My edSurge story: Where’s the Money, Jack?

Last year Tony Wan at edSurge asked me to write a story about the London edtech scene. It took a little while to finalise and my story went live at the same time as I was on a panel discussing start-up funding with members of the London Educational Games Meetup Group (LEGup). LEGup is organised […]

10 years ago Education More

Chris Whittle – third time lucky?

Education can be an unforgiving lover, as education entrepreneur Christopher Whittle knows only too well. His latest venture ‘Avenues – The World School’ a nascent chain of for-profit international private schools – comes after bruising encounters with his first education start-up, the sponsored media business Channel 1 News (sold in 1994) and his more high-profile […]

10 years ago Education More

Elite universities schooled?

Chris Whittle’s new venture Avenues – The World School may be an object business lesson for the elite university sector. Yale recently invested $600m to expand its undergraduate intake by 15% or by around 800 students. At $750k per student this is rather expensive even when you take into account they had to build two […]

10 years ago Education More

Problems with US for-profit colleges aren’t unique

The Harkin report into US for-profit colleges makes for uncomfortable reading and for those of you who want the details you can download a copy at http://bit.ly/T2dnve. I have watched this investigation from afar, which may seem odd as ‘I don’t have a dog in this fight’. Well, not directly, but I work with people […]

10 years ago Education More

The MOOCs are coming!

Hype in education has reached incredibly massive, extraordinary proportions! Nowhere is this more apparent than in the coverage and debate about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Why is the HE sector so atwitter about MOOCs? HE is a massive and rapidly growing international business sector where demand outstrips supply. Like any market this demand has […]

10 years ago Education More

What’s wrong with the UK education start-up scene?

In the last six months we have had the successful launch of StartUp Weekend edu and seem some interesting companies at the start-up competition held at Learning Without Frontiers. These show there is plenty of innovation in the UK educational start-up scene, but sadly this isn’t matched by much enthusiasm from incubators or investors.   […]

11 years ago Education More

Learning Without Frontiers

Not as big or well known as BETT, LWF (originally Handheld Learning) has become a serious thought leadership event in the international edu tech calendar.   LWF this year had speakers ranging from Noam Chomsky (on video) and Lord Puttnam (film director and edu ‘inspirator’) through Ray Kurzweil (‘rightful heir to Thomas Edison’), Mark Surman […]

11 years ago Education More

2tor (now 2U) breaks new ground in elite online higher education

2tor (or tutor it’s supposed to be pronounced in the US) is a very exciting higher education startup and I was fortunate to have a long chat with Jeremy Johnson, 2tor’s Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer. So why are 2tor so hot? Well partly because one of the founders is  John Katzman (founder of Princeton Review), […]

11 years ago Education More

BETT 2013 @ ExCel – has Emap gone mad?

Visitors to BETT 2012 have a year to recover, but for exhibitors there is no respite with most having already been offered a ‘deal’ to sign up for 2013 when for the first time BETT will be held at ExCel in Docklands.   Emap’s minions will of course be espousing a myriad of benefits at […]

11 years ago Education More

The Goddess of English

It may be the lingua franca of business and, increasingly education, but just how important is English? There are 2 billion people expected to speak English by 2020, but even these numbers don’t show just how vital English has become to some groups. For example in Bankra, Northern India, Angrezi Devi is the Goddess of […]

11 years ago Education More