Technology-enabled teaching & learning in higher education, pt. 2b: A guide on how to build a unicorn in course Delivery

This is part 2b of our series on technology-enabled teaching and learning where we dig deep into the topic of teaching and learning Delivery in higher education covering trends, challenges and opportunities to build new edtech unicorns.

Introduction

If this is the first time you are encountering this edtech article series from Emerge Education, we highly recommend you later check out our first piece highlighting ‘Why we are investing in this space’ and our ‘Guide on how to build a unicorn’ that serves as an introduction to this deep dive.

As we have previously written, there has been a lot of unsuccessful investment and adoption of education technology in the context of teaching and learning in higher education. In our previous piece we covered the dynamics in the heavily funded Resources space. Aside from Learning Management Systems (LMSs), and rare company exceptions like Top Hat and Kahoot, technology in the context of Delivery of education, however, has until recently been a very underfunded and ignored space. While Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Online Programme Managers (OPMs) have digitised education for off-campus students, the physical one-to-many lecture for on-campus students has remained relatively unchanged since the beginning of higher education.

Why is this the case, what is changing and what can be done to foster innovation? This article provides the answers to these questions for founders and operators looking to understand and take advantage of opportunities in this space, as we analyse the digital teaching and learning category of Delivery against:

• (1) an overview of the current subcategories it consists of, referring to the old, conventional ways of thinking about teaching and learning and their market sizes
• (2) the key recent trends and innovations in the market covering the macro trends with the ups and the downs, as well as specific incumbent company trends
• (3) challenges in the space, explaining why these sectors have at times struggled to grow and what is preventing growth
• (4) the next generation opportunities for innovation, highlighting the 4 new subcategories we believe represent the next wave of future in this space, directly aligned against the existing conventional subcategories

Overview & Definition:

This category represents infrastructure we use to facilitate and assess teaching and learning. LMSs and plagiarism detection services have historically dominated this space as the only two large categories, but have more recently seen video conferencing and communication platforms join. As Covid has moved the lecture online, where much of it is likely to stay, it has prompted the need for technologies and environments that support online and blended learning. We see this happening through companies enabling interactive instruction, student engagement through learning experience platforms and virtual learning environments, and actionable on-the-go feedback and analytics.

Current Subcategories:

Content storage and management systems: Learning Management Systems (LMSs) led by Canvas and Blackboard, have for more than two decades played a fundamental role in hosting, storing, transmitting and managing learning resources and students, with basic assessment and discussion features. This mature $2bn category has built defensibility through supporting varying faculty teaching styles and preferences in effectively sharing content and managing students through broad feature sets. It plays a central ecosystem role with integrations ranging from Student Information Systems to courseware and video providers. Lecture capture is the only other category that has made a dent in the space with mid-market providers like Panopto and Kaltura allowing educators to record and upload their lectures to make them available to students throughout the semester.

Engaging instruction platforms: Engaging instruction has to date been a relatively small category. It represents platforms and tools that help facilitate and enhance faculty-led live and blended instruction from clickers for polling through midmarket players like CourseKey, fun and engaging quizes with new market leaders like Kahoot and more holistic student engagement solutions that include assessment like Top Hat. More recently live online lectures have dominated teaching facilitated by video-conferencing solutions like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Unlike LMSs which are present in most established universities, interactive instruction software pre-Covid has been a niche offer reserved for the innovative professors looking to create more student engagement and better understand the classroom.

Student engagement environments: This category represents a gap against what the LMS has not yet managed to achieve — create an engaging asynchronous communication, discussion and learning environment which ensures teaching staff and students are connected and supported beyond the physical lecture and tutorial environments. Microsoft’s recent forray into higher education through Teams has created the first meaningful dent in this category, but the general concept of meaningfully continuing the academic experience outside of a physical classroom outside the occassional mandated online homework, test and exam has been an empty space.

Assessment and proctoring products: This category encompasses a range of solutions created for professors and institutions to make it easier to grade essays and assignments, check for plagiarism and authenticity in writing and prevent cheating through proctoring online examinations. The plagarism space has long been a large market, lead by new leaders like TurnItIn. The second biggest market that emerged were tools that helped educators save time and effectively grade assignments and exams, led by companies like Examsoft. Proctoring, including companies like Examity and Honorlock, represents the third large frontier in this space — given technical challenges, cultural resistance, privacy and quality concerns it has historically seen slow uptake which has drastically changed with Covid as unprepared institutions were left with no choice.

Trends & Innovations:

LMS product and ecosystem improvements: Many leading LMS players, led by Canvas, have taken a cloud, open-source and ecosystem product approach. It has created opportunities for the community to improve the product over time and for hundreds of teaching and learning solutions to connect with it to allow customization and greater functionality. This more recently includes increasingly in demand online assignments, asynchronous communication, video content, lecture capture and live video solutions and features.

Surge in online instruction and communication demand: While online instruction pre-Covid was reserved for online degrees, overnight it became the global norm. Educators that had never taken part in a video calls have immediately became power users of the best solutions they could find: Zoom, Google and Microsoft. In doing so many for the first time experienced the luxuries of convenience and flexibility, despite many other ongoing challenges.

Assessment technology improvements: There has been great progress in assessment technologies from assessment creation tools, plagiarism detection to multiple-choice auto-grading and subject tailored grading tools that all support educators in giving better and faster feedback while protecting the academic integrity of the institution. Research suggests that automated essay graders have reached a level where, purely through algorithms and access to large graded datasets, they can accurately predict human essay scores.

Increased openness to online testing: One of the biggest limitations to the flexibility of online teaching and learning has been the exam. Even the most progressive online degrees have required part-time students to travel to physical sites to take semester-end high-stake assessments. Even though the technology has been there, the need and risk appetite from educational institutions has not. With the first wave of semester exams during Covid many universities adopted proctoring solutions and realized that they can work just as well as administrators walking around testing rooms and checking no one cheats.

Challenges:

LMS blockers to innovation: The LMS has as a primarily enterprise and faculty-oriented product failed to become a collaborative student centric system. Students use the it to access materials and grades, but not as an engaging place to collaborate on academic work. For faculty the LMS as a content agnostic platform has failed to provide meaningful and actionable learning and student comprehension insights. As the guardian of infrastructure and data, with acquisitions and in-house product feature developments, the LMS has avoided decades of ‘the LMS is dead’ predictions. In doing so it has made it difficult for more student-centric players in its ecosystem to expand their functionalities, remits, analytics and impact.

Technology interactivity limitations: As the world overnight pivoted to online video instruction through Zoom, Google and Microsoft, education incumbents tried to create offerings of their own. Most have been out of depth in video technology infrastructure. While the education market has been a driver of growth for tech giants, it has almost unanimously been dissatisfied by their features. Current features limit interactivity and the remit of the educator who needs far more functionality to make an online class close to as good as a live physical lecture. Teaching virtuosos like David Kellerman have shown it ispossible to create the dream science class through Microsoft teams and integrations, however Microsoft’s lack of commitment to any vertical make it unlikely such offers will scale beyond their make-it-yourself marketplace and tool propositions into packaged and easily accessible products tailored towards the average educator.

Assessment shortages and the rise in cheating: Gaps persist in giving meaningful feedback at scale for open-ended text, while anti-plagiarism technologies remain very susceptible to cheating and the growing ‘essay mill’ industry. Assessment creation is still time consuming and difficult for many educators. While textbooks include question banks and assignments there is a lack of solutions for educators to curate and build pedagogically sound homeworks and assessments against their own content and desired learning outcomes, while ideally connecting assessments with real world, applied problems.

Proctoring privacy concerns: As proctoring has overnight through necessity become a mandatory spend for many universities, concerns and pressures have risen from educators, parents and students around the practices of software providers in data usage and privacy. As learning and assessment become more digital and personalized in the future, with an emphasis on knowledge and skills versus fact memorisation, there are opportunities to rethink the purpose and diminish the role high stake, high pressure exams should play in education.

Next Gen Opportunities:

Video lecture engagement: Lecture capture technology has existed for years and has been commonly used at universities for educators to film their live lectures, with solution providers having close integrations with LMSs. As recorded video lectures become the norm and are no longer just used in the role of catching up on missed classes or misunderstood concepts, there are opportunities to support better and more inclusive student engagement.

Leaders in this space like Panopto are focusing on new functionalities and features including better captioning, multi-language capabilities, easier annotation and navigation of videos and even video feedback to students. Companies like mmhmm are empowering educators to create dynamic and compelling live and recorded presentations. Educators are empowered to remain at the forefront of the video lesson while engaging students through fun virtual backgrounds and presentations, and easy to navigate recordings.

Live interactive instruction: The role of the educators and the style and effectiveness of the physical live lecture has often been challenged, especially as educator to student ratios have increased and attention per student has decreased. In parallel WIFI and the internet have increased competition for student attention, while most lectures are now also recorded both of which add further pressure on the purpose of the lecture and how to make it engaging and differentiated from just a video recording. While live video lectures today are often inferior to live physical lecturers, technology carries great opportunities to change this.

Companies like engageli have created a new active and collaborative digital learning platform that rethinks the classroom and supports educators with engagement and management features, while keeping students busy through inclusive, social and active small group learning. In parallel, solutions like Whiteboard.fi empower educators to engage students through virtual feature-rich whiteboards, while non-education specific tools like Miro’s online canvases support active collaboration.

Learning experience platforms: Today our online social lives are connected and active with technologies like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, while Slack and Microsoft teams ensure everyone in the office is available to chat in two clicks. While Microsoft teams has currently plugged this gap, education still does not have a fit-for-purpose platform that ensures that the connection with educators and faculty can continue outside of the classroom and is not limited to clunky e-mails and unused message boards. Especially during Covid, as many students are suffering from isolation, it is a great opportunity to create a go to platform for academic learning and communication.

Aula is the Learning Experience Platform for higher education. It combines easy-to-use technology with evidence-informed learning design to create truly engaging community-first learning experiences that are as much about meaningful connection as they are about academic challenge. Companies like Bizy are aiming to define the future of online conversation. Through easy to create and modify lists and polls, it gives everyone a voice while simplifying and expediting decision-making.

Feedback infrastructure and analytics: As online exams and proctoring pick up in uptake satisfaction remains low. There are opportunities to build educator trust and improve the test-taking experience while better balancing the need for reliability, prevention of biases and protection of privacy. In parallel, as many educators still struggle to give meaningful feedback to each student on assessments and exams, there are still plenty of opportunities to support this process through better assessment frameworks and grading support. Lastly, while essays and exams are the best way we currently have to assess and give feedback, they are often too late. Currently, the best solutions in the student academic success market are adviser tools that track simplistic metrics like attendance and exam scores. As learning environments become more digital and interconnected the most exciting opportunities in this space lie in side-stepping high stake exams and supporting educators and students with just-in-time evaluation and actionable insights on all of their inputs.

Taskbase’s formative feedback algorithms integrate with large content libraries to give students immediate feedback on open-ended question responses. Ment.io is an AI-driven discussion board for active learning & critical thinking. It enabled educators to manage and easily moderate open-ended online student discussions while giving both them and students insights around the quality of arguments with automatic online participation assessments.

Stay Tuned

If you have come this far, thanks for reading.

Over the last six months, we have had the pleasure of speaking with more than 50 UK universities and 30 leading edtech startups to inform this work. We hope this guide will help existing and future founders better understand this promising and complex digital teaching and learning Delivery landscape and better inform the direction of their businesses.

Next week we will be publishing our insights on the Support category, so stay tuned. If you don’t want to miss it, sign up here to our edtech founder newsletter.

If you are a learning leader or educator interested in following our work, we would love to speak with you. If you are an ambitious startup founder building exciting solutions in this space, we would love to hear from you. Just send us a note here.

Acknowledgements

Andy McGregor, Deputy Chief Innovation Officer and Jisc
Ben Nelson, founder and CEO at Minerva Project
Corey Snow, Director, Education Industry Solutions at Salesforce.org
Curtiss Barnes, Senior Adviser at e-Literate
Damir Sabol, founder and CEO at Photomath
Dan Avida, co-founder and CEO at engageli
Dave Sherwood, co-founder and CEO at BibliU
Daphne Koller, co-founder and Board member at engageli, former co-founder and co-CEO at Coursera
David Minahan, Chief Information Officer at TEDI-London
Dror Ben-Naim, founder and CEO at Smart Sparrow
Gideon Shimshon, Associate Principal Digital Learning and Director of QM Online at Queen Mary University of London
Grant Lindsay, Director of Product Management at Chegg
Ian Dunn, Provost at Coventry University
James Kenigsberg, founding CTO at 2u
Jamie Brooker, founder of Kahoot & founding Partners at We Are Human
Joab Rosenberg, founder and CEO at Ment.io
Jonathan Baldwin, Managing Director Higher Education at Jisc
John Filmore, President, Chegg Skills at Chegg
Khaleeq Aziz & Abdullah Orkun Kaya, CEO & COO at Symanto Research
Matt Greenfield, Managing Partner at Rethink Education
Mauro Calise, founder and Director at Federica Weblearning
Michael Feldstein, Chief Accountability Officer at e-Literate
Michael Soselia, Director of Growth at BibliU
Mike Silagadze, founder & CEO at Top Hat
Morten Andersen, Strategy and Business Development at Labster
Nachiket Paratkar, Senior Vice President, Higher Education at Learning Mate
Nathan Thompson, Vice President, Corporate Strategy &Development at EAB
Dr Philippa Hardman, Vice President, Learning at Aula
Peter Reed, Managing Director at Interactive
Prasad Mohare, Senior Vice President at Learning Mate
Rob Cohen, former COO/CFO & current Senior Advisor at 2U
Robert Purdy, Regional Director of Scientific Partnerships at Labster
Tom Davy, Managing Director at Panopto
Valentina Reda, Research and Academic Development at Federica Weblearning