When Robert Ubell first applied for a job at a university's online program back in the late ’90s, he had no experience with online education. But then again, hardly anyone else did either.
First of all, the web was still relatively new back then (something like the way AI chatbots are new today), and only a few colleges and universities were even trying to deliver courses on it. Ubell’s experience was in academic publishing, and he had recently finished a stint as the American publisher of Nature magazine and was looking for something different. He happened to have some friends at Stanford University who had shown him what the university was doing using the web to train workers at local factories and high-tech businesses, and he was intrigued by the potential.
So when he saw that Stevens Institute of Technology had an opening to build online programs, he applied, citing the weekend he spent observing Stanford’s program.
“That was my only background, my only experience,” he says, “and I got the job.”
And as at many college campuses at the time, Ubell faced resistance from the faculty.
“Professors were totally opposed,” he says, fearing that the quality would never be as good as in-person teaching.
One big challenge that has long faced online learning is who will pay the costs of building something new, like a virtual campus.
Ubell points to philanthropic foundations as key to helping many colleges, including Stevens, take their first steps into online offerings.
And it turns out that the most successful teachers in the new online format weren’t ones who were the best with computers or the most techy, says Frank Mayadas, who spent 17 years at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation giving out grants hoping to spark adoptions of online learning.
“It was the faculty who had a great conviction to be good teachers who were going to be good no matter how they did it,” says Mayadas. “If they were good in the classroom, they were usually good online.”
We dig into the bumpy history of online higher education on this week’s EdSurge Podcast. And we hear what advice online pioneers have for those trying the latest classroom innovations.
An edtech founder shares some of his purposes and motivation for helping others.
GUEST COLUMN | by Adrián Ridner
Among the approximately41 million Americans with some college credit but no degree, about 40% are estimated to be first-generation students. As a first-generation college student myself and an immigrant from Latin America, I understand the unique struggles first-generation students face. Like many, I experienced economic hardship while earning my degree. Plus, the challenges associated with acclimating to a new culture, overcoming language barriers and simply navigating the higher education system made my college experience dramatically different than it was for my peers.
‘…the challenges associated with acclimating to a new culture, overcoming language barriers and simply navigating the higher education system made my college experience dramatically different…’
Unique Challenges
According to the Center for First-Generation Student Success, a first-generation student is one whose parents did not complete a four-year college or university degree — even if other family members have. As first-generation students, we face unique challenges, including financial constraints, lack of academic support, and other barriers that impede our ability to complete a degree. With such an enormous population dropping out of college, whether struggling from self-doubt, poor grades or being the first in the family to pursue higher education, the need for targeted educational pathways and support systems for all students to obtain a degree is critical to ensure economic mobility for our country.
Many who started down the path of higher education without completing their degrees are left with the burden of debt without the benefit of a credential. I recognize the challenges first-generation students face, having experienced the struggles of navigating an educational system that wasn’t built with students like us in mind.
Creating Opportunities
This personal experience has fueled my commitment to democratize education and create opportunities for learners who, like I once did, find themselves outside the traditional system. Today, my company is a platform dedicated to providing accessible, affordable and flexible education for all—especially those who need it most. Our goal is to help learners open the door to the life-changing impact of education.
Not only can traditional educational pathways often leave students of color and those from historically underserved populations behind, but they also can reinforce systemic inequities and limit opportunities for upward mobility. First-generation students often live in rural areas, where there may be fewer community and school resources than in urban areas which tend to receive more funding. It also may come as a surprise that more than 40% of full-time students and more than 74% of part-time college students need to work while pursuing their education.
In addition to work, they also may be juggling childcare responsibilities; one in four undergraduate students have children. Even with financial aid to help offset the cost of tuition, those who most need the support often fall short, especially among students with more family responsibilities or those from historically underserved populations. The need for non-traditional educational options has never been more urgent, and within this context, we must create innovative solutions to provide alternative pathways to success.
Making Education Accessible
One example is the Keys to College initiative, which offers flexible on-ramps and pathways for students to earn an affordable degree at a fraction of the cost of traditional tuition. This initiative is built on the College Saver program, which offers low-cost college credits that transfer to more than 1,200 universities. By offering multiple pathways to degree completion – including full and partial – this approach has made education accessible to diverse learners, breaking down barriers that have long prevented them from achieving academic success.
The College Saver program includes the most extensive American Council on Education (ACE) online library, featuring more than 220 college or graduate level courses. Backed by decades of learning science research, the curriculum is designed to be engaging, supportive and personalized, helping learners build the confidence they need to succeed.
‘Backed by decades of learning science research, the curriculum is designed to be engaging, supportive and personalized, helping learners build the confidence they need to succeed.’
The impact of the College Saver program has been profound. To date, the program has saved students more than $270 million in tuition costs and empowered thousands of learners to earn over 400,000 college credits. These are not just numbers—they represent breakthrough moments for individuals who may have struggled academically or financially to further their education.
Take, for instance, Tiaka Hyatt-Geter, a San Francisco Bay Area single mom of three kids and an HR analyst, who completed her college degree while balancing work and family responsibilities. Her success is a testament to the life-changing potential of affordable and flexible education. Or, the son of migrant workers who spent his youth in Stockton, California balancing school with working in the fields. Like me, he is the first in his family to complete a college degree and has plans to continue his education by earning a master’s degree. Because of his determination and with the support of my company’s flexible online College Saver course library, he could continue his education while working and caring for his four-year-old son.
Transformative for Many
This program has been transformative for many, particularly women and people of color. Among a subset of College Saver students surveyed that received additional coaching support from Study.com tutors, 68% of graduates are women, and 77% identify as non-white. The findings underscore that technology can serve as a bridge to further education, but it can’t replace the importance of personal connection with a coach to provide motivation, accountability and support. Moreover, 67% of graduates report income growth, and 87% report increased confidence and skills in the job market. One such graduate, a working mother from the San Francisco Bay area, said the program helped her achieve her dreams without sacrificing her family’s well-being.
My company has always been guided by a mission to ensure that all learners, especially first-generation and non-traditional students, have access to the life-changing impact of education. As we look to the future, our vision is to continue innovating and scaling our efforts to provide alternative educational pathways that build a more diverse and inclusive workforce.
Together with community-based organizations and higher education institutions, we can fuel initiatives like Keys to College that offer on-ramps to success for all learners, regardless of where they start, to ensure everyone has the opportunity to achieve their full potential.
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Adrián Ridner is CEO and Co-Founder of Study.com, a leading online learning platform helping over 30 million learners and educators monthly, on a mission to open the door to the life-changing impact of education for all. Connect with Adrián on LinkedIn.
One of the country’s richest nonprofits focused on online education has been giving out grants for more than a year. But so far, the group, known as Axim Collaborative, has done so slowly — and pretty quietly.
“There has been little buzz about them in digital learning circles,” says Russ Poulin, executive director of WCET, a nonprofit focused on digital learning in higher education. “They are not absent from the conversation, but their name is not raised very often.”
Late last month, an article in the online course review site Class Central put it more starkly, calling the promise of the nonprofit “hollow.” The op-ed, by longtime online education watcher Dhawal Shah, noted that according to the group’s most recent tax return, Axim is sitting on $735 million and had expenses of just $9 million in tax year 2023, with $15 million in revenue from investment income. “Instead of being an innovator, Axim Collaborative seems to be a non-entity in the edtech space, its promises of innovation and equity advancement largely unfulfilled,” Shah wrote.
The group was formed with the money made when Harvard University and MIT sold their edX online platform to for-profit company 2U in 2021 for about $800 million. At the time many online learning leaders criticized the move, since edX had long touted its nonprofit status as differentiating it from competitors like Coursera. The purchase did not end up working out as planned for 2U, which this summer filed for bankruptcy.
So what is Axim investing in? And what are its future plans?
EdSurge reached out to Axim’s CEO, Stephanie Khurana, to get an update.
Not surprisingly, she pushed back on the idea that the group is not doing much.
“We’ve launched 18 partnerships over the past year,” she says, noting that many grants Axim has awarded were issued since its most recent tax return was filed. “It’s a start, and it’s seeding a lot of innovations. And that to me is very powerful.”
One of the projects she says she is most proud of is Axim’s work with HBCUv, a collaboration by several historically Black colleges to create a shared technology platform and framework to share online courses across their campuses. While money was part of that, Khurana says she is also proud of the work her group did helping set up a course-sharing framework. Axim also plans to help with “incorporating student success metrics in the platform itself,” she says, “so people can see where they might be able to support students with different kinds of advising and different kinds of student supports.”
The example embodies the group’s philosophy of trying to provide expertise and convening power, rather than just cash, to help promising ideas scale to support underserved learners in higher education.
Listening Tour
When EdSurge talked with Khurana last year, she stressed that her first step would be to listen and learn across the online learning community to see where the group could best make a difference.
One thing that struck her as she did that, she says, is “hearing what barriers students are facing, and what's keeping them from persisting through their programs and finding jobs that match with their skills and being able to actually realize better outcomes.”
Grant amounts the group has given out so far range from around $500,000 for what she called “demonstration projects” to as much as $3 million.
Artificial intelligence has emerged as a key focus of Axim’s work, though Khurana says the group is treading gingerly.
“We are looking very carefully at how and where AI is beneficial, and where it might be problematic, especially for these underserved learners,” she says. “And so trying to be clear-eyed about what those possibilities are, and then bring to bear the most promising opportunities for the students and institutions that we're supporting.”
One specific AI project the group has supported is a collaboration between Axim, Campus Evolve, University of Central Florida and Indiana Tech to explore research-based approaches to using AI to improve student advising. “They're developing an AI tool to have a student-facing approach to understanding, ‘What are my academic resources? What are career-based resources?,’” she says. “A lot of times those are hard to discern.”
Another key work of Axim involves keeping up an old system rather than starting new ones. The Axim Collaborative manages the Open edX platform, the open-source system that hosts edX courses and can also be used by any institution with the tech know-how and the computer servers to run it. The platform is used by thousands of colleges and organizations around the world, including a growing number of governments, who use it to offer online courses.
Anant Agarwal, who helped found edX and now works at 2U to coordinate its use, is also on a technical committee for Open edX.
He says the structure of supporting Open edX through Axim is modeled on the way the Linux open-source operating system is managed.
While edX continues to rely on the platform, the software is community-run. “There has to be somebody that maintains the repositories, maintains the release schedule and provides funding for certain projects,” Agarwal says. And that group is now Axim.
When the war in Ukraine broke out, Agarwal says, the country “turned on a dime and the universities and schools started offering courses on Open edX.”
Poulin, of WCET, says that it’s too early to say whether Axim’s model is working.
“While their profile and impact may not be great to this point, I am willing to give startups some runway time to determine if they will take off,” he says, noting that “Axim is, essentially, still a startup.”
His advice: “A creative, philanthropic organization should take some risks if they are working in the ‘innovation’ sphere. We learn as much from failures as successes.”
For Khurana, Axim’s CEO, the goal is not to find a magic answer to deep-seated problems facing higher education.
“I know some people want something that will be a silver bullet,” she says. “And I think it's just hard to come by in a space where there's a lot of different ways to solve problems. Starting with people on the ground who are doing the work — [with] humility — is probably one of the best ways to seed innovations and to start.”
Cignition delivers high-impact K-12 virtual tutoring, led by experienced educators who produce proven, repeatable results in student success. Tutors complete internal assessments, broken down by grade level, to validate their qualifications. Using classroom data, students are initially matched for tutoring. Teachers and tutors then utilize data from mastery progress, surveys, and online activities to continuously track and enhance student progress within the established groups.
Cignition’s research-based approach focuses on data-informed instruction and collaborative learning, encouraging student-to-student interaction to build deep conceptual understanding. Instead of the traditional model of learning through repetition, Cignition tutors focus on the conceptual goals of each topic. Teachers tell Cignition they can see the change in their students’ engagement and participation after receiving tutoring.
Making dashboards and tools available to help tutors understand each student’s most immediate needs also contributes to the success of the thousands of virtual tutoring sessions delivered by Cignition. Research on Cignition’s learning model, backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates and Overdeck Family Foundations, shows an effect size indicating dramatic student growth. The amount of growth shown in the study suggests that students complementing their learning with a year of Cignition tutoring would advance by up to two years’ learning gain with their robust intervention model.
In addition to the collaborative learning model, Cignition is committed to connecting students with certified educators who have experience crafting personalized learning experiences. Keeping instruction inquiry-focused empowers students to build academic confidence and critical 21st-century skills.
For these reasons and more, Cignition was named “Best Collaborative Learning Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more.
Last week, 2U, a pioneer of the so-called Online Program Management (OPM) model for helping colleges run online degree programs, announced that it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy with a “prepackaged” deal arising from prior negotiation with creditors.
The company was an edtech “unicorn” at its height — worth billions — and characterized as a “giant” in the space.
But after a rocky few years, a bankruptcy filing wasn’t all that surprising.
Nevertheless, it raises the question: Was that announcement a rebuke of the entire OPM model — or just the story of one troubled company?
The answer may have consequences for the future of online higher ed, since OPMs were once viewed both as a winning strategy for universities to make money by increasing enrollments and as a pathway to expand access to advanced learning for students who wouldn’t or couldn’t participate on campus.
A Giant Falls
In the early days of 2U, the company worked with selective institutions with elite reputations to create online graduate programs that charged high tuition rates. In exchange, 2U took a large share of tuition revenue. Then the company shifted to offering universities “stackable” options instead of its full package of services, ostensibly to help lower tuition.
The COVID-19 pandemic’s forced experiment in emergency remote instruction prompted more colleges to seek support from outside companies like 2U to create more-permanent online learning options, argued Robert Ubell, vice dean emeritus of online learning at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, in 2021 in a column for EdSurge. Yet he suggested that OPMs were “merely a stopgap therapy” for “colleges with insufficient digital infrastructure,” recommending that institutions seek more sustainable ways to grow their online programs.
OPMs have come under scrutiny in recent years, particularly for tuition-sharing contracts that critics say encourage predatory marketing practices and swell student loan debt. A 2019 report from the Century Foundation, called “Dear Colleges: Take Control of Your Online Courses,” urged institutions to turn away from outsourced programs. New regulations were expected for the industry, but they have been delayed. In the middle of July, the U.S. Department of Education proposed regulations to increase oversight over distance education programs, including requiring additional reporting to better enable the government to monitor student outcomes.
According to 2U, the Chapter 11 process started by its recent filing won’t disrupt operations. The deal will eliminate half of 2U’s debt, give the company more time to pay back loans and provide an additional $110 million in financing, according to terms. In a release, 2U said it expects the process to last only a couple of months.
Some observers have suggested that 2U’s filing was squarely the result of an overstretched company.
Edtech commentator Phil Hill argues that the filing was a predictable result of the company’s balance sheet. He also argues that the pre-packaged deal defused the “debt bomb” that 2U held, giving them a chance to bounce back.
But other experts suggest that colleges are increasingly turning to alternative models, such as “anti-OPMs,” for their online programs. In theory, these models allow colleges to outsource building online programs while ultimately working to run the programs themselves, thereby helping universities become “self-sufficient.”
The idea that online programs run by external vendors serve as “cash cows” for universities hasn’t worked, argued Emily Ravenwood, manager of academic technology consultants at the University of Michigan, in 2021 in an essay for EdSurge. And she also called the approach “pedagogically bankrupt,” writing:
“Once we stop allowing higher enrollment to be the driving force behind online programs, what do we let drive development? I would argue that we need to start with our institutional missions and goals. Who are the communities we serve and draw our students from? What do they need in order to fully partake of our offerings? What can technology add to our school’s mission? If we start with these questions, a very different and far more diversified approach to online learning may emerge. We’ve already seen some first steps in this direction, from a few schools; let us continue that way.”
Since 2U works with some 260 colleges and universities, its ultimate fate will likely play a big role in the future of the OPM model.
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