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July 31, 2013 11:00 pm GMT
If you haven’t heard, some of the former giants of the education world haven’t been doing too well, particularly academic publishers, as evidenced by McGraw-Hill’s recent sale and Cengage’s filing for bankruptcy earlier this month. The bigs are faced with a slow death, or slow rehabilitation (with death still a possibility) by digitizing their content and services — and digitizing fast. Kaplan is one of those familiar names, as the 70-year-old test prep company recently launched its own TechStars-bankrolled “EdTech” accelerator in NYC, while its venture capital arm moves to invest in more digital education startups, like Treehouse. Today, it’s taking another smart step toward a digital future by snapping up the test prep assets and social learning platform of veteran EdTech startup, Grockit, the San Francisco-based maker of social learning apps and technologies. Why is this a smart mutual decision? Well, for starters, as Kaplan CEO Andy Rosen recently said: “Continuing to cultivate new innovations in education technology is critical to the future of the company and the industry at large.” Yup. For many of these old hands of education, developing digital tools internally will be equivalent to starting from scratch. There has been a new wave of education startups that are innovating and building mobile apps and software across the educational spectrum. There’s a ton of early-stage capital moving into education, but not so much in the series A and B range. Education startups are starting to feel the crunch and will continue to for the foreseeable future, which presents a great opportunity for what corporate acquirers there are in the education space. As a matter of fact, CB Insights laid this out for us in May, and as you can see, Kaplan ranked fourth on the list in the number of acquisitions it made over the last three years. With its acquisition of Grockit, the company is just one purchase behind Blackboard and Macmillan, and it really wouldn’t be surprising to see Kaplan continue playing the role of EdTech buyer. As long as it has the cash, there’s no reason not to continue. It’s also a smart move, because Grockit went through a significant shift of focus over the last 18 months or so. The startup first came on the scene in 2006 as a video test prep course for standardized tests, before re-launching at TC50 in 2008 as a social learning service, combining game-ification with personalized,
Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/KrsqR5EueRs/
Grockit Sells Social Learning Platform To Kaplan, Goes All-In On Learnist, Its Pinterest For Education
If you haven’t heard, some of the former giants of the education world haven’t been doing too well, particularly academic publishers, as evidenced by McGraw-Hill’s recent sale and Cengage’s filing for bankruptcy earlier this month. The bigs are faced with a slow death, or slow rehabilitation (with death still a possibility) by digitizing their content and services — and digitizing fast. Kaplan is one of those familiar names, as the 70-year-old test prep company recently launched its own TechStars-bankrolled “EdTech” accelerator in NYC, while its venture capital arm moves to invest in more digital education startups, like Treehouse. Today, it’s taking another smart step toward a digital future by snapping up the test prep assets and social learning platform of veteran EdTech startup, Grockit, the San Francisco-based maker of social learning apps and technologies. Why is this a smart mutual decision? Well, for starters, as Kaplan CEO Andy Rosen recently said: “Continuing to cultivate new innovations in education technology is critical to the future of the company and the industry at large.” Yup. For many of these old hands of education, developing digital tools internally will be equivalent to starting from scratch. There has been a new wave of education startups that are innovating and building mobile apps and software across the educational spectrum. There’s a ton of early-stage capital moving into education, but not so much in the series A and B range. Education startups are starting to feel the crunch and will continue to for the foreseeable future, which presents a great opportunity for what corporate acquirers there are in the education space. As a matter of fact, CB Insights laid this out for us in May, and as you can see, Kaplan ranked fourth on the list in the number of acquisitions it made over the last three years. With its acquisition of Grockit, the company is just one purchase behind Blackboard and Macmillan, and it really wouldn’t be surprising to see Kaplan continue playing the role of EdTech buyer. As long as it has the cash, there’s no reason not to continue. It’s also a smart move, because Grockit went through a significant shift of focus over the last 18 months or so. The startup first came on the scene in 2006 as a video test prep course for standardized tests, before re-launching at TC50 in 2008 as a social learning service, combining game-ification with personalized,Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/KrsqR5EueRs/
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