Global Evolution of EdTech
$16 billion and 20 something years later
Note: Checkout Landscape 2.0 — Published May 2017.
Whilst many suggest education is the final frontier for digital disruption and reaching a tipping point, others point to a multi-decade evolution. EdTech is sometimes argued as a catalyst to much deeper sociological or anthropological disruption given educations medieval origins. Project Landscape mapped 2,000 companies who believe innovation and technology can rapidly and positively reform education and transform the way the world learns.
We launched Project Landscape in January. Our vision is a global, open source, community driven initiative to help us all understand what the next 10 years in education might look like. This month we look at over 20 years of evolution through $16b of investment around the world.
In Part 1, we explained our MVP approach to Project Landscape, noting we know our sample is incomplete, and overlaps but it’s more than enough to seed the project and collect feedback. Here is a quick summary of what we learnt about evolution in our MVP.
21st Century Perspective
We marked the turn of the century as our baseline and added a half-time marker in 2008 to get roughly to today. By the year 2000, we found 425 companies across the landscape with $4.3b of investment behind them over several decades. With a small but long tail of early innovators, the mid 1990’s marked serious growth in the US and the UK with China following fast. Formal accreditation and content distribution featured with small starts in admissions and other services related clusters.
8 years later, by 2008, nearly 400 more companies had made a start attracting just over $4b in that 8 year period. Learning Management Systems, a second wave of content publishers and language/literacy focused clusters started to make a move.
By 2016, 800 more companies had started with a little over $6b invested since 2008. By now we see VR/AR emerging, social learning appears from nowhere, peer to peer and tutoring surges, we see informal/unaccredited explode and watch testing and credentialing expand as well.
Median Founding Year
Another way of looking for evolution trends is to take a look at the median year of founding for all the companies in a given cluster. We compared median founding year with the total investment received for each cluster and the number of companies that make up each cluster itself shown in the bubble-chart below.
Median founding year is exactly that, the middle founding year of the companies in each cluster, not the average. Through this lens, we marked three phases of evolution.
Phase 1 is a wave of formal accreditation alternatives to traditional tertiary education receiving the second highest level of investment overall. Innovation in the distribution of content followed with the next generation of learning management systems not far behind. This first phase accounts for a large share of all the companies we find on the landscape.
Phase 2 starts in about 2006 through this lens with clusters that are more familiar and make up the bulk of the global edtech conversation we see today. China clustered together despite having companies that belong throughout the landscape and centered around 2007. Admissions technology and language and literacy, make up a burst at the start of Phase 2 followed by a second burst in Phase 2 of digital learning, testing and credentialing and classroom tech.
Phase 3 is the most recent phase kicking off late 2009. Unaccredited education, VR/AR and social learning, recruitment and employment, peer to peer and tutoring and informal/unaccredited education are the late starters that we should expect to see more of.
Thematic Evolution
In part 1, we grouped the 16 clusters we found into 6 themes. As part of the evolution lens, we looked at the share each theme held of the startups founded in each year from the turn of the century to 2016.
Content has always been strong, moving through what looks like two waves in the period from 2000 to 2008 and through to today, showing a decline in share over the last few years but still sitting above 10% share of startups founded each year.
Platforms made a strong start in the early 2000s, appears to have shrunk post GFC in 2008/2009, made a resurgence in 2010/2011 and tapered off to less than 10% total share of startups founded in 2016.
Access follows a reasonably steady trend to start, holding 15–20% share and has grown significantly since 2010 to over 30% of all startups founded in 2016, the largest theme by almost double.
Immersion has always had a 10% or so share but shows recent signs of strong share growth, stretching out to over 20% in 2016. VR/AR has driven much of the recent surge in share.
Learning made a large start in the early 2000s, at one point nearly 30% share but has only made up a small 10% or so share in the last 10 years. Formal/accredited and informal/unaccredited clusters sit in this theme but by number of founded companies they make up a smaller share than you might think despite their key role in delivering learning outcomes.
Progression hovered through the 2000s at 10–15% and in 2007 reached almost 30% share, declining slowly in share to nearly 15% in 2016. This thematic is a little counter intuitive given the recent focus on pathways to work but again is the share versus the size of founded startups.
What’s next
We have received some incredible feedback from Part 1 and our landscape is now reaching over 10,000 companies from around the world. EdTech leaders from different cities are ‘donating’ data sets to the project which will give us all much richer and deeper insights and diversity.
We are set to share another perspective of Landscape 1.0 in March focused on investment trends and comparing what we have found with the likes of Crunchbase, CBInsights, JMDEdu, EdTechXGlobal etc.
Building Landscape 1.0 has taken some effort, but the real work comes now. We need passionate and constructive feedback so we can understand where to focus. You can send feedback here. We greatly appreciate any and all thoughts.
