I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, covering innovation in and around academe. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week.
Tech-skills boot camps are on the march.
General Assembly, a company that teaches tech skills, is teaming up with an online-program-management company called Noodle Partners to develop boot camps with college partners. Their first deal is with University of Virginia’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies.
Partnerships between boot camps and colleges aren’t that novel anymore. So, even before this announcement became public, I’d been trying to figure out why it might matter to anyone other than the parties involved.
For sure, I know some with a penchant for insider ed-tech gossip (no judgement here; I count myself in that camp) will relish the news that Noodle’s founder, John Katzman, had found another way to compete with, and annoy, 2U, a major OPM company. Katzman co-founded 2U in 2008 but now publicly derides it as caring more about stockholders than students or educators.