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Guest: Ish Baid, Founder & CEO @ Virtually

• Check out Ish’s podcast: Reshaping Education

Topics This Week:

1. Duolingo Math
   • Join the waitlist to test their new math app!
   • Takes by Forbes, The Verge, & Fast Company
2. College Enrollment Shifts
   • 2020-21 IPEDS Data: Profile of Mid-Pandemic 12-Month Enrollments
   • As More Stressed-Out Students Consider Dropping Out, Surgeon General Pushes College Leaders to Ramp Up Support
   • Which School Has The Most Expensive College Tuition In 2023?
   • One state offers lessons in how to cope with the college enrollment crisis
   • Around 25% surge in popularity of hybrid learning amongst study abroad aspirants
3. Public Teacher Workforce
   • 5 Big Technology Challenges Teachers and Administrators Will Face This School Year
   • How Bad Is the Teacher Shortage? Depends on Where You Live.
   • America’s new “national teacher shortage” is neither new nor national
   • Nearly 70% of LA teachers have seriously considered quitting, study finds | US education
4. Career Education
   • ‘Academic Career Plans’ Have Students Exploring Careers as Early as Kindergarten
   • New Poll From Third Way Shows Voters Want Accountability For Career Education Programs
5. Funding + M&A Highlights
   • Crunchbase: Edtech Funding Falls Sharply
   • France launches fund endowed with 500 million euros
   • Upkid raises $1.7 million
   • ETU receives Strategic Growth Investment
   • VUIHOC raises $2 million
   • Nazara acquires WildWorks kids IP ‘Animal Jam’ 
   • Renaissance Acquires Illuminate Education
   • Alchemy acquires ChainShot
   • Akili raises $163 million in “blank-check” merger

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T. Nicole Tucker-Smith, founder and CEO of Lessoncast, helps schools implement professional learning initiatives focused on inclusive leadership and teaching practices, culturally responsive pedagogy, and equity best practice. Tucker-Smith was an assistant principal charged with planning professional development (PD) for a turnaround middle school in the Baltimore County Public Schools when she realized that traditional PD methods were not going to lead to transformational results. This PD redesign led to the Lessoncast process - providing customized teacher learning experiences that capture the impact on classroom practice. 

Founded in 2011, Lessoncast offers its platform technology to schools, districts, consultants, and teacher education programs. With the unique Lessoncast video format and interactive PD modules targeting specific teaching practices, educators engage in professional learning that is tailored for their individual needs and aligned with their community's goals. Tucker-Smith also leads the Jumpstart PD Network, a community of educators who access flexible PD options to engage in high-quality professional learning experiences that fit their needs, budget, and capacity. She has served as a teacher, supervisor of parent support services, principal, and systemwide coordinator of professional development and training for Baltimore County Public Schools and as a faculty member for Johns Hopkins University School of Education. She is the co-author of Supercharge Your Professional Learning: 40 Concrete Strategies that Improve Adult Learning and the host of the Did We Learn Anything? podcast.

Recommended Resources

• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
• DecentertheTeacher on Instagram

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Topics This Week:

1. Student Loan Forgiveness
   • NYT + Inside Higher Ed 
2. Valuations
   • ”Stars Through Thunderstorms”
3. Accelerator News
   • Y Combinator cuts startup batch size by 40% amid economic downturn
   • Crunchbase: 2,000 Tech Layoffs in 2022
4. Higher Ed & K12 Enrollment
   • These Colleges and Universities Are Reporting Record Size Freshmen Classes + UC program seeks to re-enroll adults who stopped out
   • Hopeful but careful: Parents and teachers address new school year
   • Higher ed must build on what we learned during the pandemic
   • States Where Public Schools Are Losing the Most Students
   • Labor Disputes Threaten Start of New School Year
5. Funding + M&A
   • Sunstone raises $35M
   • GrowthSpace raises $25M
   • Microverse raises $4M
   • ITHAKA raises $2.5M
   • Ready Player Me raises $56M 
   • BrightCHAMPS Acquires Schola
   • Nerdy Acquires Codeverse

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Sunil Gunderia is the Chief Innovation Officer at Age of Learning, a leading education technology innovator with a mission to help children everywhere build a strong foundation for academic success and a lifelong love of learning. He oversees the company’s innovation strategy and has led the development, distribution, and implementation of its research-proven educational programs for students prekindergarten through second grade.

Age of Learning has been recognized as one of the most innovative companies in edtech for its research-based, highly scalable learning products that are built to advance positive educational outcomes and address inequities in learning. The company’s flagship program, ABCmouse, is the leading digital education brand for young children in the U.S., and its expanding portfolio of offerings includes Adventure Academy, ABCmouse English, and the personalized, adaptive learning programs for schools, My Math Academy and My Reading Academy.  

To-date, Age of Learning has helped educate more than 50 million children worldwide. 

Today, Sunil also serves on the Board of Trustees at the Children’s Institute, an LA-based non-profit that provides early education and services to help transform the lives of children and families affected by poverty. He also sits on the advisory boards of Edtech Evidence Exchange, Digital Wellness Lab, and Educating All Students Alliance, and served on the Editorial Advisory Board for the “Handbook of Research on Innovative Approaches to Early Childhood Development and School Readiness.”

Prior to Age of Learning, Sunil was the General Manager of Mobile at The Walt Disney Company, overseeing mobile strategy, product development, distribution, and partnerships globally. Sunil also founded Gunderia Advisors, where he advised numerous early-stage technology companies on strategy, product, and execution.

Recommended Resources

• Christensen Institute
• Small Talks, newsletter by Isabelle Hau
• End of Average by Todd Rose

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Guests: David Harris, OpenStax at Rice University & Justin Weinberg, Aktiv Learning

Topics This Week:

1. Back to School, But Media Narratives Say Education Is in Trouble
   • Teacher Shortage
   • Local School Grades Plummeting
   • HMH report: education is not an appealing field
2. Value of Higher Ed in Question
   • Why Americans are increasingly dubious about going to college
   • Higher Ed Must Change or Die
   • A New Vision for College Excellence
   • The Shrinking of Higher Ed
   • Cardona Speech
   • Feds cancel $4B in ITT Tech loans  
3. Potential Solution? Increasing Modularity in Higher Ed
   • Company steps in to ease transfer credit friction
   • Indicators of Higher Education Equity in U.S.
   • What Works in K12
4. Learning on TikTok & YouTube
   • Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022
   • TikTok Teachers
5. The Edtech Space in 2022
   • EdTech isn’t special anymore and that’s a good thing.
   • 7 investors discuss why edtech startups must go back to basics to survive
   • 23 Most Promising Edtech Startups in 2022

Funding + M&A

• CreatorDAO raises $20M
• FundamentalVR raises $20M
• Junto raises $5M
• Sphere raises $4.3M
• Harver acquires Pymetrics

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Gauthier Van Malderen is the co-founder and CEO of the University Digital Library Perlego. Gauthier decided to start Perlego as a Cambridge student after realizing how many people were having problems financing their textbooks. In 2017, he decided to found a subscription service to provide all the textbooks a student would need, in eBook form, at an affordable price.

Perlego raised $50 million in March (out of $75M total funding) to expand its business after seeing its platform boom through COVID-19. The London based startup currently has 400,000 paying subscribers who get all-you-can-read access to some 850,000 titles — textbooks, fiction and other literature that students are assigned as coursework at universities and other higher-learning institutions. It works with 5,000 education publishers, including Cengage, Routledge, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier and Harvard University Press. That catalog makes Perlego the largest online textbook subscription service in the world. Perlego has won 26 awards including Europas Best Edtech, Virgin Voom and the KPMG pioneer award.

Recommended Resources

• Brighteye Ventures
• enablinginsights blog by Adam Black

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Topics This Week:

1. Fall Election Cycle
   • Va. Gov. Youngkin faces second suit over teacher tip line
   • Democrats Cede ‘Party of Education’ Label to GOP
2. 2022 CHLOE 7 Report
   • Announcement + PDF
   • Online learning leaders think fully in-person will be a rarity
3. Big Tech vs. Udemy
   • Amazon Launches Udemy Competitor
   • Facebook Working on a Udemy Competitor?
4. Metaverse
   • Harvard Metaverse in Education Report
   • Deloitte Metaverse Report
   • AppLovin wants to buy video game maker Unity for $20 billion
5. Funding + M&A
   • upGrad raises $210M and acquires Exampur
   • Jodo raises $15M
   • Territorium raises $4.4M
   • Kide Science raises $1M
   • Achievable raises $650K
   • Prometric LLC acquires Finetune
   • EducationDynamics acquires EDU First

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Josh Chernikoff is an educational entrepreneur and small business advisor. For the last 14 years, he has founded and grown two successful educational enrichment programs serving hundreds of thousands of students in 85 schools across six states. He now runs Cascade Communications, an edtech advisory. Josh and his team at Cascade are, above all, content and relationship experts in the educational space, leveraging email communication and live relationship roundtables to engage the entrepreneurs and businesses with key education decision makers. He also hosts two entrepreneurship and Edtech podcasts - How I Broke That and Breaking the Grade.

Recommended Resources

• @brianbeers
• @thejustinwelsh
• @dickiebush
• @JasonRBradwell
• @justingordon212
• @nathanbaugh27

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Welcome to Season 2 of This Week in Edtech!

Guest: Matthew Tower, Principal @ Workshop Venture Partners

• Subscribe to Matt’s weekly newsletter @ https://matthewtower.substack.com/

Topics This Week:

1. Byju’s
   • Layoffs, debt, litigation!?
2. Bearish OPMs
   • Phil Hill: ”The brutal spring and summer for OPMs & MOOCs”
   • Zovio sells OPM business to University of Arizona Global Campus
   • 2U Layoffs + tuition share agreements
3. Funding Landscape
   • HolonIQ – Global Edtech Funding 2022 H1
4. Metaverse
   • College in the metaverse is here. Is higher ed ready?
   • Time Magazine cover + Meta ads 
   • Classdojo raises $125MM
5. Crypto & Web3
   • Pearson plans to sell its textbooks as NFTs
   • DAOs - the new LLCs?

Also check out our weekly newsletter @ https://edtechinsiders.substack.com/

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 Jonathan Finkelstein is the CEO of Credly, one of the leading organizations in the credentialing space for education technology around the world. Credly is a Pearson business.  Previously, as founder of LearningTimes, he helped mission-driven organizations produce and launch innovative online programs, products and platforms that impacted the lives of millions of users. He was also a co-founder at HorizonLive, which was acquired by Blackboard, and author of Learning in Real Time.  He's a frequent author and speaker on digital credentials and the future of work.

Recommended Resources

• How I Built This, podcast hosted by Guy Raz
• Human Work In the Age of Smart Machines, book by Jamie Merisotis
• How to Tell a Story, book by The Moth
• Resources Page, curated by Credly