This post first appeared on aud.life

(via "The Premium Model in EdTech: Aggregators" on Medium.com)

The history offered in thie article -- one aimed at startup entrepreneurs and investors -- is incorrect. The University of Phoenix did not invent e-learning. CALCampus was not the first to offer an online curriculum. To be sure, these are assertions made by various online education marketing content farms. But just because you read it on the Internet or saw it in an infographic doesn't make it true. (Startling, I know.)

What I find fascinating about the claims here are that this particular story posits that education technology and online learning is something developed by for-profit higher education. It's a convenient narrative: one that allows today's startups to invoke a particular story about ed-tech innovation: one that posits that public education has been resistant to technological change and that the "democratization of education" has and will come from markets.