Code Acts in Education: Edtech, Coronavirus, and Commercialization in Public Education
While the opening months of 2020 have been marked by huge disruptions to education at an international scale, some organizations have thrived during the coronavirus pandemic. According to the education markets consultancy HolonIQ, the first three months of the year ‘delivered $3B of Global EdTech Venture Capital, nearly 10% of the prior decade’s total, in just the first quarter of the new decade.’ April even saw the largest-ever venture capital investment in an edtech company, with Beijing-based Yuanfudao receiving $1billion USD for its AI-based online tutoring and homework platform. The company has become the first coronavirus crisis edtech unicorn, during a remarkable quarter of a year for commercial edtech and education markets.
The rapid expansion of commercial edtech during the large-scale closure of schools and universities is the focus for a new project supported by Educational International, the Global Union Federation that represents organizations of teachers and other education employees around the world. The project is a collaboration with Anna Hogan at the University of Queensland. We’ll be bringing together Anna’s research expertise in education policy, marketization, privatization and commercialization with my experiences of researching edtech over the last decade. The project will help inform EI’s response to the COVID-19 crisis, but also its longer-term work on commercialization in public education internationally.
We’ve started initial work already, gathering evidence of commercial edtech activity over the last few months. It includes:
- global tech businesses offering free access to resources for schools and parents (including CONTINUE READING: Code Acts in Education: Edtech, Coronavirus, and Commercialization in Public Education | National Education Policy Center