Rupert Murdoch, Big Man on Campus?
Just seven months after his surprising expansion into reading, writing and arithmetic with the $360-million acquisition of Wireless Generation, News Corp.'s chairman and CEO seems intent on making the grade in what could be the future of education -- economized, customized, data-driven digitized instruction.
Potentially at stake: hundreds of billions of dollars.
“We have the resources to play and do what we need,” said Joel Klein, the innovative former New York City schools chief now on News Corp.'s board and CEO of Murdoch’s Education Division.
And Klein (below) is seriously scouting more acquisitions, though he is stingy with details. “We’ll make strategic investments," he said. "And the [News Corp.] board has said if these make sense, we can move forward on them.”
In plunging into the education last November, Murdoch moved in typical fashion -- big, splashy and disruptive.
First, he wooed Klein -- one of public education’s most high-profile administrators, reformists and technology-advocates. Soon after, he purchased Wireless Generation, a leading-edge ed-tech company based in Brooklyn.
Kindergarten-through-12th grade “is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching,” Murdoch said at the time.
The media mogul's ambitions may well be the clearest and most optimistic bellwether yet of a coming paradigm-shift in education.
The nation’s failing schools, eroded competitiveness and fiscal crisis form a perfect storm of factors that true believers hope will usher in an age of digitally enabled individualized learning.
They envision public school classes where slow, fast and average students are each digitally tracked, measured, categorized and fitted for a customized curriculum. Gone will be the paper notebooks, replaced by digital tablets and laptops.
Teachers, untethered from the blackboard, test-grading and lesson-planning, would be empowered to interact strategically with the class, his or her own performance subject to digital assessment.
“We are convinced that in the next years we can build platforms with digital content and learning profiles,” Tom Vander Ark, CEO of Open Education Solutions and a partner of ed-venture fund Learn Capital, told TheWrap. “These platforms can be customized to learning, and put in teachers’ hands, really powerful new tools.”
Investors’ growing interest in education is another indication of the dawning era. Vander Ark, who was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s first executive director for education, launched the first fund dedicated to education three years ago. Now, he told TheWrap, private equity dealmakers and venture capitalists are pouring into the field.
This week, for example, the first ever Goldman Sachs-Stanford University Global Education Conference is convening worldwide education leaders. The purpose, says the invitation: “to discuss how innovation, globalization, regulation and technology are impacting education, and how the public and private sectors can work together … Education appears to be at a fundamental inflection point.”
And another big player also recently has joined the tech-ed fray.
