This episode features special guest Joshua Broggi of Woolf University, the first global collegiate higher education institution that allows education organizations to join as member colleges and offer accredited degrees.
In this episode we discuss:
1) Higher Education's Sea Change (Axios)
- Changes coming to higher ed from many directions- testing, rankings, enrollment woes, hybrid courses and more. How can Edtech best support HE in a time of great pressure and change?
2) Credential Engine's Annual Report
- In a world with over 1mm credentials available, how can Edtech help learners sort out which will work best for them?
3) There’s a Reason There Aren’t Enough Teachers in America. Many Reasons, Actually. (NY Times)
- The teacher shortage is leading to some new policy ideas, like a $60k minimum wage for teachers- Ben says it should be more like $100K.
4) Edtech’s brightest are struggling to pass (TechCrunch)
- Edtech stars like Outschool, Bloomtech (formerly Lambda School) and Pluralsight continue to shed jobs and seek profitability
5) Course Hero creates parent company Learneo
- Course Hero takes a page from Google/Alphabet and creates an umbrella organization to manage all its acquisitions
Funding and M&A:
Late Breaking news:
This episode features special guest Joshua Broggi of Woolf University, the first global collegiate higher education institution that allows education organizations to join as member colleges and offer accredited degrees.
In this episode we discuss:
1) Higher Education's Sea Change (Axios)
- Changes coming to higher ed from many directions- testing, rankings, enrollment woes, hybrid courses and more. How can Edtech best support HE in a time of great pressure and change?
2) Credential Engine's Annual Report
- In a world with over 1mm credentials available, how can Edtech help learners sort out which will work best for them?
3) There’s a Reason There Aren’t Enough Teachers in America. Many Reasons, Actually. (NY Times)
- The teacher shortage is leading to some new policy ideas, like a $60k minimum wage for teachers- Ben says it should be more like $100K.
4) Edtech’s brightest are struggling to pass (TechCrunch)
- Edtech stars like Outschool, Bloomtech (formerly Lambda School) and Pluralsight continue to shed jobs and seek profitability
5) Course Hero creates parent company Learneo
- Course Hero takes a page from Google/Alphabet and creates an umbrella organization to manage all its acquisitions
Funding and M&A:
Late Breaking news:
Welcome to Season Two of edtech insiders, where we talk to the most interesting thought leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, educators and investors driving the future of education technology. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an edtech veteran with over 10 years of experience at top edtech companies. Hello, everyone, it is Ben and Alex from the week in edtech. It is the week of 1215. We're midway through December, we're loving life getting ready to take some time off and recharge those batteries. Alex any big plans for the holidays, you're gonna go skiing or hiking or just get some sleep with the newborn? And yes, it's going to be a very low key break, which is exciting. I'm also doing my capstone project for my Executive MBA Program with Quantic School of Business and Technology. I've been way behind on that. So I got to knock out the entire Capstone over this break. So it's going to be in the house. It's been very rainy and gross outside. So it's going to be a low key vacation. How about you? Are you going anywhere fun, you know, saying around here, education friend may be doing like an ed tech house up in Tahoe that I might be able to drag the kids up and, you know, get out there, the inflation has hit differently in so many different sectors. But in the ski industry, it's off the chain. And I'm not a skier, I want my kids to know how but man like 200 bucks to hit the slopes for an 11 year old might be a little bit much. So we will see. In terms of things going on at ed tech insiders. I'm looking forward to our predictions episode, which is coming up in our next episode is kind of our classic annual look back, look forward, get some different voices around, you know where we've been in 2022 crazy year, and where we might be going 2023. Awesome. What else do we have on the pod? So we actually put out two really interesting how long form interviews this week. The first is a panel interview with a number of folks from amplio learning, which is a terrific Special Ed platform that is really thinking about how to address special needs students through technology. That's it was a really interesting conversation about special ed and Ed Tech. And then just today we put out our episode with Sharon Thomas, who is the business lead for cosmos by Jews, which is a very interesting product. By Jews, as you know, we talk about on this podcast all the time is just such a crazy thing. You know, crazy ed tech giant, the cosmos product is a particularly interesting one. And it was it was really a good conversation to learn about what they're doing. That was a Google started product that Baidu has acquired, and they're trying to, you know, really make it into a sort of household name. So two really excellent and rare, they get somebody from the byjus Empire talking about their business. And you know, the holiday advertising machine of Osmo is quite impressive. When you have a six and 11 year old, you're getting all these great ads, and but we use that at home. Meanwhile, as we're recording the World Cup final is set and by Jews, Lionel Messi is in the final. So regardless of what you think about their overall, you know, strategy of cash management, and so on. That's been a big winner getting a little messy as you're a big advocate, they made a bet. And he's made it to the finals. So in addition to the scrolling boards that you see on your screen, when you're watching the match, you've also got your Bhaiji spokesman playing for the championship. So probably when you're listening to this, you'll know the outcome and you know, we'll see if the by Juice Man is winter, so let's kick it off. That's right, we've got so much to cover. And it's like the world Alex, I feel like the world is changing, like week by week now, between like, fission or fusion has been discovered, like net positive fuel. So basically in like 2030 years, we're gonna have unlimited energy. We've got aI with we just talked about chat GPT and mid journey and basically unlimited compute power, which, you know, accelerates us to the singularity, of course. And on top of that, you've got all of this like, real social change unrest, like rethinking of higher ed cage. Well, the political landscape changing. I mean, I didn't think it could get any crazier than this. And here we are wrapping up 2022 with some insanity. What's your take? And you know, the first area we're diving into is our higher ed beat. What's going on in higher ed this week? Yeah, so higher ed is going through a sea change. And there was a really interesting article this week. called Higher NC changed that sort of tried to put together some of the different sort of major changes affecting the higher ed landscape. And we, you know, the number of undergraduate students dropped by 10%. During the pandemic, there's a ton of colleges closing and merging are many more than that, you know, they said the number of colleges closing over the last decade quadrupled compared with the prior decade. And we know that a lot of those are very recent, you're also seeing colleges, basically, in the wake of the pandemic thinking totally differently about their hybrid and online learning options. You're seeing the standardized tests, you know, the test optional. world spin up, the people start to protest against the US News and World Report's ranking, there was a great article in the Times this week about tuition reset, so a number of colleges are starting to sort of change their sticker price. And everybody who follows higher ed knows as this sort of ridiculousness in higher ed, where they have this very, very high sticker price. And then most students get huge discounts. And it's been this sort of weird bait and switch II kind of odd thing that's totally normal in the industry, but it's turned tons of families away from colleges, because they say I can't afford the sticker price I'm not even gonna bother looking at this school are applying. So you're seeing a number of schools in this competitive landscape with reduced enrollments starting to reduce their sticker prices by as much as 50%. Right? That's crazy and very interesting. And then the sort of icing on the cake. So our friend Matt tower at Ed thoughts at Tech clouds, he has covered a really interesting report, there's a nonprofit called credential engine that basically puts together all the different credentials that people can earn, and their most recent count, and they put together all the data with many different sources basically says there's over a million credentials, that people can access for post secondary, you know, workforce, all of these things, a million different credentials, all vying for seniority, or for power, in terms of what changing people's you know, work lives or getting their educational credentials in place. And, you know, his take on that, which I thought was really, you know, poignant is basically that with a million credentials out there, any one university is starting to really not have as much control over the credentialing landscape as they sort of ever had, there's more competition for sort of eyeballs in terms of what people are going to do with their educational lives than ever before. So that is another higher end sea change. And I think it's gonna, we're all seeing very strange, very large, I think, waves of change coming at the higher ed landscape all at the same time. So very interesting moment for higher ed. And I think for ad tech, which can, you know, respond to a lot of these, then what do you think this means for ad tech? Well, stepping back, big picture, there is this quality versus quantity? Question. And the value prop of ad tech period, first and foremost, was expanding access and choice. And I think we've achieved, you know, 90% of that goal. And let's also be honest, like the pandemic accelerated that achievement. So really, it's better 2.0 is, how do we create indications or indicators of quality or fit for individual learners, with whatever programs or options are out there. And so I think, the analysis here that there's this incredible sea of degrees and courses, one is not surprising, but two, it's overwhelming now to navigate the amount of access and choice. And so we either need to have concierge, individuals, organizations, capabilities to help people with the matching, or we need some sort of force consolidation, either through governmental or market forces. And then I think, third, we also need to acknowledge that, like, we do not have like a single repository of quality reporting. And so I, you know, you know, one of my like, Go twos is, how do other industries do that? Well, healthcare is a great example, where, you know, there are a wide variety of clinics and you know, back pain specialists or things like that, you know, people you can go to, and there is not a lot of transparency around the costs of those things. And they're working on that. But in terms of outcomes, they've done a great job of creating professional standards, around certification reporting, transparency, and so on. And they figured out how to improve quality through the benefits of scale. And this is where I think the biggest challenge for us as ad tech entrepreneurs is today is that actually there are diseconomies of scale in ad tech today in terms of quality when you run your single course. And you're a passionate educator and you're, you know, making that single course happen. Quality is not the problem. And what we found, though, is that our aggregators and those who are really doing the work to scale up, we're seeing that the graph of quality has an inverse relationship to scale. And so how could we either through standards, or regulatory, you know, pressure or through transparent reporting, is there like a nutrition label for education courses, or phyllite, there's a variety of different things we might use to solve it. But it will take industry advocates, to look beyond the individual companies and put that together. And I will also say, if we're waiting for state government, or federal government to step in here, I think we've seen that they're too slow to move in our space. And so I would ask that the large VCs or the capital, the people who have self interest in this system working and aggregating at scale, to kind of put those things forward. And in the past episodes, we've reported on breach capital, and our capitals impact reports, they're starting to figure out what is our quality narrative? And how might we project that forward? So as a long way of saying, like, Yay, access and choice, Boo quality? Let's work on that now. And consistency, I think, you know, I mean, having I love this mention of sort of a nutrition label for education, we had it for courses, certificates, you know, degrees. And, you know, it makes me wonder, like, what are those sort of few metrics that people truly care about when they're considering taking a course or an online certificate or a non credit, you know, certificate? I mean, I would just posit, obviously, you know, job outcomes is one of them, did I actually get a raise? Did I get a new job? Did I change fields money? Did I get a good return on my investment? But of course, there's also, you know, ones satisfaction ones that really matter, you know, am I glad I took this? Is this something that I think improved my life and improved by understanding that quality could be an owner? Or it could be a process? Like, am I engaged? am I enjoying it is so correlated with the positive outcome anyways, so, right, I think the market forces thing you're talking about is also so key, because with higher education institutions, I always like to talk about the clip. I'm sure I've mentioned it on this show before but the clip was his college learning exam that they tried to introduce, I think, maybe 1520 years ago, and it was basically, hey, you the same way people take an LSAT or a standardized test when they leave high school, and it's a great way to compare, you know, what's going on in schools? Or it's okay way to compare it at least, what if we had a standardized test at the beginning and end of college and we could see which colleges have the most value add in terms of actual, you know, content acquisition or skill acquisition. And basically, college has said, Nope, not interested, we don't want to know, we don't want to know, we don't want to compete on learning. We don't want to compete on this type of outcome. And to me, that sort of says so much about where the higher ed world has been able to be for many years, they don't have to care about that they can compete on reputation, they can compete on US News and World Report ranking, they can compete on the how beautiful the quad is, and the learning outcomes just didn't matter. And then, you know, college scorecard came around and tried to say what schools are the best at getting people into higher percentiles and quintiles of income. That was a really interesting move, but I don't think very many people look at it. So I think we're at a point where edtech companies really have an amazing opportunity. Because I think colleges now are back in competition, enrollments are down, they need differentiators and maybe the differentiator of being we're the ones who can actually get you a job in data science, or we're the ones who most students in the whole country are happy that they came to our school University of Iowa than any other school. That's why you should go here. I think maybe some of these standardized metrics might actually be positive, instead of just being sort of a reveal of what might not be happening in higher ed. Yeah, it's a really interesting moment. I think it's a hard nut to crack. But I think edtech companies have the option to start offering comparative metrics, and it could be a game changer. Well, and Matt towers point in a few letters back is like, why isn't there a best in class economics 101. Or, you know, the other thing too, is like as you think about the degree program, but then also, as you micro you know, fractionalize it into the individual courses. We also do not have quality metrics that allow for the broadcasting of the best pedagogy or curriculum and programs. You know, while higher ed is kind of awash in choice and struggling with declining enrollment. The biggest challenge in K 12 is really becoming clear. It's the shortage of high quality teachers. And this is accelerated during the pandemic. And now we're getting to the point where I think there's a realization that it's almost like falling into the chasm, and no better article than Thomas Edsel's article in The New York Times around why there aren't enough teachers in America and the driving factors around it. Now, there are some things with this that are not new. So I think this is important to understand. teacher shortage has been a decade's long trend in like the 90s. I remember reading Linda darling Hammonds piece around the decline in the profession. And even in the 70s, we started to see that, you know, in terms of post graduate jobs, we move from the top 20% of college graduates to the bottom fifth of graduates going into teaching as professionals. And you know, I've thought a lot about this as a edtech leader, but also as a school board member. And I think that it's time for us to create some real policy incentives that bring talented people into teaching as a profession. And I think first and foremost, it's a teacher minimum wage, and the teacher minimum wage has to be 100k. Basically, no matter where you live, if you're in Boise, you're in Alabama, you're in LA, you should be guaranteed as first year credentialed teacher to make 100k or more. And one of the things that prevents that is the union dynamics, which to the veterans go the spoils. So early on in your your career ladder, you only get percentages increases on your salary. So what happens is the kind of higher salaries accelerate faster, and the entry level salaries accelerate slower. And meanwhile, we have this like turnstile of new teachers moving in and out. And so districts basically are all in this like to camel hump, you know, staffing models, where there's no middle teachers in like years, six through 15. Well, this is just like the model of teacher compensation is stuck in a unionized, you know, 1950s 60 industrial model, where it is envision that you stay at a job for 30 years doing the exact same thing that just does not work for today's entering workforce. And so they've got to see the return on a four or five year basis of their degree and of their work. And they've got to basically make, you know, from a cost living standpoint, to they've got to make enough money to be able to afford housing and be able to afford everything. So I think we need a national 100k minimum. And then the second thing that we need to understand is, how do we scale the great teachers that we already have, and this is the ad tech problem. The Ed Tech problem is that there are not enough physics teachers to fill every physics open it, you know, something like 20% of those are literally open no one warm body just watching a class. And that's going to be 40% in like four or five years. And if you're a physics major, are you doing high school physics? Or are you doing fusion to solve like our climate crisis? Okay. So I do think that there's a number of companies whose value proposition they may state is better learning better outcomes for kids, but ultimately, being a replacement or an extension of, you know, missing teachers. And I'm not saying we should replace teachers, I'm saying we should amplify great teachers. But that also unlocks a business opportunity that is way bigger than one to $5 per student. And so I think there's a new class of organizations that are attacking that problem. And I think that that's a, it may be a slow grow, it may not be VC bankable, and maybe more PE or social impact makeable. But organizations in edtech tools that figure out how to amplify the best educators to give access with quality, I think is where we're headed. Yeah, that's a terrific analysis. I think the only tiny thing I may add to it is that in terms of getting to that 100k minimum wage, which is I mean, a beautiful vision. I wonder if the sort of loan forgiveness could play some role in that because we know that teachers spend money, you know, they need certifications, they need degrees to be able to teach in the classroom, which are expensive and have gotten more and more expensive. So I wonder if one way to get to that kind of salary is instead of it just being money in the pocket, maybe there's loan forgiveness that makes the total compensation up to 100k. Just from a policy angle. That would be something I would maybe look at, but amazing analysis across the board. Well, while we're thinking about new teacher jobs, of what's going on with layoffs. Yeah. So, you know, we've seen a sort of a mixed bag this week, there are some big funding rounds, which we'll talk about soon. So it feels like the funding landscape is beginning to come back. At the same time, there's still a huge emphasis on profitability, overgrowth in many, many different industries, including ed tech. So we saw, you know, large layoffs from Pluralsight. That's the Utah based, basically workforce learning platform and done really well over the years laid off 20% of their workforce this week, which is quite a big one. And there was a really interesting article in TechCrunch, that basically talks about how some of the brightest, most sort of exciting companies in edtech, like outschool, which we've covered on the pod, you know, laid off a quarter of its staff this week, or, you know, Bloom tech, that's the rebranding of lamda school laid off lots of people, the Quizlet, CEO is stepping down. degreed CEO is moving out, you know, class technologies, which is the, you know, who's doing sort of zoom based learning, conducted layoffs. So we're continuing to see pretty significant layoffs across the ad tech sector, as well as places like airtable, and plaid and Stripe, and, you know, tech all over the place. So it's a very scary time. I think for a lot of people I know personally, I've had many conversations over the last couple of weeks with people who have been in the EdTech space, and have suddenly found themselves on the end of a layoff and looking for new work. And it just feels like, you know, this edtech winter continues, but the funding is beginning to come back. And I think you're going to see more hiring. So it's, I hope we can all sort of hang in there. I know that some people are going to leave the space, I've seen a lot of people in, like from Skillshare, for example, a lot of the people the engineers particularly have left edtech. They're in all sorts of different kinds of companies, because there's jobs there, they pay really well. I just talked to an engineer I've worked with for four years at Coursera, who's just moved into gaming. So it's a little bit of a sad moment, because I think this, you know, we're going to lose a lot of really talented people. But hopefully there's going to be a spring back. What do you thoughts about the layoffs, Ben, you know, I have a number of thoughts. And first and foremost, my heart goes out to people who are laid off. And I will say one big takeaway is, if someone is laid off, it is not necessarily an indicator of that employee's quality of contribution. In many of these cases, these are macro layoffs, these are entire departments getting x and there's not a Okay, let's trim here, trim there. We have an underperformer here, there, these are often really high achieving people who are almost overnight, like cut loose, in part because the company was just so desperate to figure out a way to keep that. So I would just say for those who are hiring, I think it's important to understand that context. And number two, I'd say is we're living in an era of high beta in edtech. And I just think that the swings are going to be really high and really low. And I think there's going to be we're not settled into a new normal by any means. I think, you know, if you look at just the last six months, it would seem like, okay, things are coming back to Earth. If you look like 12 months, it's like things have crashed. If you look forward 12 months, it might be that this is a dip, and then things come back up, it's really hard to know where you are in the curve. But I would just say that the degree of change and the pace of change across our world is accelerating, but especially in edtech. And then I think this also comes back to from an entrepreneur standpoint, pick your funders wisely and pick your be thoughtful about your valuations and how it sets up for subsequent rounds. I think I've actually come across a couple of companies that are raising at 65,000,080 5 million post money on like an eight or $10 million round and the revenue is still at a you know a million or less, that really puts a lot of pressure on you for the subsequent round. And if you're not hitting these kind of arbitrary and often like insane growth targets, then you're going to be the one like axing part of your staff and pivoting and doing a down round and all of that. So just really running the marathon of the sprint, I think is the takeaway for the leaders and entrepreneurs out there. So if you are looking for a job though, send your resume out to Alex and me, we're happy to pass it along, or post an app mention us on LinkedIn. We're happy to amplify it. And you know, it's a good time. If you're looking for talent. There's some great great people out there. Okay, amazing people. Number four Course Hero, one of my favorites because I'm a user is reorganizing with a new parent company learning Oh, this is happening in my backyard in Redwood City. But Alex, what's your take on the Course Hero Mic reset. Yeah, this is actually a very bright spot, I think in the sort of slightly negative and tech landscape, which is that Course Hero, which has been valued at over $3 billion, it sort of has got a very large round. You know, before the funding started to dry up out of Redwood City has gone on an acquisition spree over the last couple of years. And they bought a number of companies, including quill bought, and CliffsNotes. Classic. Yes, notes. If we all remember from our history, a company called lit charts that sort of similar to Cliff's Notes, in some ways, symbol lab, they bought a lot of different companies and what they're doing now, is there a restructuring so that they have a parent company called learning to sort of like Google created alphabet, and that each of the companies within learning to live charts CliffsNotes, symbol bookwell bought a company called skriver. And of course, Hero itself, are all sort of subsidiary companies. And this is something we actually haven't seen in edtech. Before, it's a sign of sort of competence. And, you know, it's pretty interesting, because I think it's trying to create a little bit of a sort of edtech empire. And I think, hopefully, I'm sure they're looking at by Jews, which also made many acquisitions and saying, how do we make sure and to you, which made lots of acquisitions and starting to say, you know, we're trying to grow by acquisition, but how do we organize so that we can really make sure all our companies can grow in the way they grow and not be sort of burdened by a central org. So I'm sure they're also looking closely at alphabet, and Google and how they've sort of tried to do this. So I think this is an interesting move. I have no idea what it's going to be the CEO, of course, hero, Andrew Gower, is now becoming the CEO at Learn do, and they have a new CEO, at course, hero. But that's the move. And I wish them luck. I think it's really interesting. I know the Course Hero, people pretty casually, but I've been to their office and things that I think they've done quite well, during this kind of strange period. Well, I would say this is also kind of tying into what we were saying about the fluctuations up and down and everything. One of the things we expect out of this period is something like 80% of startups have less than 12 months of runway. Now that was reported that information last week. So who's going to be the aggregator that's going to be bringing these in. And typically, we find private equity firms are the aggregator. And the challenge when private equity firms are the aggregator is they care about cash, and they're affected greatly by the interest rate. So if they by you, and you're not producing cash, and they're paying higher and higher interest rates, they're going to be cutting you to the bone. Of course, zero, I think, is the aspiration of, hey, could there be I think they're basically saying, Hey, we're gonna step up. And we're going to start bringing together a portfolio of assets that really do accelerate the opportunities for our learner, and how Classic is it that cliff notes, which it just has enduring following is going to be part of that. And yet, they're going to be able to surround it with other assets. So they're basically saying, Hey, we're here, we're going to be one of the big players in this space, I do think that it gives an alternative asset to founders who are thinking, Hey, I've got something really good here. But I don't think I've got another couple funding rounds in me going and joining something like that, which is aspirational, versus something that might be, you know, squeeze the lemon here, that is an exciting development for entrepreneurs. And one other thing I would just say in the macro, I do think that we're also seeing people finding operational synergies on the back end. And one way you can cut costs is you know, taking zero net cost cutting, you know, in your organization, but the other is joining with other organizations and creating shared back ends. So I am seeing also related to this a number of companies that do you know, offshore accounting or, you know, overseas development, rather than them just having a contract with one company saying, hey, I can provide edtech offshoring, there's one in Costa Rica, I can provide a tech offshoring. And I'm developing enough of the capability that I can work with three or four different companies that have some sort of shared back end infrastructure needs. So just a really great way for the maturing of our sector. All right, well, we're now to our final spot. Alex, you're gonna take it away with the m&a and funding. It's just been a great week excited to wrap the year in our next week's episode, but thank you all for listening. I'm going to sign out here are deep dive with Joshua Bragi. From wolf University is up next. He's doing some really interesting things in the university accreditation space. But let's go through some of the funding rounds that happened this week. I mentioned there were some pretty big funding rounds this week. I will call out that I don't think any of the funding we saw this week at least that came across our desk is in the US. It's all over the world, which is a testament to the globalization of edtech and I think it's not such a terrible thing. So we saw The Korean edtech math spresso raised a very large $70 million Series C round. They are backed by Google. And it's a, I believe a math learning app that is very, very popular. It's operator of the AI driven education app quando, which helps people search for solutions to math problems by taking a photo. So in some ways, it's almost like the South Korean Photomath. They've been getting big rounds, but $70 million is a lot. So that's really interesting. We saw sauna labs, raise a $34 million. Series B. Sana Labs is a Scandinavian company that does knowledge management for enterprises, and incorporates some learning elements. And I believe AI as well. They've been around for a few years, but getting to their series B 34 million is nothing to you know, that's a pretty serious round as well, we saw a company called you Oh, that's you O L O out of India, raise $22,000,000.22 and a half million dollars. They offer English language courses and coding courses, to almost 4 million students across India. So that's a testament to how the Indian edtech market just can get very big, very fast. This is a relatively recently created company. But when you're offering high demand skills, like coding and English language, you can grow very quickly. And they have $22 million more to grow even further. We saw career foundry, which is a European bootcamp. Basically, it's a German tech company that offers sort of technical training raised 5 million euros this week, to continue their growth in Europe. And of course, the European tech sectors is continuing to be hot. And then we saw Nairobi based Zaraki, which is as student information system in Kenya in raise almost $2 million to continue expanding outside of Kenya and to other parts of Africa. So seeing big rounds in South Korea, in Africa, in India, and you know, different areas in Europe. That's pretty exciting. But the size of these rounds is what caught my eye this week, you know, 70,000,030 4 million, we haven't seen rounds quite as big at commonly for a while. So hopefully this is a harbinger of more, you know, interest in the space. And what we're probably going to see as the sort of later stage rounds, the series B C's DS, you know, continue to go through and maybe fewer early stage in acquisitions, the only acquisition that we hadn't covered before that we saw this week was McGraw Hill, the textbook, you know, I'm sure they don't call themselves a textbook company anymore. But this sort of large publisher education publisher acquired a company called boards and beyond, which is all about medical training, specifically helping medical students study for their national board exams. So this is something that will supplement McGraw Hill's portfolio of medical content. And that was courtesy of Matt tower. Of course, we will always look at his rundown each week as well. So that's it for funding our one merger or even our one acquisition this week, we are now going to go to our deep dive with Joshua Bragi. From wolf University. For our deep dive today, we're talking to Joshua Bragi, the CEO of wolf University. Wolf University is a fascinating company taking on accreditation and really thinking about how a credit system in higher ed might be changed for the positive in the future. Joshua, Welcome to EdTech insiders. Really glad to be here many thanks. Absolutely. So first off, help our listeners understand what what university is, it's a little bit of a complicated, but very, very potentially transformative technology. Yeah. So in some respects, we're just very traditional, you know, we are the first global collegiate university that allows other education organizations to join as member colleges and offered degrees. So in one respect as a collegiate University, we're very old school, Oxford, Cambridge, University of California is kind of a collegiate University, University of London. So those are well trodden examples. But what's novel about our Collegiate university system is that we do allow other education organizations to join if they're qualified. And once they join, they have the power to offer degrees, we're a bit more tech forward as well, insofar as it's possible to join by getting connected with us technologically, rather than, you know, needing to physically move to the town of Oxford to join the University of Oxford and become I don't know that 40 is college or something like that. So somebody who's interested in teaching a specific subject can apply to become a college of wolf University. And if they succeed in going through all the requirements, they can offer a degree that actually holds credits, and those credits are in the European higher education credit system. Is that right? Yeah. So we're roughly structured in three layers. So there are all of our colleges. You know, it's like Berkeley As a member of the University of California, you know, we have colleges in Africa and India and Europe and the United States, and, you know, South America, and so on. So we have colleges around the world. And then we have software as kind of layer two, which is tracking all of their internal learning activities, and approving of all of their course proposals and degree proposals, and so on. And then layer three, we actually own four universities today. And so those universities are in different jurisdictions, and each one comes under a different licensing regime and has different abilities. And so we do issue most of our credits today out of Europe, that will probably change sometime in the future. But today, you know, regardless of where the college is in the world, they are being tracked through our technology, and then mapped back to a license that we hold in Europe. And so the student in say, Nigeria, is actually earning a European degree with eects. Accreditation. That's so interesting. And you recently announced a new API called air lock, that sort of makes it even easier to connect all the pieces together, can you describe to our listeners, what air lock is? And how that takes the wolf University vision to the next level? Yeah, so the first piece is, well, you know, when we have colleges that are in different countries, that are being successful in delivering high quality programs, then their learning techniques often vary a lot. So initially, we made everybody you know, use our learning management system. And, you know, the kind of feature requests list is very long. And in one group teaches, you know, one method and another group teaches another method. And actually, like, both methods are successful. So we got a lot more agnostic about, you know, what kind of learning experience students would be having that would be successful. And many of our colleges needed these highly customized learning environments to handle, you know, machine learning at scale with, you know, large number of students or just one on one teaching for, you know, a PhD or things like that. So it became a bit of a challenge to force everyone onto our LMS. And so we created a product called the airlock, which is a little bit complicated, but it effectively allows people to plug in via an API, and they send us a copy of all of their learning content, we review all of that content with a team of PhDs and as well as our own algorithms are tagging the content for things like intended learning outcomes, workload values, and so on. And then once they've been approved, there's like a little SDK with a small w, that appears in the corner of the screen for the student. And it's tracking their learning activity, whenever they engage in one of those approved learning resources, it's added to their education record. So it's a very granular picture of exactly what the student is doing. You know, they downloaded a PDF, which has the following intended learning outcomes, you know, workload value of an hour and a half, and is associated with some upcoming quiz or whatever. And so it builds an education activity record wherever the student is in the world of all these kinds of approved resources. And so it ends up producing a very granular picture of a student's learning and their journey as they go through a course. So that the kind of end result for college is, you know, you can use our API to basically plug in join a global university system, the credits that are being issued by your college, you know, today are recognized by more than 50 countries. You know, we're a recognized university in Canada. And so many of our students want to immigrate to Canada, for example, but as well as the European higher education area, and places like that. So we really want to reduce the friction that it takes to get to the status of accreditation, and not just like, accredited locally in your country, but you know, really global recognition for what you're doing. But at the same time, we don't cut any corners. And so being able to deliver a provable record of what is being done by students, regardless of where they are in the world is a major challenges that we think we've overcome. My best attempt to paraphrase what airlock adds is that in the past, to work with Wolf University meant you'd have to work within wolf University's LMS. And every feature on the LMS was developed over time. Now people can use their existing LMS is or even work outside of an LMS. And use the airlock API's to still track every individual action on the learning content and the students it to make an educational record, therefore, qualifying it for accreditation, even if they're not in the LMS. That's right. So you know, the complete record from an accreditation perspective has to be built in our system because we're audited by a large number of regulators. And in some months, we get audited multiple times by regulators in multiple countries. And so like we need to have that very complete record. But we also want to give our colleges the freedom to have a highly customized environment. You know, we still mostly work with organizations where there is some centralized environment for them so that we can pull all the data from it. It's a little bit more challenging if you know they're sending suit tends to like a lot of random websites. And they're doing some work in some coding environment. But it's completely off platform, we do have some future things that are coming out to handle those scenarios. But right now, mostly we work with high growth, master's degrees organizations and undergraduate degree organizations that have built their own custom environments to handle coding. And so like, we can actually get the screenshot at the moment that the student submits their coding quiz answer, and as well as get the score that's been created by the teacher and match it to the intended learning outcomes and the grade weights and so on for that. So it builds a very rich record for somebody who is operating with their own LMS. It's really, really interesting. So let's zoom out for a moment. You know, we have listeners who are deep in the higher ed world and know a whole lot about the regulators and the accreditation systems that you talk about, and some that are in the K 12 world or the workforce world and don't know much about it. Higher Education, accreditation is a complicated world. And I think one of the advantages of wolf University is it helps people navigate that world without having to learn about it from scratch, understand all the requirements of the regional accreditors us in Europe and Canada, can you just talk broadly about sort of higher education, accreditation, and why the, you know, the challenge of really disrupting it. So I think of higher education as a double licensed industry. And so, you know, if you have a master's degree or a PhD, you're qualified to practice your profession, but you're not actually able to practice your profession, you know, if you're a doctor or a lawyer, you could open up your own private practice and go and pursue a career. But in higher education, there's a second license required, which is the license of the university in order to issue a degree. And that sounds, it's a little bit like taxi driving for Uber, you know, there's something like a taxi medallion. And when you get into yellow cab, you are paying for the ride, and you're paying for the mortgage on that million dollar taxi medallion. And so my real concern is that many students are going into debt when they go to university, and the teachers are not getting paid very much. And so, you know, if you think about students, at one end of a classroom, there might be 50 to $100,000 worth of students in the room for that one class that one semester, and then the teacher at the other end of the room earning maybe two to $4,000, you know, for the class. So they're getting, you know, maybe like 5%, of what's actually represented there in terms of revenue. So like, where's the other 95% of the money going if the students are going into debt? And they're like, a lot of answers to that, but one of the answers is that the number of professional administrators in colleges has continued to grow relative to the productivity of the faculty. And so it's not like adding one administrator just like give super powers to all the faculty, and they take on a lot more students, and said, they kind of grow in tandem. And so you know, it's true that there are more administrators at Yale than there are undergraduate students, and that the headcount in many universities exceeds 50%, from the administration side. So you know, that worries me, because in part, those administrators are dealing with quality assurance and protections for the students, but the students are also paying for those, and it's very costly. And so, you know, how do we achieve an environment where we get those protections, many of which are data related, without filling students into a lifetime of debt to achieve it. So part of what we want to do is say, Well, can we consolidate that accreditation information into a single system, and ensure that we can provide it you know, at the same levels of quality or much higher, without, you know, incurring such a heavy cost on the institution. So, you know, having an accreditation license is comparable to having a bank license, it is very hard to maintain. And so the idea that all 4850 accredited colleges in America need to have their own independent, like accreditation license, that they need a full time compliance staff to maintain just seems like too much for students to be paying for. That's a really interesting, take. I've never heard anybody, you know, call out that the costs are passed directly on to the students. But I think that's really there's a lot of truth to that. The cost of accreditation. So, you know, critics of accreditation, say it costs too much, it limits schools ability to sort of innovate or change because they have to keep maintaining their compliance. But those who like accreditation, say that its power is that it keeps bad actors out of the field that it can't be, you don't have you know, somebody showing up in town like The Music Man and starting their own university and just learning from people. You are in a really interesting position, balancing rapid accreditation with maintaining high quality of education. I'll, you know, talk to us a little bit about that tension and how you resolve it and how you make sure you don't as you say, cut corners in universities that you work with, with wealth. So to start, you just have to have very high standards. And so our experience is that the standards in Europe are just extremely high on the academic side. And the standards in the United States tend to be higher on the fiscal side. That's just kind of Anna total observation. But you know, we really need to know like, does this course have academic peer reviewed literature published in the last five years that has been approved by our team of PhD, you know, quality assurance agencies? And then has the student actually engaged with that for how long did they engage with it? And what are the intended learning outcomes of it. So there's like quite a bit of granular stuff that goes into the standards. And that goes all the way up to like the level of the course and the level of the degree that the course is a member of the college and like the academic board of that college, what are the approval workflows? Now, if you were to Google, like new degree approval, workflow University and check out the images, every university has this kind of spaghetti nest of committees that is involved in things, and that's actually often defined by regulation, so we have many of those as well at Wolf, it's just that the time gaps in between those committee meetings tends to be a lot shorter. And the kind of information is gathered at the very base layer of like, what a student is doing, and so on. So like, we can present all the information directly to the committee, where it's already visible, whether or not it's going to be approvable or not approvable. And so that just speeds up a lot of the processes in between the key human judgments. And then you need to make sure, well, only if you have a verified ID with a verified PhD in our system, can you be a member of that committee, and then the committee has to have a quorum of a certain number of approvals. And so we can set those things out in software in a way that just speeds the process up quite a lot without actually reducing the rules. And we can auto generate the record of that, which means it's then auditable, without going through months of like reorganizing paperwork to make it presentable to regulators. So I think there are a lot of like, basic software technology gains, and what's a largely paper driven industry to start with, and that's just low hanging fruit. And you can actually just increase the standards pretty straightforwardly by doing that, because you have higher levels of consistency. And you can turn the dial on things like, well, you know, what, are the education requirements to be a member of this committee? Or how many years do you need to have taught or in what subject areas do you need, have taught and so once you have those parameters on a committee meeting, you can kind of adjust them. And really, you know, for us, it's our regulators who decide, you know, what our kind of key parameters are, and we make arguments about why we think it will be stronger or weaker in certain cases. But we don't get to change the rules, we just get to implement them in a strong way. It sounds like a strong and efficient way, putting all the pieces together quickly, you know, in a way that's repeatable, it doesn't require a month between each meeting. And that can expedite the entire process without compromising against the instructional or fiscal standards. Look, I'm empathetic to people that want to get rid of accreditation, or they think that it will just go away or something like this. I don't think it's in the realm of reality quite yet. You know, it's not like, I don't know, a Yelp rating on restaurants, which you can get kind of the information. And then people don't care about whether the restaurant has a license, because it's so tied up with tax, immigration, the disbursement of funds from governments, people's national Ministry of Education, there are just like a lot more layers of things to get rid of. And you have to do it all at once across all countries, which makes it very, very hard. So like, I don't think it's going away. And I don't think that whatever the statements of large tech companies are, I think that actually the hiring practices, you know, you really will have improved lifetime earnings if you have a bachelor's degree or master's degree. And so the big job is, well, where are the pockets of very, very high quality education happening that are not currently accredited? And can we pull those into the realm of, you know, improving a student's lifetime earnings? And then where are the universities that are just spending way too much on accreditation? It's not like their core area of competency. And why don't we allow them to kind of lower the cost of that area by plugging into a system like, Wolf, really interesting, the metaphor I think of and forgive me, if this is naive is sort of like TurboTax. It's like, you have this incredibly Byzantine complex tax code. And you can wait for it to be you know, overhauled, and every, every few years, they, they say it will be, or you can create a software that understands all the rules and allows you to sort of whip through all of them and cross your t's and dot your i's and get, you know, get your deductions in the right place. But actually, much faster. Does that, does that resonate with you as a metaphor? Yeah, you know, the Turbo Tax piece is like a core piece of what we do. We call it the AMS instead of an LMS. Our accreditation management system, and it's kind of internal logic is very comparable to what you would find with with TurboTax. And then something like airlock is really a way for us to connect with universities around the world and give them access to our accreditation management system so that they don't have to carry that burden and ultimately, so their students don't have to carry it. Absolutely fascinating. I think it is such an interesting model. And, you know, the idea that this system is so complex, and you enable people to sort of swim inside of it without waiting for it to sort of disappear or be overhauled or be Ever replaced by all the different you know, alternative credentials or non credit or you know all the things that people think is so interesting. Thanks for being here with us at Tech insiders. I encourage everybody to check out wolf University and learn about airlock it is a really interesting technology approaching a very complex problem in higher ed, namely cost and compliance. Thanks for being here. Joshua Brophy, really appreciate it. Thanks a lot, Alex. That's it for Ed Tech insiders week in ed tech week of December 15. We are heading towards the end of the year and our 100th episode as well as our predictions episode, so stay tuned for that and keep listening to anything in the Ed Tech insiders library. We're so happy to have had so many listeners and such great feedback this year. Thanks for being with us. If it'll happen in ed tech. You'll hear about it here at weekend Ed Tech. Thanks for listening to this episode of edtech insiders. If you liked the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more Ed Tech Insider subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.