Edtech Insiders

Greg Bybee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Avela Education and the Co-Founder of PoliScribe. 

Greg was an early employee at NovoEd where he ultimately ran every business function from marketing to business development and customer success, and ultimately helped sell the company to Fidelity.

Previously, he was a Fellow at NewSchools Venture Fund, the first product manager at Coursera, an advisor to Renren’s expansion into education, the lead for VMware’s vCloud Suite launch, and a strategic counselor to Fortune 500 executives at McKinsey & Company. He's also an advisor and mentor to several education organizations and tech startups, including Vendition, Veery, HiCounselor, and Rutgers University

Avela's mission is to increase equitable access to education. Avela offers a modern application and enrollment system for schools, districts, and mission-driven organizations, which focuses on empowering families and enabling data driven decisions.

Recommended Resources
Expanding Access to High-Quality Schools report by Center for American Progress
Who Gets What ― and Why by Alvin Roth
School District RFPs archive

Guest: Fadl Al Tarzi, Founder & CEO @ Nexford University

• Online University Nexford will use $8M to plug affordability and relevance gaps in education

Topics This Week:

1. Ads in Education
   • The next chapter for Learning on YouTube
   • Roblox jumping into ads in effort to diversify beyond virtual goods
2. SPACS & Aging Unicorns
   • London Looks to Un-Meme the SPAC Market 
   • A Sober Look at SPACs
3. College Chaos
   • Malignant by Scott Galloway
   • College Student Transfers Declined By Nearly 300,000 During Pandemic
   • Oberlin Says It Will Pay $36.59 Million to a Local Bakery
   • The Post-Pandemic College Campus as a Design Challenge
   • France hits 400,000 international student mark after record growth
   • Stanford Law to offer 'income share' financing as law school costs soar
4. Religion & Education
   • In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Yeshivas Flush With Public Money
   • Yeshiva University doesn't have to recognize LGBTQ student group for now, Sotomayor rules
5. Funding + M&A
   • 3 in 10 Education Companies Secured VC or Made Acquisitions Over the Last Year
   • Virtual Internships raises $14.3M
   • uDocz raises $2M 
   • Hone raises $30M
   • Tract raises $7M
   • Docquity raises $44M
   • Edupia raises $14M
   • Code First Girls raises £4.5M
   • Citizens Financial Group acquires College Raptor
   • Lepaya acquires vCOACH
   • Orenda Education Merges with Think Together

Check out our Newsletter @ https://edtechinsiders.substack.com/

Shravan Goli has been the Chief Product Officer and Head of Consumer Revenue at Coursera since 2018. Shravan came to Coursera with over 20 years of experience of building products and leading companies. He has built products at Microsoft and Yahoo, been the CEO of Dictionary.com, and was most recently President of tech job marketplace Dice (part of public company DHI Group Inc).

Coursera was launched in 2012 by two Stanford Computer Science professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, with a mission to provide universal access to world-class learning. It is now one of the largest online learning platforms in the world, with over 100 million registered learners globally.

Coursera partners with over 275 of the world’s top universities (Yale, University of London, Penn) and industry educators (Google, Meta, IBM) to offer courses, Specializations, projects, certificates, and degrees. Over 7,000 businesses, government entities, and campuses have used Coursera’s enterprise offering to provide job-relevant online education to their employees, citizens, and students.

Recommended Resources
A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College by Ryan Craig

Guest: Anjuli Gupta, Head of Academic Partnerships @ Outlier.org

• MasterClass's Co-Founder Takes on the Community College Degree
• Outlier.org & Golden Gate University Reinvent Affordable College with Degrees+

Topics This Week:

1. LAUSD Cyberattack
   • Los Angeles Schools Hit with Ransomware Attack
   • FBI joins probe into LAUSD cyberattack
2. Learning Loss & Pandemic Recovery
   • Plunging NAEP scores signal a long and difficult road to recovery
   • 7 charts highlighting the pandemic’s impact on 2022 NAEP scores
   • U.S. School Closures Leave Students Behind.
   • Experts Say Kids Are Far Behind After COVID; Parents Shrug. Why the Disconnect?
3. Around the World
   • China Liberal Education acquires Wanwang Investment Limited
   • Vitru Limited acquires Rede Enem
   • Entrepreneurship and Education across Africa
   • Byju's to raise $500M @ $23B valuation + Ministry of Corporate Affairs Inquiry 
4. XR Grows
   • Metaversity is in Session as Meta and Iowa’s VictoryXR Open 10 Virtual Campuses
   • Oxford University Press partners with Immersify Education to create interactive learning modules
5. Funding + M&A
   • Glints raises $50M
   • Learnsoft raises $17M
   • Astro raises $13M
   • LumiQ raises $5M
   • EarlyDay raises $3.25M
   • Discovery Education acquires Pivot Interactives
   • Unacademy acquires Gate Academy
   • Edlio acquires SchoolInfo
   • Scholastic acquires Learning Ovations
   • XanEdu acquires PLC Associates

Check out the Edtech Insiders Newsletter @ https://edtechinsiders.substack.com/

Lisa Jiang has a long career at the heights of edtech; she was most recently the head of Remote Learning at Facebook, after 4 years as a senior director of product at New York’s Flatiron School, a leading bootcamp provider and 6 years at Google, where she was a product manager and lead for education for Google Hangouts.

Joe Burgess was the first hire at Flatiron School and worked his way up to the VP of Education, where he led the education product and delivery teams across four disciplines both online and in Flatiron’s eight campuses.

Together, they are the co-founders of Ribbon Education, which is building software to help student-facing staff scale their impact to serve more learners and improve outcomes in adult education.

Recommended Resources
Phil Hill's blog
Michael Feldstein
Robert Ubell's books
Learners' Success Guild & blog by Ribbon Education

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

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

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

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

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