拉里·伯杰

2022年9月9日

订阅复制URL放大,陷入困境的数字教育部门的鲁珀特•默多克(Rupert Murdoch)的新闻集团(News Corp),上周销售团队11放大高管,其中包括前总理Joel Klein纽约市学校。部门内销售后发生大规模裁员。拉里•伯杰无线一代的新闻集团收购他的公司五年前曾暗示媒体巨头的进入教育,将放大首席执行官在新的所有权。教育部门管理团队购买被一群支持购买私人投资者,据新闻集团宣布没有透露销售条款。今年8月,新闻集团表示,它已经放弃了3.71亿美元的亏损扩大在过去的一年里,并打算把它出售。新闻集团已投资10亿美元自2010年以来在教育部门。两扩大教育企业传达销售扩大学习,它提供了核心课程为k - 12在各种主题,和增强洞察力,提供分析数据和评估。放大访问失败,出售平板电脑有“k - 12学习系统,”已经停止,但该公司仍将支持其正在进行的项目在吉尔福德郡,北卡罗来纳州、学校。伯杰一直担任的首席执行官放大学习。克莱恩,扩大教育前首席执行官,将搬到新公司的董事会,根据电子邮件,伯杰送到员工9月30日这一天出售关闭。 (Berger served as a board member of Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit corporation that publishes Education Week, from 2009 to July 2015.) About 500 Amplify employees were laid off last week, although the company indicated that many are staying through part of a four-month transition. Berger referred to the layoffs in his email to the staff, saying the decision to “let some of our colleagues go” was necessary “in order to focus our resources and attention.” At its peak, Amplify had up to 1,200 people on its full- and part-time payroll, or acting as contractors, a former Amplify employee said. Market Lessons Learned Berger credited Klein with providing Amplify’s vision of combining curriculum, analytics, and software, and helping to plan for the buyout. Klein will play a key role in providing “critical strategic advice,” according to Berger’s email to the staff. Klein’s vision for News Corp.'s involvement in education coincided with the Murdoch-led company’s purchase of Wireless Generation for $360 million in 2010. Co-founded by Berger, Wireless Generation represented the first leg of what was to become a three-pronged approach to providing digital education products and services through Amplify. Klein planned to leverage Wireless Generation’s established assessment and analytics business, which had 400 employees when that company was acquired. The Amplify sale last week represents a vote of confidence by the original leadership team, said Doug Levin, a consultant on the ed-tech market and a former head of the State Educational Technology Directors Association. Levin had said earlier this year that News Corp.'s foray into the K-12 marketplace was another example in “a long history of education entrepreneurs who have crashed on the rocks because the market was not what they thought it would be.” But he views this latest development as a sign that members of the management team are willing to “put their money where their mouths are. “They did a lot of work in digital instructional materials,” Levin said, and received some positive reviews. He pointed to two products, in particular, that have gained some traction: Amplify’s gamification for middle school English and development of an Advanced Placement computer science MOOC (or massive, open online course) that Amplify released in 2013 and sold this August as Edhesive. Berger, in his email to the staff, said he was “proud of the technology we’ve invented, the educational innovations we’ve pioneered, and the results we’ve delivered—and most importantly, of the team we’ve assembled.” “Larry Berger has been successful building a company in the past, and the industry and customers both benefited from his vision and implementation,” said Karen Billings, the vice president and managing director for the Education Technology Industry Network of the Software & Information Industry Association. “And he knows what mistakes not to make in this go-around.”