Tag Archives: Edtech

The future of education services for schools is in workflow

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How will artificial intelligence impact K-12 teachers?

This week McKinsey published a new report addressing the question of how AI will impact K-12 teachers.  The research suggests that 20-40% of current teacher time comprises tasks that could be automated. They estimate that teachers could re-direct approximately 13 hours per week towards activities that raise student outcomes and increase teacher satisfaction.  The tasks of preparing lessons, administration, evaluation and feedback are flagged as high potential for automation.

Be selective

These results echo those of last year’s Learning Impact Survey of Sanoma, in which teachers indicated a desire to go digital in those areas which were most labour intensive, flagging essentially the same areas.  This suggests that not only is the opportunity in these tasks but that the profession is also ready for solutions.

present_vs_ideal

Teaching profession under pressure

The teacher is by far the most positive intervention in education.  However the teaching profession faces significant challenges.  UNESCO estimates an additional 69m teachers need to enter the profession by 2030 to fulfil global demand.  In some parts of the world, teacher turnover is high, for example in parts of the USA annual teacher turnover reaches 16%.  In the UK 81% of teachers are considering leaving the profession due to dis-satisfaction.

Higher impact & happier teachers needed!

Furthermore, on average teachers spend only half of their time actually teaching.  This represents not only lost productivity from the core task but is also demotivating for many teachers whose passion is to teach rather than the ancillary tasks around it.  Enabling teacher workflow could therefore not only increase productivity but also make the profession more attractive.

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$400bn impact & opportunity

Make no mistake, the opportunity to solve this productivity gap is huge.  Measured in terms of financials, assuming global spending on education to be some $6trn, of which 45% is on K-12 education,  and of which 75% is spent on staff salaries, this implies a global spend on teaching/staff salaries of some $2trn per year.  A 20-40% uplift in productivity through AI could arguably be worth some $400-800bn per year in terms of paid and unpaid output!  Which is not to say that this is a saving governments could make or a revenue that education companies could earn, because a significant slice of that value should rightfully return to teachers through higher salaries and quality of life, and another part would rightfully get re-directed to teacher-student interaction to increase outcomes and professional satisfaction.

20%

 

Help the teacher to focus on teaching!

Nevertheless, it’s my belief that the teacher will continue to be the killer app in education, and that the biggest opportunity to make not only a positive impact on learning and teaching in K-12 but also to build a successful business, is to enable the workflow of the teacher.   Probably by combining it with the other side of the same coin: the learn-flow of the pupil.  What other opportunities at this scale of potential impact are possible in K-12 within the next 5 years?

Looking for new opportunities in education (technology)

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Europe’s biggest edtech company

After 10 years at Sanoma, mostly leading Sanoma Learning, I’ve informed the company of my intention to move on as of spring next year, giving plenty of time to arrange a smooth handover to a successor.  Check out the press release of 13 November about it here.

Great place to work

It’s been an honour to lead Learning during this period, and I’m really proud about what the teams have achieved.  I love the dedication to learning that can be felt across the company and very much respect the commitment of our people to do a great job for pupils and teachers.

Growth and successful transformation

Our teams have achieved a lot of success in local markets and made great leaps forward on the digital transformation.  We have worked together intensively across the company on the High Five program in building one Sanoma Learning.  And we’ve completed a number of acquisitions including Sanoma Utbildning in Sweden, Tammi Learning in Finland, De Boeck in Belgium and and Iddink in The Netherlands, Belgium and Spain.  We are now about twice the size we were five years ago.

Amongst the best performers in the industry

Today we stand as a very successful company.  We are positively impacting about 11m learners and 1m teachers in some of the World’s best education systems through a professional organization of some 1700 talented people. We are a frontrunner on the digital transformation, arguably Europe’s biggest edtech company today in terms of revenues and employment.

We’re growing and amongst the best performing companies in the industry financially: 2018 brought us the strongest result in our history so far, and we are well on track to extend that success further in 2019.  It has really been a privilege to be part of this great company!

My priority right now is to continue leading Learning effectively and then to handover to a successor before leaving Sanoma.

Investing in education/technology

After that, I’m intending to make some investments in the education (technology) sector and to see where that  brings me.  For early stage investments I will be investing in and working together with eduimpact.fi.  For later stage investments I will work together with other investors.  Feel free to reach out to me at johnrichmartin@gmail.com if you think I could in some way help your company to prosper.

Thank you!

Thank you to my colleagues at Sanoma Learning for their excellent work and cooperation through the years. Wishing them and Sanoma Learning all the best for a bright future ahead!

Looking forward >>

John Martin

How many edtech companies are exporting more than $20M each year?

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Source: HolonIQ

Source: HolonIQ

The promise of education markets is well marketed.  Estimates have been made that global education and training spend will reach approximately $10T (that’s $10,000,000,000,000) by 2030, about 6% of global GDP, with approximately 55% spent on the K-12 sector (somewhat above $3T this year).

Global edtech spend is forecasted to grow from $152B in 2018 (a paltry 2.6% of total spending) to $342B in 2025 (a slightly less meagre 4.4%).

Growth in edtech spend

Source: HolonIQ.com

Applying technology to learning and teaching should be a massive opportunity to both improve learning impact and to build a successful business, right?

I’m convinced on both counts.  But if global spend on K-12 is $3T then why is the spend on edtech so relatively modest? It’s mainly important to remember that about 80% of spending in K-12 is on teachers and other staff, with additional spending on other fixed costs such as buildings. Conceptually, in a pure-play digital future, in which teachers might be replaced with AI and robots, this could be an addressable market. However, this seems unlikely to happen at scale any time soon, since it would be not only pedagogically unsound but also socially unacceptable.  (It’s my own belief that the human teacher is the “killer app” in education).

Spending on Staff

Source: OECD Education at a Glance 2018

It seems more likely that technology will be used to super-charge teachers and enable more flexible organization forms for teaching.

Is there a global market for K-12 edtech?

If we would assume for the sake of argument that 2.6% of spending on K-12 education is digital (see above), this would imply a current spend of about $85B.

I would like to understand how much success the edtech industry is having in scaling internationally. How much of the $85B is being spent on local vs global solutions and how big is the opportunity for global vendors? It’s important for us to understand this dynamic as an industry: it will inform our investment decisions and potential to make an impact on learning.

Although the edtech market is not yet very mature, it is of a sufficient scale that we should expect to see successful global operators in edtech in K-12, if the market has a (partially) global nature.  Imagine we set a very low threshold: 0.025% of $85B spend, roughly $20M.  How many edtech companies are there in K-12 today who are generating $20M sales or more each year on edtech offerings being sold outside their market of origin?  More than 100? Less than 10?  I simply don’t know, my guess is there are tens rather than hundreds or thousands.

Who is exporting more than $20M?

I am very keen to discover and understand examples of such companies (exporting more than $20M of edtech each year outside of their home markets in K-12).  I would appreciate it if you would reach out to me when you know of good examples, or if you know of any good reports on the subject.  (Of course there are a number of examples I am aware of and I am excluding the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and so on, which are more generic tech solutions than specifically edtech).

Assuming it’s likely the international opportunity is currently under-developed, are there things that we can do together as an industry to unlock this potential?  At Sanoma we have successfully scaled our bingel platform in primary education across geographies, and are now working on the same with Kampus in secondary education.  Therefore within a Group it seems to be possible.  Are there other examples across Groups or through partnerships that have scaled successfully across international markets?  What can we learn from these examples?

HolonIQ

Source: HolonIQ

The Chinese, Americans and Indians have the advantage of huge internal markets.  At the same time, many of their edtech ventures are focused on capturing that big local opportunity.  However, it seems only to be a matter of time before some of these companies go global.  Whilst lacking their scale, could we Europeans (better) develop the capability to scale across geographies as a competitive advantage in edtech?  What would we need to do to make that happen?

Of course it’s a possibility that K-12 education and edtech markets will remain mainly local.  In which case we as an industry can adjust some of our investment hypotheses accordingly.  Yet I expect growing teacher shortages, pedagogical innovations and technological progress will drive change in our markets. We should organize ourselves to be ready for these changes.

 

Scaling European Edtech

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I recently came across this interesting report from Navitas Ventures – Global Edtech Ecosystems 1.0: Connecting the World of Education Technology.  Navitas analysed 20 cities with leading edtech ecosystems representing about 40% of global edtech.  Beijing, the Bay Area and New York are top of the class, with Boston, London and Shanghai challenging.  They also assessed a further 14 emerging ecosystems at different states of maturity.  It’s clear that edtech is thriving across the globe!

Scale is essential to success in digital and you can see that in edtech too, with the predominance of China and the USA.  In addition, given the demography and emerging status of the edtech ecosystems in India and Sub-Saharan Africa, it’s likely that together these four regions will give birth to a generation of edtech giants.  Edtech could significantly improve the life chances of hundreds of millions of people in these regions by increasing access, participation and engagement in education.  It’s a powerful promise!

HolonIQ

Source: HolonIQ

What about Europe?

Europe has some natural advantages in the edtech space.  We are home to many world-class education systems such as Finland. There’s a rich start-up scene in a number of European cities with London leading (but will Brexit make us BETT-sick?). Paris, Stockholm, Berlin, Helsinki and Amsterdam are vibrant and promising too, in fact there are more than 3000 edtech ventures across Europe today. Furthermore, there is significant and reliable spending on education through governments and ready access to venture and growth funding privately.

However, we lack scale

A lack of scale probably results in us under-serving our own customers.  It restricts our ability to expand to international markets. And it potentially exposes us to competitors grown in the big markets.  A lack of scale is restricting our potential.

European Champions

To address this, I think we need to create a European edtech network with strong go-to-market capabilities so we can effectively scale successful concepts across the continent.  I believe this network would be well served if it includes a handful of Champions to acts as magnets to talent, ideas and capital.

Learning organisation

I am interested in your ideas about how we could bring more scale to European edtech and what you think about the idea of building a European network with Champions.  How could we make that happen?  I’m also curious to learn from some of the challenger and emerging edtech ecosystems: how are they approaching this, what’s working and what’s not?  Learning is in our DNA, we need to put those skills to work if we are to bring this potential to life.

Sanoma’s Start-up Challenge Five Years On

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Five years on from Sanoma’s Start-up Challenge on the Future of Learning at TNW2014, I checked out how the five finalists have fared.  I’m impressed!

Winner Labster raises growth funding

Winner of the Challenge Labster has been prospering and announced at the end of last month raising $21M in a series B round to develop more digital lab simulations and to grow in the US market.  Next stop the World.

DragonBox joins Kahoot!

Maths app developer DragonBox announced today that it has been acquired by Kahoot! for $18M.  Their claim is that together they are going to make learning maths awesome!

ClassCharts wins BETT

Edukey’s ClassCharts, a seating planner and behavioural management tool, has gone from strength to strength based on the close understanding of teaching and the classroom underpinned by a strong data and analytics capability. Edukey won Company of the Year at BETT2019.

Jumpido combines movement with software to boost maths learning and looks like quite a fun thing to do in primary schools.  Although the website is still active and the company was a finalist at the Forbes e-volution Award in 2016, they have been rather quiet since.

The website for the final contender Eduvee, an intuitive learning and tutoring platform, now re-directs to the education page of custom software and consulting company Elinext, likely indicating that some form of major pivot has taken place for this company.

Impressive

Overall it’s really impressive to see how much success these companies are achieving.  We were lucky to have selected such a strong cohort for our Start-up Challenge.

Inspiring

What I found inspiring in all of the contestants at the time was their deep understanding of their customers and their passion and drive to make a difference.  Five years on you can see the positive impact of the energy they have put into their ventures.

Looking forward >>

I’m curious on how far these companies will go in the next five years, and wish them every success in turning their ambitions into reality.

Edtech: hotter than the Acropolis in August

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At the beginning of the week I was in Athens celebrating my birthday. Let’s just say I was born in the 1970s :). I’ve always had an interest in Greek mythology (it was a good choice to read Mythos on the way) and as a man of learning, I wanted to see more of the homeland of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.  An inspiring and thoroughly enjoyable visit!

News broke of the sale for $1.75B of plagiarism-checker Turnitin, more than the total amount that all edtech startups raised in 2018 ($1.45B) and also one of the biggest edtech deals this decade, beating LinkedIn’s purchase of Lynda, but smaller than the Ellucian deal.  This underlines the growing importance of technology in learning markets. In the meantime, Sanoma Learning is, with the intended acquisition of Iddink Group, emerging as Europe’s leading edtech company, with a couple of hundred million euros of digital/multichannel revenues and more than 300 tech employees.  It’s a hot place to be.  Hotter than the Acropolis in August!

The immediate focus back at the office was the steering of our High Five program.  At the beginning of March we went live with our Next Gen EdTech Team, where we have created one technology team for the whole of Sanoma Learning. It was good to see we are well on track to launch Kampus in Finland & Sweden, and Bingel in The Netherlands.  Overall I feel we are making great leaps forward with High Five!

Then we spent time with the Iddink team in preparing ourselves for finalizing the intended transaction.  There’s a good click between us, which is a great starting point.

At the end of the week we did the monthly business reviews with each of the units. We’re deploying a new stage-gated investment process into new courses and had a couple of very interesting cases from Poland. I was highly enthusiastic about how the team is approaching this and really appreciated to be able to spend time with them to learn more.  Well done!

Looking forward >>

The Chinese are coming to a school near you

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Last week we visited China with a small team to learn more about their education system. The timing was good with today’s announcement of the results of the latest PISA survey,  with the Chinese regions once again performing very well.

china

Amongst others we visited a variety of successful private and state-owned enterprises as well as a government department of education and – best of all – a primary school. It was an inspiring experience and we were greeted warmly and had open discussions everywhere we went.

The primary school felt very similar to those in our home countries, although the class sizes were twice as big at 50 rather than 25 students.  We sometimes have the impression of Chinese children doing heavy duty rote learning, but I was struck by the emphasis on meaning, aspiration and happiness in the school we visited.  Teachers were experimenting with project-based learning and digital, not dissimilar to recent innovations in Finland.

The companies we visited were all proud to present what they were working on, very open to answer questions and to curious to learn about us too.  Finnish education was well respected.  The tech companies looked and felt very similar to those in Silicon Valley but somehow seemed even more keenly commercial.

The government clearly has a big voice in education, with central government setting overall policy through the five year plan and the local authority we visited was actively working to understand and improve school performance across the region, driven by quite a rich set of data.

It made me wonder:

“is China going to lead the next wave of breakthrough innovations in education and learning?”

The scale of the market, commitment of the key players and innovative potential of the ecosystem  create a compelling case.

Scale

With a population of over 1.3 bn inhabitants and about 200 m students in K-12 education this is a huge market.  Each year about 17 m new students join the system, with this number likely to get boosted by up to 6 m each year due to the recent move to a “two-child” policy.

Commitment

The government is highly committed to education and the 13th 5-year plan (2016-2020) focuses on improving quality and access, with a key role for digital. Significant new resourcing is being dedicated to the transformation. At the same time, private spending on education is huge, estimated to be of the order of 1/3 of average household disposable income, driven by the “six adults – one child” phenomenon resulting from the earlier “one child” policy. The commitment to education in China seems unrivalled on the global stage.

Innovative potential

The companies and organisations we met had high quality management and development capabilities at least comparable with what we have seen in the West. There seems to be a “learning culture”, with people keen to try new things and work hard at it. There is everything to win. The transformation need is clearly articulated and well-funded.  Authorities and companies are building large networks of users and rich databases.  Surely the insights that will come from this ecosystem about learning on all levels (individual, class, school, region, nation) will power innovation in education and learning?

China: coming to a school near you

All-in-all I think it’s highly likely that China will become a powerhouse of innovation in education in the coming years – and that our education systems will also benefit from Chinese innovations in education.  Also, given the growing global importance of China, how long will it be before Mandarin is a common second language in our curricula?  One way or another, the Chinese are coming to a school near you pretty soon.

Working together to develop scalable technology at Sanoma Learning

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One of the key trajectories in our strategy is using technology to help pupils and teachers. We believe technology is an enabler of what we call learning impact: engaging pupils, improving learning outcomes and supporting the workflow of the teacher. Developing and deploying the right technology in the right way is therefore critical to our mission.

Key parts of our technology are developed together and scaled across our units. This is not easy but brings benefits in terms of speed, quality, cost, skills and shared learning.

This week I caught up with new recruit Heikki Rusama, in the team of our Chief Business Technology Officer Arnoud Klerkx, who recently moved from Rovio in Finland to Sanoma Learning’s co-development team in The Netherlands, to learn more about this work.

Tell us about your background and why you joined Sanoma Learning

I’ve been interested in learning since my teenage years and studied educational science to originally prepare for a role in academia. I’m keen to work in a role that will allow me to combine my passion for education with technology.

I found such a role when previously working at Rovio Learning, the entertainment company behind the Angry Birds. However I joined Sanoma for two reasons: to me it is important that learning is the company’s core business and secondly I see potential for further international growth in learning. Therefore, Sanoma Learning feels like a perfect fit for me.

What’s your role at Sanoma Learning?

My role as one of the Business Technology Consultants is to help business units to grow in digital learning by providing building blocks for the current and the future applications. This I do by leading some co-development initiatives like Edubase (learning engine), Identity & Access Management, and later this year Learning Analytics.

How does this bring value to our ways of working?

One of the many strengths of this company is the deep understanding of education including the local differences. Through our co-development program we identify and build common, scalable technology.  This helps us to develop higher quality solutions, faster and at lower cost and also to share learnings across our footprint which includes some of the World’s best education systems. If we are able to take co-development to the next level, we are going to create more Bingels in the future.

What are your first impressions of working with us?

I really enjoy my work. Like today, when I had meetings with Business Technology teams from Van In (Belgium) and Sanoma Utbildning (Sweden). Not only are they inspiring people to work with, I really admire the drive and passion they have for learning and technology. With teams like these, the co-development agenda will succeed.

Where do you think we stand on the digital transformation?

The future of our business seems bright yet increasingly complex. I am confident that we are tackling the right questions. We’re clearly a frontrunner on the digital transformation, which is going to be a long journey. Our deep understanding of learning combined with our technology capabilities make us strong. Further building on our co-development abilities will prepare us better for the future, by enabling us to make better products faster.

Thanks for the feedback Heikki. I believe enabling our learning methods with technology to help our customers is the way forward.  The co-development agenda is a great way for us to scale investments, skills and learnings as we progress.

P.S. Leicester City has a five point lead at the top of the Premier League.  Go Foxes!

From the makers of bingel: yes we diddit!

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Vicky Adriaensen

This is Vicky Adriaensen, Business Unit Manager Flanders at Van In

This week I caught up with Vicky Adriaensen who was recently appointed into the new role of Business Unit Manager Flanders, combining both primary and secondary education at Van In. I’m a big supporter of Vicky and admire her sharp focus on the business and inspiring positive energy and enthusiasm – a really great attitude and team leader!

The huge success of bingel in Flanders is well known. It’s used in about 80% of primary schools with more than 500 m exercises completed since it was launched in 2011. Bingel helps to engage pupils with learning, enable good learning outcomes and support the workflow of the teacher. It’s also been good for business and has helped us to grow our sales and market share in primary education. In the meantime we’ve scaled bingel further to Sweden, Finland and Wallonia. It has been a major investment for Sanoma Learning to make, but thankfully a good one.

In the meantime bingel has inspired us to launch a new learning platform in secondary education called diddit. This has been one of the reasons for us to ask Vicky to lead both primary and secondary education units in Flanders. I was especially interested to hear more about diddit from Vicky.

diddit_campagnebeeld

This is not Vicky Adriaensen.

Tell us about your background and new role Vicky

“I’m proud to have been part of the primary education team in Flanders when we were launching bingel and more recently the secondary education team as we have been launching diddit. Since 1 February I now have the opportunity to work with both excellent teams, helping to guide teachers as they take their next steps in the transformation. We share many common opportunities and challenges in the two departments – in creating new learning methods and helping teachers to use them and taking a lead on the digital transformation. It’s great to be able to work on these things together and get the maximum synergies along the way.”

We all know about bingel in primary education, tell us about diddit in secondary education.

“The bingel success story inspired us to do something similar for secondary education. We adapted the approach to fit the different needs of this age group, including a more mature and personalisable look & feel. We believe we have created the perfect successor for pupils stepping into secondary education, starting with the first grade. It offers the possibility for teachers to easily differentiate and personalise their education, to evaluate digitally and find lots of inspiration both inside and outside the classroom. Pupils can make exercises endlessly on an adapted level, get adapted feedback and also get rewarded by credits for fun and short games.”

screenstudent

 

What do our customers like about it?

“The killer argument for the teacher is definitely the fact that it helps them differentiate very easily. The fact that after a test you can automatically generate personalised tasks for every pupil by just pushing one button, is a great time saver for them. Also they are now able to see exactly what students are doing and how they are performing, and of course all input is corrected automatically. Also the fact that they can find everything in one spot is considered very practical. Students use it extensively to prepare for exams and according to them, it works!”

screenteacher

Do you consider the launch a success?

“Absolutely! Since the last reform in secondary education in Flanders five years ago our market share has been under pressure. Recently, although there wasn’t a specific curriculum “trigger”, we noticed that teachers and pupils were looking for something new from the market. We took the initiative with diddit creating a “big bang” connected with a whole set of new methods. For the first time in five years we managed to grow again and position ourselves as true digital leaders in the secondary education market as well. With more than 30.000 users in the first few months we definitely have the kick-start we were hoping for.”

What’s coming this year?

“On the customer side it’s clear: go for even more users and more usage! From the development perspective we will be expanding the content to cover the next grades and listening very carefully to customer feedback to make sure the user experience of the platform is super friendly and simple.”

Respect!

Thanks for the feedback on this Vicky. I truly hope that diddit will delight pupils and teachers in secondary education just as bingel has done in primary education. Good luck to you and the teams in making it happen. Respect!

Sexiest Job at Sanoma (re-visited): Edtech Developer

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edtechdeveloper

‘Sexiest Job at Sanoma: Data Scientist’ including an interview with Sanoma’s Queen of the Quants, Ulla Kruhse-Lehtonen, was one of my first blogposts and also the best read posting so far. I guess a lot of people are searching for “Sanoma” or “data scientist” :-).

Data scientists definitely have some of the sexiest jobs at Sanoma. However, and I might be a little biased, I think that the sexiest jobs these days are those of the edtech developers, led by Sanoma Learning’s Minister of Education Technology, Arnoud Klerkx.

Our team believes that edtech has the potential to bring many benefits to education

Supercharging the teacher as the killer app in education

We believe the teacher is the killer app in education and that edtech can supercharge her as a professional. For example by automating processes such as preparing lessons, checking homework, and giving insights into the learning of individual pupils. Edtech can help to channel the time and energy of the teacher to her relationship with her pupils.

Helping to motivate pupils to achieve their potential

With edtech we can personalize learning pathways for pupils, and engage them in new ways such as gamification and social thereby helping to develop the talents of each child.

Giving insights to other stakeholders

We can give better insights to parents into how their children are progressing and help headmasters to better evaluate school performance. Taxpayers will get new insights that will support them in assessing value. This should help us to create a better learning experience in the future.

Edtech is booming

Encouraged by these opportunities, edtech markets are starting to take off. IBIS Capital estimates that today there are more than 3000 e-learning companies in Europe alone. Last year, industry analysts estimate that more than $ 2 bn was invested in edtech venturing. And deals such as LinkedIn’s acquisition of Lynda.com for $ 1.5 bn have hit the headlines. Learn Capital estimates total market capitalization as a percentage of global annual spend at 2% for education companies compared with about 81% for media & entertainment and 80% for healthcare. They believe we are at the beginning of a huge wave of investment in edtech. Now is a good time to be a part of the industry.

The business of progress

Overall this is a truly exciting space to work in. Imagine you are a talented young developer today. Would it rock your boat to create technology that will help schoolkids to develop their talents and fulfil their potential? To play a role in helping to shape the next generation and have the chance of contributing to building a more fulfilled, happier, healthier and more prosperous society?

This is what excites me about the edtech space and why I think the edtech developers at Sanoma Learning have some of the sexiest jobs these days. Looking forward >>.