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Microsoft said in January of this year that Teams, its online collaboration platform, is used by more than 100 million students, driven largely by the COVID-19 pandemic and by many schools partially or fully distant. Now he has made another acquisition to further expand his position in the education market.
The company acquired TakeLessons, a platform for students to connect with one-on-one tutors in areas such as music lessons, language learning, academic subjects and vocational training or hobbies, and tutors to book and organize the classes they teach, both online and in person.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but we are trying to find out. San Diego-based TakeLessons had raised at least $ 20 million from a range of VCs and individuals that included LightBank, Uncork Capital, Crosslink Capital and others. TakeLessons posted a short note in the form of a Q&A confirming the deal on its site. The note says it will continue to operate, as usual, for the time being, with the intention of spreading its platform to a wider global audience.
It is not known how many active students and tutors TakeLessons had on its platform at the time of acquisition, but in some context another big player in the field of online one-on-one tutoring, GoStudent out of Europe, raised $ 244 million in funding. earlier this year which valued it at $ 1.7 billion. Others in online tutoring like Brainly are also seeing assessments in the hundreds of millions.
Considering the relatively small amount raised by TakeLessons, it is likely that this was a much lower valuation. Yet the acquisition is still the one that gives Microsoft the infrastructure and the start to build a much more aggressive game in mass market online education, potentially to take on these big platforms and others. .
TakeLessons now offers education in a wide variety of fields, including music lessons (this is where it started) to languages, academic subjects and test preparation, computer skills, to crafts and more. It has been around since 2006 and started as a platform for people to connect with local tutors for in-person classes, before moving on to online classes to complement this activity.
The pandemic has precipitated the shift to a much larger wave of these, with online tutoring apparently being the majority of what is offered on the TakeLessons platform today. These courses continue to be offered on an individual basis, but in addition students can participate in online group lessons via the startup’s Live platform.
The shift to online education that we’ve seen take hold around the world is probably the reason Microsoft sees it as a big opportunity.
In the wake of many schools around the world looking for better online learning platforms to manage distance learning during shutdowns and quarantines, educators, families and students are using (and paying for) a variety of different tools. In this context, Microsoft has strived to make Teams a leader in this area.
This was built on years of already market traction (and a number of other investments and acquisitions Microsoft has made over the years).
But it is also involved in a new upsurge in competition resulting from the current state of affairs. This includes the adoption of Google Classroom, as well as a wide variety of point solutions that are more targeted for specific purposes, such as video lessons (Zoom is important here); apps for lesson planning and homework planning; on-demand online tutorials in specific areas such as math, languages or science to enhance classroom learning experiences; and more.
The Microsoft method is to build as many features as possible into a platform to make it more persistent and less likely that users will turn to other applications, thus providing better value for money around the Microsoft offering. In other words, I would expect Microsoft to do more transactions and launch more features to cover all the services it doesn’t already provide through its educational tools.
(Example: My children’s school uses Teams for online lessons, in part because they already use Outlook for their email system. Now the school has announced that it will no longer use another third-party app. for homework scheduling; instead, teachers will assign homework and manage it through Teams. For a cash-strapped public school like ours, it makes sense that it refuses to pay for two apps when it does can get the same functionality in just one of them. Kids aren’t happy with that! That’s what Microsoft is exploiting with its platform game.)
NextLessons is somewhat adjacent to this school-based education strategy. Yes, there will be a large audience of students and their families that could represent a good cross-selling opportunity for tutoring, but NextLessons also represents a more mainstream offering, open to anyone who might want to learn something, not only those who are already using Microsoft Education products.
So, the interest here is probably not just the students who want to supplement their online learning – there is a large audience for online tutoring – but all lifelong learners, as well as the many consumers or professionals. who are interested in learning something new, especially in the past 1.5 years of spending more time alone and / or at home.
And with that, there are other potential opportunities for NextLessons in the Microsoft universe.
Just yesterday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Ryan Roslansky, CEO of Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, hosted an online presentation on what the job will look like in the future. Education – especially professional development – featured heavily in this discussion, with the conversation coinciding with LinkedIn’s launch of a new learning center.
LinkedIn has not only been working for years on growing its educational business for years, but it has also long sought a more solid foray into doing more with video on its platform.
Interestingly enough, something like NextLessons could kill two birds with one stone. While LinkedIn’s educational content has so far not been specifically linked to “live” online courses, you can imagine a bridge between Microsoft’s latest acquisition and what LinkedIn might consider next as well.
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