Spark Plug #13: Paradox of Access to Knowledge
Stuff worth sharing for research and learning technologists
Hello people of the world! 👋
I got some really sad news last week. One of my favorite dataviz tools is closing down this fall 😭. Workbench was an amazing data tabulation tool, you could scrape tabled data from almost any website and even collect tweets, build a workflow and do some analysis. It’s super intuitive and easy to use. The positive is that the code is open source, so if you want to set it up on your own machine and have good enough coding skills, you will still be able to do it. Workbench is AGPL-3 licensed, open-source software; and you can also follow these Kubernetes installation scripts.
A huge re-emerging theme these days is access to education, and what I came to realize as the 😱paradox of access to education🤯. Every month, you’ll hear of at least 2 startups that raise money to focus on reskilling, upskilling, offering micro and nanodegrees, alternatives to universities and some even going as far as replacing HE degrees altogether. Their mission, and they truly believe that they are achieving it, is increasing access to learning.
👩🏻💻UpGrad raised $185 million in new funding at a post-money valuation of $1.2 billion. Based out of India, upGrad offers HE-level courses worldwide.
👩🏻💻Smashcut also partners with universities to deliver online courses (visual and media arts, including gaming), and just raised $7 million from Pearson Ventures. Pearson Ventures previously invested in several other discipline-focused online learning platforms, like Springboard, Holberton School, Knowledge to Practice, which support software engineering and medical.
👩🏻💻Emeritus, the Singapore-based platform that works with HE to deliver online courses, has raised $650 million in funding from a series of prominent investors including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Think about it, just last week, more than 800 million dollars have gone into online course delivery platforms💰💸. Each of these claims millions of users and high completion rates. On upGrad’s front page for example, the completion rate is listed as 87%. That’s as good as it gets. Previously I talked about coursera with 77 million users going public, and edX with 24 million in the process of being acquired by 2U.
The market and money moves are signalling the great edtech promise to increasing access, but is the reality different? Mandated online teaching during lockdowns highlighted major drawbacks to this assumption.
💁🏻♀️On the one hand, some argue that not everyone can come on campus to attend lectures. 🙋🏻♀️But on the other hand, there is increasing evidence that non-traditional learners actually cannot afford a laptop or a smartphone, so coming on campus will, in fact, increase access to whatever they need to complete their courses. In the US, a quarter of adults with annual household incomes below $30,000 do not own a smartphone, 43% don’t have broadband, and 41% don’t have a computer.
The situation is even more abysmal in other countries. In India, for example (the country that investors have high hopes for), only 4% of the rural population has a laptop, and 14% have access to internet (2017-2018 data); just 28% of these users are female 💆🏻♀️. Before the lockdowns, going to university meant freedom, hope and more learning. Right now, imagine having to fear for your life after you walked 4 km to reach the only hill where you have a signal on your phone, so you could join your online class. Or writing your entire dissertation on a phone, forget about grammarly and writeful! Worse still: not having a plug where you can charge a device 💣.
Where are the startups that are dealing with these challenges? And what does that mean for the future of HE really?