan of Amir, the CEO and the way that outschool is going, it does bucked the trend of earlier narratives around outschool As an alternative to the school
system. I think now school has firmly found itself in a spot as a supplemental and adjacent area of learning. What was your take on this article?
Yeah, so I've been a fan of that school for a while. And we spoke to Amy Jenkins, ahead of schools at our school for the tech insiders podcast. And I think it's just an incredible idea to be able to give teachers the ability to teach directly to students all over the country and world without necessarily being within a traditional system that feels really exciting and sort of groundbreaking to me. I think this article itself felt a little bit like almost advertising, which felt a little
bit funny. I think our school is an amazing company. And I'm really excited to see where they go, especially as the pandemic ones down, hopefully. And school comes back into session, as you say, but I think it struck both of us then a little bit as like, it's important to be careful about overhyping, anything in the tech space, because things that tend to get a lot of positive press become sometimes this sort of golden children, and then people are looking to
see them fall. This article sort of felt a little bit like a hype cycle style article. Did you feel that at
all? Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of the challenges when you're in ed tech right now. And you're trying to understand what is true. What is not true, is that there's two big genres once the hype piece, and Forbes has become like the master of the hype piece. This article we're talking about was in Fast Company, but there was one I think just a week ago, about outschool in Forbes. And so it's hard to know, are these journalistic endeavors or is
this promotional? And the second paradigm is hit pieces, when there's just a lot of concern or skepticism about technology, in
education and so on. And what I would say it's hard for us putting together the podcast but also I know a lot of folks who want to get into edtech for work, and it is really really hard to understand which ad tech companies are doing well and which are not doing well until you get under the hood and sometimes even joined the team and I've had a number of curveballs myself and joining
new enterprises. So I just think that this like truth in journalism, which is a worldwide theme, and question, we're seeing a lot of it in ad tech space.
Yeah. And those tend to go together the hype piece about how this is the next big thing and then the fall piece, even this article, how to, you know, is it going to be able to maintain the momentum use, they sort of plant the seed of the fall even in this article, and it sometimes it feels like that narrative may be a little bit counterproductive when you're truly trying to
understand what's going on. But speaking of skepticism, and the sort of a hit piece, a terrific gap letter newsletter from Ryan Craig of achieved partners in university ventures this week, anybody who is not reading the gap letter Ryan, Craig is one of the best observers of especially higher education and future of work and alternative credentialing that we have in edtech, or any other sector. He had a great piece this week
called Master crash. It's really a very well researched hippies on the bloated master's degree industry. And in some ways, it's also a little bit of a side blow to the OPM industry, which props up a lot of the online masters but you know, it has stats like while the average bachelor's degree list prices increased nearly 50% in 20 years, which is
amazing. Masters are up 80%. So masters are outpacing even bachelor's degrees inflation, it talks about master's programs being the only growth segment during the COVID pandemic, while everything else Trump masters still continue to rise, despite very high prices, and despite them producing outsized amounts of student loans, often having negative return on investments, there's issues of only, you know, almost half of Human Services, masters have negative ROI in things like psychology
and social work. So it's really a warning sign. And Ryan Craig is a known skeptic of a lot of things, he has a very specific vision for the future of the world. But I thought that the steps in this were really eye opening about how we've gotten to a place where colleges, both in person and online are starting to use master's degrees overtly as sort of a cash cow. And it's sort of a known thing. And that allows the prices to
spiral. And they don't necessarily care enough about the ROI, and they want to keep making more and more masters. So definitely something to keep an eye on. And I do hope that the cost curve gets pulled down, because it's really not a good direction to go in to have all of these masters that are very expensive, and negative ROI just pushes the tuition problem up to the ladder. What did you think about Master crash?
Yeah, and by the way, for listeners, the links will add to the show notes. Thank you for introducing me to Ryan crack. And this newsletter, Alex, I think the kinds of questions that come up for me are one, if masters cash cows go away, does that actually mean that undergrad tuition goes up? Which that can be really problematic? Number two is if the value is not there today, does the value or the positive ROI occur in lower cost Master's models? Or is the master's degree model just fully
outdated? And then third of you start picking it apart? And I think he rightly calls out Human Services is an area where it has a negative ROI. Are people doing those master's degrees for a financial return? Or is it actually for another purpose? Like they just love what they're doing and want to spend money on psychology, social work or education? Ultimately, we're going to talk about this in a
little bit. These ask questions around what is the purpose of education and if it is economic mobility, clearly, master's degrees programs writ large, are
failing on that front. And you know, it gives that opportunity for disruption could also be one of those things where we should just see a decline in people doing master's degrees and doing more work based learning trilogy and to you have made a lot of money helping universities set up their master's programs, and often the Masters online programs, they're held less
tightly for universities. So I would say like as an area of innovation, master's degrees have usually been ahead of the curve versus core academic programs for universities. So that's also another factor here. Moving from Master crash to potentially over optimistic future who knows web three and education. We've had an ongoing kind of web three B and I I think our overarching takeaway is that it's a wild wild west
right now. And even the people who are experts in web three, don't really know exactly where it's going. We had a really awesome guest two weeks ago and now an article coming out from Jumeirah Herrera from reach. And it really is one of the core education related web three essays out there. You can check it out on medium again in our
notes. But really the team at reach segmented the web three market into four categories onboarding, learning, credentialing and earning and then tried to place companies and organizations on it as a market map. And what really struck me is that many of the solutions don't actually require blockchain or daos, or some of the innovations. They're actually working in pretty well known spaces where the non web three solutions are doing pretty
well. And so it raises this question of, can web three or crypto based blockchain based solutions actually deliver better or more decentralized solutions than non web three solutions? So as you read the article, what was coming up for you?
Yeah, I mean, I'm always trying to figure out exactly how the relationship between web three and education is going to pan out. I think, even as you say, even the closest observers and the people who are studying it a lot are still trying to predict a future in an area that is just it's growing incredibly rapidly and
in every possible direction. But I don't think there's a common framework for people to really think about and I think Joe Myra Herrera's article here is a an attempt to help people think about a framework in which to put different web three education projects, which are in all sorts of shapes and levels of maturity. Right now, I'm all
relatively young. Of course, one thing that consistently strikes me about the sort of web three education world at the moment, is that the vast majority, in fact, I mean, almost all web three projects that have any kind of educational bent, are often designed to educate people about the subject of web three itself. There are crypto academies or ways to get people
to become web three coders. And there's nothing wrong with that it actually makes a lot of sense, given how early web three is and how competitive it is every new protocol, every blockchain, every different group, it really wants to grow its own ecosystem, which is totally rational and logical. But I think that has obscured the real potential of web three
and education down the road. I think web three down the road will have, as you say, Ben could have, let's say, some really interesting ramifications for education in terms of decentralizing the education world for students to be able to work together in decentralized organizations to decide what to learn to bring on their own teachers to decide their own projects to own part of their own schools or universities. Those are all really exciting
and very new ideas. I think a few people are starting to hit in that direction. But it's very hard to tell to separate the wheat from the chaff so far. And I think even with this part two article of Jamar is learning earning and web three part two article which we will link to in the show notes. Even this very deeply researched attempt, I think is still in that trajectory. But we're not quite there yet. I don't think we quite yet know how to talk about web three and education.
Yeah, what I would actually say the most impactful part for me was at the end, where you Jumeirah kind of admits that this space is still really dynamic. And she kind of has her core questions of what they're looking for both from a company side, but then also a market side. So the questions are, one is the company's target user, likely early adopter. Two, is the acute pain point, high enough with current solutions? And two, is there an existing web two viable business model
that can be implemented? That's how they're sourcing these. So already, they're looking at? Okay, if this doesn't play out in web three, immediately, is there a web two viable business here? And I think that that's just telling that most web three and education is going to have to be web two viable, which means centralized and conforming to the traditional like business and organizational structure models that could then flip into web three and then the second on
a market basis. They're looking at markets where the learners are more digital natives and early adopters, where the current market has solutions that have high take rates are suboptimal. So take rate would be like, whatever the solution is they take 80% of the value and the user community only takes 20% of the value. So that might be an opportunity to win. And then the third is, there's a very viable business model that
exists. So if you're looking at markets where there's viable business models, and you're looking at companies that have web two slash web three viability, I think you're just going to be in this blended space for a period of time. The other big point that she makes at the end is that there is a huge lack of diversity in web three founders. And that circles back to your point, like most web three, learning is about web three, we need to find ways to build web three from the bottom.
And from the early days with a broader group of founders that include women and people of color. And already it's off to a like strong white male only start and so I'm pretty excited for reach to lead the charge in that regard. So like, find pathways for recent college graduates or people that are in college or higher ed, to have pipelines to pursue web three careers,
agreed. And one more very brief point on web three before we move on one model that I've yet to see. But when you talk about take rates, it sort of spurs this idea. Web three allows smart contracts, so that payment can be sort of conditional and locked in code. Can we imagine a world in which a tutoring company or tutoring person, an individual can tutor or somebody and will get paid in direct proportion to how well the student does in whenever
they're getting tutored. And whether it's a standardized test or a class or a certification exam, you could build that in code. And that would completely change the tutoring space or potentially change the tutoring space. There are some really interesting potential ideas out there. I think as a community, we're still rustling in the in the hay to find them. So let's
move on. Then. There was a fascinating article this week about a Columbia Professor challenging the US News and World Report college rankings for Columbia itself, a little bit of a dissent from a tenured professor in the ranks. And it got some interesting coverage.
Because as you know, anybody who's followed education higher ed for a long time, knows the US News and World Report is this sort of universally disliked ranking system that still somehow has an iron grip over many, many college decisions. And the idea of it being challenged in a very research driven way yet again, was really interesting. But then you have some really interesting thoughts of this. I think I'm curious when you when you hear this story.
Yeah. So Michael, Thaddeus is the professor. He's a math professor. And the numbers just weren't adding up. He's like, looking at the rankings and looking how Columbia has climbed the rankings over time to be in the top three of universities. And he was on leave from the school, you know, taking a sabbatical. And he's also known as a frequent critic of Colombia and the Academy in general. And as he crunched the numbers, he's like, these things don't add up. And normally, this would not be
headline news. But it actually is a trend of over the last four or five years, a number of universities and officials have been exposed for lying to US News and World Report's to improve the rankings of either the undergrad or master's degree
programs. And so it does call into question the machinery around college ranking, but also the long term viability of university models, which the article later on, you know, it's a less salacious headline, but points out that just going to a school based on its ranking doesn't necessarily mean that it's the right school for you as a learner. And it really related to this article that I read in Chronicle of Higher Education called the university in ruins.
And it's from the president of Johns Hopkins University, where he posits that this perspective that getting the highest ranking is the goal of universities is actually totally veering schools down the wrong avenues and wrong paths. And even the idea that university's core purpose is economic mobility, he posits is misguided. Their original core concept of the university system in the US was around economic mobility around an educated citizenry, and also around catalyzing work to reinforce the
interests of the nation. And the best example of this says during COVID, many of us went to the Johns Hopkins website to understand what was going on with COVID. What was the latest research, and this idea of public service or patriotism even, which has become like a bad word in the halls of academia. And so I connected that with this copy of professor because the intro of the book and of the article is about how monasteries, in the medieval times ended up falling out of
favor in England. And it was partly this idea that the utility of the monastery as a place of enlightened learning and innovation started falling down because it switched to judging the right and wrong of people in society. And people rebelled and react against that, but also from critics from within who just saw the large s and the misguided intentions. So the two articles really point to external factors, putting pressure on universities, which listen to any of our podcasts,
you can hear about that. But also this idea that universities are eating themselves from within. And so Michael Thaddaeus is like one of the folks who tends to take that lead using a lot of data analytics. There's also a professor at NYU, who tends to be really outspoken about universities and their ROI, and so on. And so I think this is the moment where we have to say, our universities we're saving, what are they for? What
is the Academy for? And is it solely about return on investment for economic prospects? In that case? It's a failing argument. So what is like a liberal education and its value? And what is the value to the country to have these large universities? That's the kind of conversation we need to include.
That's a great, great set of thoughts. I have two super quick thoughts that this brings up. One is that the argument you're mentioning in the university and ruins article reminds me of an argument that Kevin carry another ad tech are education sort of Skeptic gadfly in some ways, as Ryan Craig calls him brought up in his book, The end
of college. And he basically said that that tripartite purpose of universities the idea of it being about research to benefit the nation, on one hand, about creating a, you know, the sort of liberal arts ideal of educated and productive citizenry or not productive enlightened citizenry, and then about being about creating a sort of workforce, a skilled and talented workforce and creating people who can actually get jobs, those are really in
tension with each other. And he says that that idea of this one institution trying to fulfill these wildly different goals, just puts the university sort of at war with itself. And one of the places you particularly see that is in the teaching, you know, the idea that the highest ranking tenured professors at universities are often purely research professors, then they hire adjuncts and lower paid teachers to do the teaching
work. And it's just one of these moments where you can see the incentives in direct conflict. So it's really interesting. I personally don't think the university's number is up quite yet. But I do think that it's becoming more and more and more common over the last five or 10 years for people, even within academia to be truly truly questioning exactly what the purpose of college is. And I think that's a positive thing, as its costs have spiraled out of control as alternative
credentials are rising. And as inequality continues to rise, I think it's important for higher ed to examine its role in society.
Right. Right. And also this idea that college is binary 01, I think this idea of what is the overall purpose, and then who's best positioned to serve that purpose in the ecosystem. But I do think that the nuance here is really around citizenship and patriotism. And is there a world in which that has intersects with higher ed? Or has that become so politically toxic? That it's actually out of the question?
Yeah. And there's a big political divide on higher ed to the political party affiliation predicts whether people approve of,
of colleges in the US. So that's not a place we really want to be either. This is such a great topic. We could talk for hours on it. Let's do the m&a. Let's walk through some of the funding rounds this week, because there's some really interesting stuff just happened this week in tech funding. Do you want to kick us off then?
Sure. Nigerian, a tech company class. I think that's how it's pronounced. Got $130,000 angel round and it's a virtual platform that allows anyone to open a virtual school, which I find really interesting this first like innovation happening In Nigeria, which you know, soon to be will be top two or three in population countries. And what we're seeing is an ad tech ecosystem in Africa, really starting to take shape. What's the second headline?
Absolutely. The second headline was Beverly Hills based in meal learning, which came out with a brand new name this week. It's now called subject. And it got a $29 million investment round from our ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Softbank, and moving capital, which is Santa Monica based. So that is a large round. And this is a company that offers sort of very high end, not high end in terms of price, high end in terms of production classes for
high schools. So our music, AP level courses, science, it basically offers really good quality, centralized courses, often from really interesting presenters. So it's a little bit like a high school master class. And it's definitely one to keep our eye on. I think we're planning on talking to some of the subject executives next week about this round, it's going to be really interesting to talk to them. What's next Ben,
leverage edu, which is an Indian tech company that does counseling for folks that want to do study abroad. They provide international education and career opportunities. They announced a series B 22 million. And it connects with the explosion of what we're seeing in India and the Indian edtech market. This is one of those where it's starting to connect the dots between the Indian edtech market and the international market. And kind of following the playbook of
what we saw in China. Some of the biggest unicorns in China, were marketplaces that had oversea opportunities or oversea educators connecting with in country in China learners. And you can see leverage edu pulling from that playbook. All right, and then to wrap us off, per Lego,
per Lego A is a I don't not know if I'm pronouncing that correctly. It's a London based European ad tech firm that has what we believe to be the largest catalogue of digital textbooks about 850,000, which are then offered as a subscription service to university students, they raised $50 million. That's the largest round of the week, this week to grow their service. They're on the up and up. That round was led by a media release ventures, which is a part of the European
media group media queries. And it's a very exciting thing to keep an eye on. They also got investment from the we are human Fund, which is a fun started by the code founders. So exciting news. PROLOGO apparently means I read in Latin I am now sure I'm pronouncing that wrong. But they work with a lot of really
interesting publishers. And I think what this means to me is that, you know, the textbook industry with with some of the big players being bought out by private equity, or changing their business models, I think we're going to see textbook subscriptions as a very, very normal part of the education ecosystem. It already is between check in and per Lego. But I think we're gonna see even more of that
coming soon. Yeah, one takeaway from this, too, is I heard about the per Lego round and the Emil slash subject round, probably in like July or August of last year. So one of the things our listeners should know is, often when these things are announced, they happen like six months ago, or eight months ago, or that's when it all came together. I will also say I'm noticing that rounds are taking
longer to close. In the middle of the pandemic, people were closing rounds in like a month or two months, which was really unheard of getting a commitment and then having it funded so quickly. But things are taking more time now. And I think that is investors getting excited, but then also wanting to do good diligence. And also the companies themselves thinking about, okay, we want to make sure we're taking the right
amount of cash. And then we have a really good plan to use it so that we're not giving up too much equity at this point. So very interesting headlines this week. And also just goes to show this stuff is happening all around the world. So we wrap today with our game, and the game we're going to call top three, which basically means that I am going to present three stories that didn't make it for
the cut for five headlines. And my colleague here Alex is going to vote on which he thinks is the most important story of the three and then he will return the favor. So as our resident K 12 expert, my three come from the K 12 space, the three stories I have, the first one is from KQED mind shift about schools and climate change. And ultimately, it has a lot to do with natural disasters and the impact that climate change is having on school sustainability.
There's also good information around energy management and waste at schools. The second article is around equity and Esser. And this is from getting smart, and it's about hiring a diverse educator workforce. And, in fact, getting smart posits that this is a unique moment, a unique window of time to build pipelines for teachers of color, and teachers with low income backgrounds to head into the
classroom. And then the third is around 1.5 billion in recovery funds going to after school programs, really expanding the learning surface area for especially those struggling with learning loss of those three articles, you had a chance to skim them, which do you think is the most important in terms of impact in the education space?
That's a great question. So I'm gonna go with the equity and SR article about investing in educator diversity. You know, we've talked a lot on this podcast about how we're sort of facing a impending teacher shortage. And there's major changes coming to the sort of teaching ecosystem and redefining what it means to be
an educator. And I think that the idea of using this crisis as an opportunity to build better diversity and representation in the classroom combined with improving the pay, and professional respect to educators, that is a very exciting proposal to me, when things start to sort of fray at the edges as they are in a lot of K 12 schools right now post pandemic, I think there's a really exciting chance to remake them in a new way that hopefully
is better than the old way. And I love this idea of investing in educator diversity and some of the different programs that are named in this article about how to do that. So I love that one. That's going to be my number one. I think the two is the Climate Reality only because I think schools are going to face some interesting choices around climate, both in terms of curriculum and in terms of their actual practices. The after school story doesn't even though it's a lot of money, 1.5 billion
is a pretty good chunk. My read on that is that people don't know where to put the money to try to STEM learning loss and get us sort of back from pandemic days and after school is just something that is a almost like a catch off. Nothing's anything wrong with after school programs can be incredibly effective. But where that money goes, could be all
over the place. And it feels a little bit like a Hail Mary, to me to just throw money to after school programs and hope that that's going to keep the damage from being done to the K 12. System. That's my ranking diversity climate after school. You want to correct me, Ben, what did I do wrong?
Well know, all that you said. I mean, the educator shortage and expenses for and disruption to school, you know, I think you you hit it, right. And as a school board member, I'd have to say, those are definitely top of mind when you do the math 1.5 billion divided by 85 million students, it actually ends up equating to not as much money as one would think, in the classroom. All right, your turn, Alex.
All right. So the three articles that stood out to me to almost made the cut this week. One is about COVID, disproportionately impacting black and Latino students that's from Inside Higher Ed. And it's specifically about how in higher education, more black and Latino students were more likely to put off higher education or to not, you know, not enroll or to pause their education due to COVID than were white students. That
is one article. Another is about GO students are the Austrian and tech unicorn coming into the US. It's a tutoring platform, and it's starting to make inroads into the US. And the third, was it really interesting article, again, from Inside Higher Ed saying, can we come up with a better name than synchronous? Talking about some of the ways the ways that we talk about online learning and some of the sort of wonky terminology that makes things sound a lot more onerous and complex than they
might otherwise? What do you think when? Let's hear Yeah,
I'm gonna go with COVID disproportionately impacting black and Latino students. Second, go student come into America. And then the third, can we get our education lingo to be understanding? I really enjoyed the ghost student article because I do think we rarely see ventures or enterprises that crossed the
past. and successfully either direction, but especially a European unicorn coming to the US, that's really exciting and fun to read their press article, they're going to hire like 130 people in Austin, which is adding to the Austin boom. But I think the COVID, disproportionately impacting black and Latino students really hits home. And, you know, as much as we have been working towards Educational Equity over the last 20 years, the gaps and
inequity has only expanded. And what I noticed is that there's access inequity, but then there's also outcomes inequity, this idea that even when we create more access to different programs or opportunities we're not doing as a country or our institutions are not doing a great job of supporting learners from all sorts of backgrounds to get the most out of those
programs and complete them. So I just thought that article was a really important point, especially now as schools and universities in March are starting to pivot towards what this next year look like. So thanks for those stories. We're gonna wrap today. Alex, do you want to take us out?
Sure. Well, thank you for being here with us for this week in edtech, ASU GSB is coming up. If you're going to be there, please send us a message and come knock on the door. We'd love to record five good minutes with you at the conference. And as we head towards the end of March and hopefully avoid this next COVID variant. We just want to thank everybody for listening to the podcast. It's been a real adventure so far. And we're really excited to see that the tech field just continues to
fascinate and grow. Thanks for being here if it happens in edtech you'll hear about it here. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Ed Tech insiders podcast. If you liked the episode, remember to subscribe on Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're listening on Apple, please leave a rating and review so others can find the podcast. For more ed tech insiders content subscribe to the Ed Tech insiders newsletter at ed tech insiders.substack.com