He notes, however, that most of the investment went to organizational tools, such as learning management systems and data collection and analysis packages, rather than to learning tools for K-12 students to use in the classroom.
The reason for this is that organizational tools are used at the administration level, by the people who have purchasing power, while learning tools are used by teachers, who often don’t have much purchasing power.
Though Devlin suggests that “some form of government incentives” will likely be necessary to attract investors to companies that make learning tools, this represents a largely untapped area with huge potential impact in the coming years.
Professional development products
One of the most famous pivots of the educational technology world came in 2013, when Sebastian Thrun announced that his startup Udacity would switch its focus from making education free and accessible to everyone to providing technology training for the corporate market.
This move has been a success—Udacity now partners with a number of technology companies to offer subscription-based online professional development. Last year, Udacity received $35 million in funding to support its venture.
Several other education technology companies have also targeted the corporate training market, including massive open online course provider Coursera, which now offers a variety of course sequences (called Specializations) in areas ranging from content marketing to data science.
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