Access to knowledge and education through tech
A newsletter around tech, entrepreneurship, and early-stage startups with insights and analysis.
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During this unprecedented year, every government and school in the world has become an EdTech provider overnight. I have always been excited about the tremendous potential of technology to increase access to knowledge and education. There are two major goals we’re striving towards:
Availability: Making great education available to more people - according to UNESCO, 264M children are not enrolled in any type of schooling, and in developed countries access to high-quality education varies highly based on socioeconomic backgrounds and other factors.
Improvement: Making education even better for people that already have access to some education.
Technology will contribute tremendously to both and solving these problems should be the top priority for exceptional people looking to innovate. For availability, as access to the internet increases and the cost of devices reduces, more of the world’s population will have access to the same information. Meanwhile, new technologies are significantly improving the way we learn in more developed parts of the world. We have a long way to go, which is why EdTech is set on a path of tremendous growth over the next decade. So far this year, 4.1B USD was invested in EdTech (that’s 1.5B more than the same period last year).
At Antler, we’re incredibly excited to identify and support the growth of high potential EdTech startups like Eskwelabs, an online data upskilling school, and Enlight Ed, which offers an intelligent tutoring system to help students understand STEM subjects. Young people are the world’s greatest resource, and EdTech innovation can be instrumental in helping them reach their full potential. If you know other great founders that are excited to innovate in this area encourage them to apply at www.antler.co or reach out to me/us.
Additionally, we just launched the Antler Launch Academy, our own free online learning platform for aspiring entrepreneurs, aiming to provide a playbook to aspiring entrepreneurs and corporates on how to innovate and scale effectively based on working with 1000s of founders across the globe.
Magnus Grimeland
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Antler
📚Thought-provoking articles about challenges, opportunities, and advancements in EdTech
Harvard and EdX lead the world in EdTech (The New Yorker) - When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the world’s educational institutions were challenged to adapt and continue serving their students via e-learning. Harvard Professor David Malan was ahead of the curve. His famously-engaging, ultra high production-value CS50 introductory computer science course offers a glimpse of how post-COVID, education won’t be the same. It will be better: Link
A Free World Class Education for Anyone Everywhere (NPR) - This bold mission is what drove founder Sal Khan to quit a lucrative hedge fund job and establish the non-profit Khan Academy. Their free platform allowing students to learn content via video lectures and get immediate feedback after working on exercises is at the cutting edge of using software to improve human potential, with 30M users/month and growing: Link
Fiveable Provides Social Learning for US High School Students (Fiveable) - Virtual learning has certain limitations, including dependence on self-directed study and less personalized and effective teacher-student interaction. Fiveable’s platform is democratizing access to Advanced Placement exams with unique social elements that bring students together such that they can support one another academically and personally: Link
Embibe’s AI-Driven EdTech Delivers Personalized Learning that Improves Outcomes (Antler) - Antler recently launched our Antler VC cast podcast to share stories of exceptional people who are playing key roles in building and shaping the next wave of tech. Aditi Avasthi founded Embibe to carve out personalized learning programs for Indian students by leveraging AI and adaptive learning: Link
📢 Antler EdTech portfolio company
Here are some insights from Angela Chen, Eskewlabs’ CEO and Co-Founder, on how they are helping to upskill learners and teams in the Philippines for success in a data-driven future.
What is the mission of Eskwelabs?
Eskwelabs drives social mobility in the future of work through data skills education for workers in emerging Asia.
How do you think the COVID pandemic affected worldwide education for students? For adults trying to gain new skills for employment?
Even before the crisis, McKinsey Global Institute estimated that as many as 375 million workers—or 14 percent of the global workforce—would have to switch jobs or acquire new skills by 2030 because of automation and artificial intelligence. COVID has only accelerated the speed of digitalization, and as companies shift models overnight, the imbalances in digital talent supply and demand will exacerbate. The pandemic is highlighting that the digital divide affects education — those without access to internet or technology cannot attend online classes, but it’s the digital skills divide that will continue to widen as a result of the crisis.
How do you think education will change post-pandemic?
Great education has always been part learning and credentialing and part experience, so the challenge is how to deliver both effective learning and memorable experiences either online or with a hybrid online-offline model. The complaints about current online learning are around the lack of structure, how impersonal it is, and lack of outcome focus; these are the things we are innovating on at Eskwelabs. And as we navigated with students on adjusting our model through the crisis, we saw that COVID gave learners the unique opportunity to examine and question the education they are getting — the value, the price, and the product. In the long-run, we believe truly learners-first educators will stand-out and education will be better because of it.
What does this mean for people looking for employment?
Asia’s fast-growing economies offered millions of young people the opportunity to do better than their parents. Now that path of upward mobility is at risk. Sectors most vulnerable to automation are also some of the same sectors hurt most by the pandemic, like wholesale and retail trade, manufacturing, business services, accommodations, and food service. What we see operating in the Philippines is that COVID-impacted workers are pursuing two types of opportunities: they are turning to digital talent-marketplaces to work as freelancers, or they are turning to micro-entrepreneurship activities like online reselling. Democratizing skills needed in the tech sector can provide a glimmer of hope for this "lockdown generation."
🎓 Book Recommendation
The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? In his thought-provoking new book, philosopher Michael Sandel exposes the impossibility of a true meritocracy with perfect equality of opportunity, suggesting that even such a system with equality of opportunity at the starting line would legitimate whatever inequalities follow as natural products of innate differences in talent and virtue. Decrying educational credentialism as “the last acceptable prejudice,” Sandel exhorts us to repair social divisions by respecting the dignity of work at all levels, not only work that requires a brand name, 4-year university degree: Link
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