Wednesday, January 2, 2019

How Much Money In That Edusector?!!

When you're starting to wonder why so many people are interested in education, even though they have no training, experience, or apparent deep interest in education, it's helpful to see some numbers.

Like 2,600,000,000.

Reportsnreports is an international outfit that provides "market research reports to industries, individuals, and organizations to accelerate decision making process." They offer a library of over a half million reports with coverage of at least 30,000 niche markets. They've got reports on negative pressure wound therapy growth and the zirconium dioxide market. And they pay an average salary of $83K. So this is not some guy writing market reports in his garage.

Reportsnreports has released a report on the "Education and Learning Analytics Market." $2.6 billion is how much money they reckoned was in that sector for 2018. And that's peanuts compared to their projection for 2023, when they figure the sector will involved $7.1 billion.

That's $7,100,000,000.

Analytics are expected to grow in connection with the growth of computer-driven personalized [sic] learning, as well as the growing business of simply collecting and connecting data from education, plus the continued use of the Big Standardized Tests. The list of "key players" from the US includes familiar name like Microsoft and Oracle and SAS as well as lesser-known players like Alteryx and Schoology and iSpring.

So any time someone comes into your country or state or town or school to all about how awesome it would be to wire up your students and help them get a super-duper education powered by super-duper analytics, remember-- the people pushing this stuff may be sincere and may think this stuff will help teach students, but they have probably also noticed that there is just a giant mountain of money to be made in the field of education. analytics and they are just trying to cash in and gather a chunk of it.

Whenever someone is pitching the Next Big Thing that will save education , it's always important to follow the money, particularly in the 21st century, because there is just so very much money involved.

3 comments:

  1. Whenever someone is pitching the Next Big Thing that will save education, ask them to name the Last Big Thing that saved education.

    No program, no policy, no product, no pedagogy, no standards, no curriculum, no test, and no promise can help marginal or struggling students who do not attend school regularly, do not pay attention and work hard when they are there, or do not care to succeed. Those who follow this simple prescription are successful everywhere.

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    1. On the other hand, there are standards (CCSS) and policies (test-and-punish) and curricula constrained by said policies that can demotivate, bore, and otherwise drive marginal students into losing interest in school.

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    2. So the focus needs to be on why they don't attend regularly, pay attention and work hard, and don't seem to care about succeeding, and to see what can be done to change that, because there are things that can be done.

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