What is on the five-year horizon for higher education institutions? Which trends and technology developments will drive educational change? What are the challenges that we consider as solvable or difficult to overcome, and how can we strategize effective solutions? These questions and similar inquiries regarding technology adoption and educational change steered the collaborative research and discussions of a body of 58 experts to produce the NMC Horizon Report: 2016 Higher Education Edition, in partnership with the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). This NMC Horizon Report series charts the five-year horizon for the impact of emerging technologies in colleges and universities across the globe.
Funding to education-technology companies is booming. Overall, the period from 2010 to 2014 saw more than a 503% growth in investment dollars.
The pace has held high even in recent quarters. Financing grew from $911M in 2013 to over $1.5B in 2014, a 71% increase year-over-year. In the last four quarters, including Q2’15, ed tech startups attracted $1.9B, a jump of 68% compared to the previous four quarters.
Meanwhile, deal count has carried along steadily. There were 193 deals in 2014, up from 176 in 2013. However, at the current run rate 2015 will see a deal count of 158, well below that of previous years which indicates that deals are becoming fewer yet larger. Note: This data only includes funding to VC-backed companies in the Ed Tech space.
BrightBytes, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) data-analytics company that measures the impact of technology in K-12 education, has raised $33 million as part of a Series C financing.
The San Francisco-based company had raised $18.5 million since its inception in 2012, so today’s news takes its total funding past the $50 million mark. The round was led by Insight Venture Partners, a VC and private equity firm based in New York, with contributions from Bessemer Venture Partners, Learn Capital, and Rethink Education.
Although students who take online courses in community colleges tend to be better prepared and more motivated than their classmates, a study by Di Xu and Shanna Smith Jaggars of Columbia University shows that the online format has a significant negative impact on students’ persistence in sticking with courses and on their course grades. For the typical student, taking a course online rather than in person would decrease his or her likelihood of course persistence by 7 percentage points, and if the student continued to the end of the course, would lower his or her final grade by more than 0.3 points on a 4-point scale.
