Human Learning #47 — An anatomy of peer to peer marketplaces, Coursera for Health, Edtech should be wary of self-regulation

Issue 47 turned out to be longer than expected, Coursera have set their sights on Healthcare, their approach is matching with 2U’s which should enable juicy comparisons of their respective differences. I’ve also dived a bit deeper into Peer to Peer in my article.

I’ve written an article to this effect — On potential of Peer to Peer marketplaces for Edtech

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State of the MOOCS

Coursera tilt at the Healthcare industry — Coursera has pulled together a 15 university strong alliance to launch its Healthcare focus. The 15 partners have committed to producing 100 new courses, 30 Specializations and 2 Masters degrees. The courses will focus on those looking for a career in Healthcare and industry practitioners. The two degrees will be provided by Imperial College London and the University of Michigan. A few things to note:

• Healthcare is a growing market, 2U have made it a strategic focus for years and unlike focusing on coding, the content lasts longer — (think how quickly new coding languages emerge) making it a good fit for the expensive strategic investment of degrees
• The model is Coursera’s strategy in a nutshell with a clear funnel from MOOCs to Specializations to degrees to drive down recruitment costs onto the latter
• The focus on existing practitioners is because most healthcare workers have to do placements to qualify — which Coursera would struggle to do at scale (although it is possible on the degree programmes — 2U do it) ditto the focus on Public Health i.e. policy makers evades that placement issue
• True, Healthcare is much more regulated and if they want actual practitioners Coursera will need to leverage Coursera for Business’ experience of selling directly into major healthcare providers (here and here)

Coursera launch a Self-Driving Car Specialization (keeping up with the Joneses) and launched a Data Science Academy, which is more like a shop window to provide a bit more discoverability and structure to their existing offerings

Open edX launches a new marketing site and…loses Duke University — Duke University have switched back to Sakai (an LMS provider) and for functionality that Sakai didn’t offer “If you want highly engaged discussion, why not use Slack or Microsoft Teams?” ouch. It’s not clear Open edX has worked, (1) because the existing LMS market adapted (2) As Duke allude to, other off the shelf functionality like Slack can bypass the worst deficiencies in LMS systems — here and here

Monash University launches a coding bootcamp — They’ve done it with trilogy who focus on building them within University systems (in the US up to now). The article notes that ICT education (as opposed to Computer science) has halved in the last decade, I’m not sure the ‘ICT’ degree exists to the same extent outside of Australia and likely as not it was the vocational end of tech — so coding camps are directly (and possibly more appropriate) competitors — here

Self-Regulation for Education and Edtech — The Trump administration is looking to weaken the monopoly of existing accreditors (i.e. federal and state governments) in the US and push the industry more towards self-regulation including weakening definitions of things like credit-hour. Superficially this is good news for Edtech as it’ll be easier to launch new accredited Education products. It’s also entirely consistent with the Trump administration’s approach overall — appointing industry to regulate finance, the environment etc.

The problem is the whole reason you have regulation is to avoid a scenario of foxes guarding the henhouse — regulation is there to maintain standards and protect the vulnerable from being victims (e.g. students of Trump University). For-profit universities which charged huge amounts for sub-standard degrees left tens of thousands mired in debt unable to get a job. There was also a big backlash and the Obama administration’s regulation took a lump out of For-profits, an exuberant rise for Edtech could face a similar backlash (from which the whole sector could suffer by association) in a similar circumstance — here

The decline of the West as seen in MBAs — 7/10 MBA programmes in the US including from Stanford and Harvard saw declining application numbers while those in China rose by 8%. Some of this is due to declining popularity of 2-year MBAs (favoured in the US) but following the money (or at least those who pursue it) points to another indication of the waning power of the West — here

Duolingo pushing AI for proficiency — Language app provider Duolingo are pushing their AI efforts towards their English language proficiency test (a £5bn per year market) which is already accepted in 300 US Colleges and Universities. That’s bad news for old school providers like British Council and also provides a good example of where we’d expect to see AI emerge first in Edtech — here

Tangents

‘Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers’ — The otherwise fantastic Azeem Azhar wrote a lamentable piece on MOOCs. The article essentially argues that Education policy makers ought to steer clear of MOOCs (or whatever is next) because MOOCs have terrible completion rates, a well worn trope and implying in the process that MOOCs as a medium were inherently awful. The issue here is what you’re trying to do with a MOOC. Many want to dip in and out of a MOOC rather than complete, so they are achieving their aim, when they pay, completion rates shoot up (typically above 50%) and when they pay a lot e.g. for a degree, completion rates converge on-campus rates. It’s not an apples for apples comparison.

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