IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

138 Chapter 7
U.S. firms spend a big chunk of that total on internal training. The so-called
consumer market for learning is also huge. Two hundred million North
Americans take some kind of continuing education course each year, and
nine out of ten adults aged fifty and over are actively seeking learning
opportunities at any given time. These are remarkable numbers when compared
to annual sales of tickets to sporting events in the United States,
which total just ten million. 10
The approach business has taken to the learning market has been to
segment it. An influential paper by Jerry Wind and David Reibstein at
Wharton Business School11 divided education into discrete markets: child
care and early education, K–12 or secondary education, postsecondary education,
corporate training, and the consumer market. Another popular matrix
divides learning into content (information technology, business skills,
lifestyle, academic, customized), services (content distribution, consulting,
implementation, e-commerce, community portals), and technology (learning
management tools, digital portfolios, content creation tools, delivery
platforms, collaboration tools).
There was a time when market analyses of this kind, combined with the
huge financial numbers bandied around, greatly excited investors. There
was talk of an ‘‘emerging electronic university,’’ a ninety-billion-dollar
‘‘unified global marketplace for ideas,’’ ‘‘Web-based knowledge exchanges,’’
and so on. 12 One start-up, UNext, proclaimed that ‘‘the vast imbalance between
the supply and demand for quality education provides an enormous,
untapped global market. Countries, companies, and individuals that don’t
invest in knowledge are destined to fall behind.’’ 13
This bewitching vision enticed investors to pour billions of dollars of
venture capital onto the e-learning bandwagon during the last years of the
dot-com boom. A lot of this money went to so-called pure-play learning
start-ups following a ‘‘land grab’’ or first-mover-advantage strategy. These
start-ups thought it vital to own or control access to as much content as
possible. ‘‘We are continually combing the Net to feed our growing database
of 37,000 online courses,’’ boasted the website of HungryMinds (now
defunct). 14 Other start-ups proclaimed themselves to be ‘‘learning portals’’
through which all conceivable types of knowledge and learning would
be accessed and exchanged. Blue-chip players were not immune from the
frenzy. Columbia University invested tens of millions of dollars in Fathom,
a learning portal, and recruited a consortium of fellow blue-chip academic