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by Nic Newman, Emerge Education
The edtech top 50 — emerging companies for higher education for 2021/22.
Higher Education edtech is a busy space and it can be hard to keep up with the innovation in the sector. At Emerge Education we want to help you cut through the noise.
Members of our Emerge HE advisory board, chaired by Mary Curnock Cook, and in partnership with Jisc, told us that keeping up to date with the best-emerging companies in edtech for HE was difficult, confusing and overwhelming. So, as a first step, we’re publishing a list of the top 50 emerging companies you should all be aware of as part of edtechX week in London 2022.
Crowdsourced from members of the HE board and more widely, we want to highlight great examples and encourage even more innovation.
We launched the top 50 with a LinkedIn Live open session chaired by Mary Curnock Cook of the Emerge HE advisory board and featuring two of the top 50’s founders — Chris Du, Ensightful, and Mads Bonde, Labster — who were interviewed to highlight best practice.
We also had the HE leader’s perspective from Ian Dunn, provost of the University of Coventry, and Nick Mount, academic director of the University of Nottingham Online (UNO). We’ll be interspersing the category maps below with some of their comments. You can watch the full session on LinkedIn.
The top 50 by category
Quick overview:
33% of these companies are from Europe but all are selling globally
They span 2011–2020 with an average age of six years
Some are bootstrapped but the highest funding achieved is $176m with an average of $38m
Between them, they have created 4,500+ jobs
Methodology:
The list is based on public and private data. It was crowdsourced and voted on by our workforce development board. Inclusion criteria in the final list included:
Breadth and quality of courses / content / pedagogy in the tool
Quality of features and capabilities
Industry visibility, innovation and impact
Strength of clients and geographic reach
Company size and growth potential
Finally, categorisation is difficult! We know that there are inevitably some overlaps. This list is by no means perfect, use the comments to tell us about companies we may have missed or can consider for next time.
The top 50 by category
Student experience
Briefly: this category has the most players and it is where there is the greatest need for innovation. Many universities were caught out by Covid and realised that they had gaps in their offering. A reliance on outdated LMSs and basic videoconferencing didn’t create engaging and impactful student experiences. We believe the future of HE is going to be hybrid and we see innovation happening across three categories: resources; delivery; support.
HE leader insights — there are two key challenges:
Integration: to avoid students having to jump around between apps on their phones, strategic engagement is needed to build a comprehensive user interface — a platform of platforms infrastructure offer — allowing students to connect and seamlessly flow between the apps.
Governance: is a challenge from both university and founder perspectives. University governance and assurance boards do not understand how edtech companies work, see risk and are fearful of paying off investments. There is also tension within the academic community. There is work to do as a sector in communicating what edtech companies are doing and how to minimise the risk. For founders, the challenge is to avoid being too influenced — and ultimately destroyed — as university seek to impose on them their entrenched perspectives based on analogue rather than digital experience.
Employment and careers
Briefly: this category is more emerging than student experience but becoming important. Universities are increasingly exposed to criticism around a failure to produce job-ready talent. There are also more and more workers needing upskilling and reskilling throughout their careers. We are seeing more employment-focused offerings that can be embedded in courses or put on top of the existing university offering.
HE leader insights –
UNO is taking a radical approach by framing all learning, from the point of learning design, within a competency framework so that students can directly map the competencies to the needs of employers and into digital badging. It has caused tension as academics resist what they see as ‘dumbing down’ and a loss of academic framing, but there is much to be gained from the perspective of the student.
For the University of Coventry, there is an acknowledgement that the basic structure of the employment market is changing and there needs to be a focus on developing skills that support resilience and planning and allow an individual to build their journey through it. This is important from a widening participation perspective and empowering people to feel like they can take control of their careers, especially when the expectation from previous generations has been to find that career with a one-off role.
New markets and research
Briefly: this category encompasses three tiers. Firstly, businesses supporting universities to more effectively attract core demographics. Secondly, solutions that are helping universities to attract new groups of students while expanding their brand. Thirdly, creating new university brands to serve new audiences. Outside of core students, one of the biggest opportunities in education is building programmes that tailor to international students. There are 200 million students in education right now and we can expect another 200 million to enter, primarily from developing markets. Campuses cannot be built fast enough and so the solution is quality online quality offerings, especially for new entrants and lifelong learners, in challenger institutions.
HE leader insights –
A really exciting space is platforms that make universities around the globe visible and available without travel, enabling a much larger range of prospective students to engage in a more profound way than just looking at a website, giving a real taste of the institution, the environment and the experiences that go with it.
The expectation of the spaces where learning happens and what those spaces should be like is evolving. The UK HE sector as a whole needs to think carefully about where it is investing. It is still investing in glossy buildings where only some students will spend their time and not investing in the same way in digital spaces where almost all students will spend time. Other countries are doing that and doing it better.
Don’t forget, you can catch up on the whole discussion on LinkedIn, and please let us know if there are companies you think are missing — we will update this list over time.
by Nic Newman, Emerge Education
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