5/5/2019 Seek bets on online learning platforms

THE AUSTRALIAN

Seek bets on online learning

platforms
TIM DODD
Follow @TimDoddEDU

By TIM DODD, COMMENT

12:00AM MAY 1, 2019 • H 4 COMMENTS

This week is a significant one for tertiary education.

Why is that? Seek, the Australian job search company, made two significant investments, each of
which signals clearly where adult education is heading.

On Monday, Seek said it was spending $92 million to buy 50 per cent of FutureLearn, the UK-
based online course platform.

Simultaneously it announced it was putting $50m into the latest investment round for Coursera,
the world’s largest online learning platform, giving Seek a minority stake in this venture.

Seek is making a play to be a major force in the growing area of micro-credentials — that is,
highly targeted, skills-based courses in which providers are trying to offer specific learning,
usually delivered online, to address a well-defined personal need on the part of the learner.

When offered online, such courses are cheap to deliver at scale. The vision — and I call it that
because it’s not yet a reality — is that providers can use a host of new technologies, including
artificial intelligence, virtual reality and speech recognition — to deliver a seamless, personalised
and compelling education experience via a screen.

We’re seeing the next iteration of MOOCs — massive open online courses — which were
welcomed with wonder and apprehension in 2012 as educators glimpsed the level of efficiency,
and effectiveness, that online courses promised to deliver. The cumbersome MOOC descriptor is
fading away but the online platforms built during the MOOC boom, such as Coursera and

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5/5/2019 Seek bets on online learning platforms

FutureLearn, are ready for the next round of innovation, backed with capital from the likes of
Seek.

Its announcement to the stock exchange regarding FutureLearn is clear: “Proceeds from Seek’s
investment will be used to grow a number of new courses linked to employment outcomes,
online marketing, initiatives to grow the student experience and overall retention. FutureLearn is
a unique opportunity to build a global market leader, and if we execute well the long-term
upside is significant.”

Seek will be a 50-50 owner of FutureLearn, alongside its British founder, the Open University.
With Coursera, which is a bigger business, Seek’s strategy looks to be similar although it will play
a smaller role in setting the direction of the company.

The new intelligent online education platforms will be able to deliver any courses, from micro-
credentials to full degrees. A number of Australian universities, Deakin in particular, are already
partnered with Future-Learn to take both degrees and shorter courses to world markets.
Macquarie University is doing a similar thing with its global MBA, in partnership with Coursera.

Both Coursera and FutureLearn, and their competitors, have found that online education gets
most traction in areas that are highly job-oriented, and when targeted at working people wanting
to upgrade skills.

So it’s no surprise that Seek, a job focused company, is pushing into this area.

By the standards of other online businesses, the valuations in online education are still
vanishingly small. But if the vision comes to pass, who knows?

TIM DODD, HIGHER EDUCATION EDITOR

Tim Dodd is The Australian's higher education editor. He has over 25 years experience as a
journalist covering a wide variety of areas in public policy, economics, politics and foreign
policy, including reporti... Read more

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