Up-Skilling Investment Trends: 2U & Guild Education Partnership

Welcome to the Meratas Memo’s Weekly Roundup! This is your weekly fix of higher education and alternative financing news. Here are this week’s stories: 

 

2U and Guild Education Partner for Online Employee Training Programs 

Employee up-skilling and re-skilling programs are often one of the first things to go during a time when companies need to cut costs. However, with the onset of the pandemic and the massive shift to remote work, it is now more important than ever to put a greater emphasis on up-skilling employees. While Guild Education has been doing this for many blue-chip companies for awhile now, their new partnership with 2U could take things to the next level. 

2U will make it’s online degree programs, bootcamps, and courses available for free to Guild Education’s network of employers which will give employees a chance to gain new skills and experience that they otherwise couldn’t.

Read the full story on Edsurge here. 

 

Faculty Opinion on Digital Materials

More than ever in the last year, teachers and education faculty turned to learning management systems and other digital teaching materials over that of traditional printed materials. The results of these changes were certainly mixed. 

65 percent of respondents to this survey by Faculty Watch said that this change negatively impacted the education experience of them and their students. However, only a quarter of these faculty members said that they would return to printed materials. 

Read the full story on Inside Higher Ed here. 

 

Codecademy Raises $40m in New Funding 

The education and edtech sectors have seen huge recent flows of investor cash. We here at Meratas are no strangers to the advantages of online bootcamps. Investors seem to be on the same page as Codecademy, one of the early players in the coding bootcamp space, have raised $40m in Series D funding.

This investment will benefit both individual students as well as their enterprise offerings launched last year which aims to help businesses upskill their employees, providing them with additional programming certifications. 

Read the full story on Edsurge here.