Global EdTech Venture Capital Report – Full Year 2021 — from holoniq.com
$20.8B of EdTech Venture Capital Investment in 2021 through more than 1,500 Funding Rounds.
Excerpt:
EdTech Venture Capital reached 3x pre-pandemic investment levels in 2021, accelerating startups around the world with over $20B of funding. Fueled by a massive US and EU investment surge and India’s growth charging onwards, collectively global growth covered an $8B investment collapse from China and managed to set record growth for the sector.
From DSC:
As the article below clearly relays, MOOCs did NOT fail! In the last decade, they have reached 220 million learners worldwide!
I don’t know the total number of graduates from the Ivy League — throughout all of the relevant institutions’ histories — but I would bet you that MOOCs have reached far more learners. And MOOCs did so in less than a decade.
And you’re going to tell me MOOCs have been a failure?!!!! Are you being serious!?!?! You can talk about completion rates all that you want to (and that misses the point, as some people sign up for MOOCs without ever intending to finish the entire course). As with other things, people get out of something what they put into that thing.
A Decade of MOOCs: A Review of Stats and Trends for Large-Scale Online Courses in 2021 — from edsurge.com by Dhawal Shah
Excerpts:
Now, a decade later, MOOCs have reached 220 million learners, excluding China where we don’t have as reliable data, . In 2021, providers launched over 3,100 courses and 500 microcredentials.
…
Originally, MOOC providers relied on universities to create courses. But that dependence is declining as more and more of the courses are created by companies every year. These corporate partners in course creation include tech giants Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook.
…the majority of the new courses launched on Coursera in 2021 are not from universities anymore.
…
These mass online courses were born without a business model. Yet within a decade, MOOCs went from no revenue to bringing in well over a half a billion dollars annually.
Bavarian Church — from 500px by Stefan Thaler
The next age of the internet could suck power away from Big Tech while living on the same backbone as cryptocurrencies. Here’s what to know about Web3. — from businessinsider.com by Katie Canales
Excerpts (emphasis DSC):
…
One aspect of the metaverse is that users will hopefully be able to go virtually from platform to platform with one single account — just like we will in Web3.
And NFTs, one-of-a-kind tokens representing your ownership of a virtual good, could be more easily bought and sold with cryptocurrencies within a space like Web3.
From DSC:
How might “Web3” translate into the future of lifelong learning? Here’s one vision/possibility:
Each person would have a learner profile/account that could seamlessly log into multiple education/training providers’ platforms and services. The results of that learning could be stored in one’s cloud-based learner profile. This type of next-generation learning platform would still need subject matter experts, instructional designers, programmers, and other team members. But the focus would be on building skills — skills that an artificial intelligence-backed interface would demonstrate are currently being requested by the modern workplace. This constantly-being-updated list of skills could then link to the learning-related experiences and resources that people could choose from in order to develop those skills.
The following vision/graphic also comes to my mind:
Top Resources For Students To Discover Real World Problems & Issues — from edtechreview.in by Saniya Khan
Are you looking for ways to help students learn about world issues: climate change, cultural diversity, biodiversity, education, water crisis, [homelessness] and more to build awareness about global issues and develop global competence?
The State of Student Success & Engagement in Higher Education — from instructure.com (authors of the Canvas LMS)
Our 2021 Global Student engagement and success study uncovers vital stats and key trends to help education institutions thrive through today’s education challenges.
Excerpt:
Dezeen reveals their award winners for 2021 — from dezeen.com
Under the Tree — from 500px.com by Birdies Lanscapes
Photo by Mrwei — from 500px.com
90 degrees — from 500ox,com by Aytug Bayer
A bonus item: This video captures an incredibly talented and clever artist!
Excerpt from “Use of digital technologies in judicial reform and access to justice cooperation — from HiiL (The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law)
Autumn Pumpkin Spice Latte –from Tatiana Goskova out at 500px.com
The Old Barn in Frost and Fire — by Jørn Allan Pedersen out at 500px.com
An excerpt from Eva Keiffenheim’s Learn Letter re: A New Education Paradigm (emphasis DSC)
Here are a couple of underlying assumptions within our current education paradigm:
I invite you to question the current paradigm: How would schools and universities look like so that all young people can flourish?
From DSC:
Eva’s reflections remind me of what I was trying to say the other day about how ideas start out as fragile…but if they take hold, they become very powerful. Today’s education paradigms are a great example of that. These paradigms have deep roots that are very hard to change.
Can MasterClass teach you everything? — from newyorker.com by Tad Friend
Malala Yousafzai on set. Though the site’s C.E.O., David Rogier, says, “Learning is uncomfortable,” the shoots are lavish. Photograph by Lewis Khan for The New Yorker
Excerpt:
When MasterClass launched, in 2015, it offered three courses: Dustin Hoffman on acting, James Patterson on writing, and Serena Williams on tennis. Today, there are a hundred and thirty, in categories from business to wellness. During the pandemic lockdown, demand was up as much as tenfold from the previous year; last fall, when the site had a back-to-school promotion, selling an annual subscription for a dollar instead of a hundred and eighty dollars, two hundred thousand college students signed up in a day. MasterClass will double in size this year, to six hundred employees, as it launches in the U.K., France, Germany, and Spain. It’s a Silicon Valley investor’s dream, a rolling juggernaut of flywheels and network effects dedicated to helping you, as the instructor Garry Kasparov puts it, “upgrade your software.”
