Metaphorically speaking, the progress of new forms of learning that are now possible yet not implemented, is like the transcontinental railroad endeavor in the US. There were seemingly impossible barriers to overcome, such as the Rockie Mts and the Sierras. The technology was promising, but the costs and risks were formidable.
When the US Federal Government came forward with very substantial land grants along the railroad right of ways, and per-mile of track-laid subsidies, the projects took off, because the ROI was then worth the risks involved. (subsidies for the Union Pacific laying track through the mountains had a substantially higher subsidy as the cost through the mountains were greater than across the great plains.)
Creating the means for ubiquitous high powered and superior learning MO using the cloud is also extremely expensive, and the risks are high that investing in a particular platform or learning MO will turn out to be “the wrong one”, or that adoption by the current ed institutions will be blocked, or “fail”.
US education is primarily funded by the States and/or school districts with tax raising powers, and there are enormous amounts being expended; Education spending is one of the top state and local budget expenditures. In NM it’s the highest expenditure by far for the state legislature’s annual budget.
(note recent enormous NM budget spending increases from the Oil and Gas Permian Basin windfall is chiefly target to teacher salary increases. Little is going to Ed Tech advances, in a state with huge distances from cities, and great isolation, for many students)
But the potential ROI on investing in EdTech are high, as are the risks. In leu of government spending on Ed Tech, private equity is testing the waters to see if they might be able to route around Educational Institutions stasis, to develop superior means of teaching/ learning. Then the big question would be, how to get over the mountains, and access the huge present education funding, to support ubiquitous rollouts of new Ed Tech.
The Ed Tech private equity thinking is something along the lines of “let’s do what the other current giant tech companies did”, starting from startups, and proceeding to a position astride the world economy.
Can that be done? Can some way be discovered to bring the teachers, and their mountains of salary expenditures, on board with Ed Tech transformations? The politics of that look as hard as crossing the mountains did back in the day.
But ever more equity managers seemingly are betting it can be done.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/US-Edtech-Closes-Decade-with-Record-1.7-Billion-Raised-in-2019-EdSurge-News.pdf”]