Human Learning #48 — Of Players and Ecosystems
Hi All
Apologies for the delay on this one, life and and work interrupted me. Top story this week is the move by Udacity and 2U to move to third party providers (glide.ai and Linkedin respectively) to improve their value proposition. It’s not the first move by either in such a direction but the ecosystem direction suggests a limit to how much either are willing to do this in-house and seems the sensible direction of travel.
Article this edition: When ecosystems collide; How RecruitmentTech is catching up with Edtech
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Dhawal Shah digs into Udacity’s finances to explain their cuts- Udacity laid off a significant chunk of their workforce in November last year, despite growing revenue (25% YOY growth in consumer and 100% in enterprise, an estimated $90m overall), notably they’ve appointed Lalit Singh as their interim COO, who has a background in enterprise software from Hewlett Packard.
Dhawal Shah of Class-Central outlines how it was in part due to a decline in paying learners from 53K in 2017 to 50K in 2018. The decline was probably due to significant price hikes (sometimes 3x) which makes the drop in numbers surprisingly small. However Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity was frank about their lack of blockbuster Nanodegrees in 2018 — here and here
HEC Paris to make part of their Masters in Innovation and entrepreneurship stackable — Having completed their first year, HEC Paris will open up a Specialization in Design Thinking, which will be open to all and if the student goes onto take the full masters — would count towards their final result. It’s good news for Coursera — HEC are continuing and opening up a new Specialization but notable they stopped short of much more (if not total) opening of the degree — is this a pilot in openness or the limit? — here
Abu Dhabi Governments is to offer Coursera to all 60k of its employees — Neat deal for Coursera and gives them at important strategic partner in the Middle East — here
Priming students to consider their skills — Vice President and Professor at Georgia State University shared the results of a seed grant programme, whereby professors who gained the grants could design student assignments that highlighted student skills , as well as giving them e-portfolios to develop. The result, over 3 years, has been a 685% increase in careers counsellor attendance. Such approaches might be a good nudge to help students prepare for work without forcing wholesale curriculum change — here
Vocational or Degree? The Guardian’s 2VCs series has Ed Brinksma, the Dutch president of Germany’s Hamburg University of Technology, and Quintin McKellar, vice-chancellor of the University of Hertfordshire debating it. The choice quote is ‘Google aren’t so interested in degrees’ which is hard to believe given a recruitment strategy that is elitist even by University standards but the wider point is that robust vocational education like Germany’s (the straw man in this essay) can lead to well paid jobs — here
Tangents
Story of WeWork now the ‘We Company’ by Bloomberg. The Bloomberg video definitely hints at certain cult-like elements but the overall message — borne out by We Company’s enterprise membership (30% of total now) is that We Company have managed to make offices a product — here
As ever if you enjoy it SHARE IT! For the permanent home of these newsletter and articles GO HERE. If you have any thoughts please write back to me.
