Blackboard Co-Founders Says Online Education Set To Put Price Pressure On Traditional Schools
One of the early pioneers of online education, Blackboard co-founder Michael Chasen, was one of the speakers at Startup Festival in Montreal today, and while he’s focused on a new startup called SocialRadar that isn’t education-focused, but he still had lots to say about the future of the education industry. Massively open online courses (MOOCs) represent the biggest disruption in the education space since colleges and universities started getting online, he said, and that’s going to mean a lot of upheaval to come.
Chasen said that the changes he’s seeing now in the industry remind him of those that were going on at the time that he started Blackboard, when colleges were realizing for the first time that putting course materials and course management tools online made a lot of sense. Change was happening fast and haphazardly, and the results weren’t necessarily clear at the time. With MOOCs provided by startups like Udemy, Coursera and more, there’s a chance to flip everything on its head again.
According to Chasen, he’s heard often that education institutions are now struggling with demand, especially in fast-growing markets like China. Schools there literally can’t build enough buildings to put people in their colleges, he said, and are trying to figure out how to handle issues like students