The Online Education Market is Officially for Realz

So many of you probably saw this already but GlobalScholar, a company that could be considered a competitor to eduFire, announced today that they raised $27 million. Kudos to Peter and the rest of the gang over there as you have to be doing something right to raise that much $$$ so soon after launching. My first reaction to the news was excitement. I’ve shared my thoughts on competition before so I won’t reiterate here but let’s just say that if there ever were doubts about whether online ed is a viable market this announcement should go a long way towards putting those to bed. Some of smartest minds on the planet are getting behind online education plays and there are some very good reasons for doing that.

While I admire some of the stuff GlobalScholar has done from what I’ve seen so far their vision of the future of education and learning is quite a bit different from ours. And that’s the beautiful thing about competing…as long as your vision hasn’t been realized yet by someone else there’s absolutely no reason to fear any announcement that any one of your competitors could make.

The next couple of years are going to be incredibly fun as all of us carve out our place in this quaint little $2 trillion industry. May the best men and women win and at the end of day what’s incredibly kick ass is that regardless of who “wins” the true winners are going to be teachers and students who are going to be able to leverage technology to lift learning out of its current muck and mire and turn it into something fulfilling, fun and affordable by everyone on the planet. And when you view it through that lens there aren’t really any losers in this battle.

OK, back to work!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.