One of the nation’s best-funded nonprofits focused on online education has been handing out grants for more than a year, but so far the group, known as the Axim Collaborative, has been handing out its grants slowly and fairly quietly.
“They’re not being talked about as much in the digital learning space,” said Russ Pollin, executive director of WCET, a nonprofit that focuses on digital learning in higher education. “They’re not disappearing from the conversation, but their names aren’t being mentioned as often.”
At the end of last month, article An op-ed on online course review site Class Central put it in harsher terms, calling the nonprofit’s promises “hollow.” The op-ed by longtime online education watcher Dawal Shah noted that, according to the organization’s most recent tax filings, Axim has assets of $735 million, with just $9 million in expenses and $15 million in investment income for the 2023 tax year. “Far from being an innovator, Axim Collaborative appears to be an unknown presence in the edtech space, and its promises of innovation and greater equity are largely unfulfilled,” Shah wrote.
The group was formed with funds raised when Harvard and MIT sold their edX online platform to for-profit company 2U in 2021 for roughly $800 million. Many online learning leaders criticized the move at the time, as edX had long touted its nonprofit status as a way to differentiate itself from competitors such as Coursera. The acquisition did not go as planned for 2U, which withdrew its support this summer. Filed for bankruptcy.
So what is Axim investing in and what are its plans for the future?
EdSurge reached out to Axim CEO Stephanie Khurana to get an update.
Unsurprisingly, she disputed the notion that the group had done much.
“We’ve launched 18 partnerships in the past year,” she said, noting that many of the grants Axim has awarded were issued since the latest tax returns were filed. “This is the beginning, and it’s sowing the seeds of a lot of innovation. To me, that’s very powerful.”
One of the projects she’s most proud of is Axim’s collaboration with HBCUv, a collaboration between historically black colleges and universities to create a shared technology platform and framework for sharing online courses across campuses. While the funding is one part of it, Khurana says she’s also proud of the work her group did to help build the course-sharing framework. Axim will also help “build student success metrics into the platform itself.” “That way people can see where they might be able to help students with different types of advising and different types of student support,” she says.
This example embodies the group’s philosophy of seeking to provide expertise and convening power, rather than just funding, to scale promising ideas and support underserved learners in higher education.
Listening Tour
When EdSurge spoke with Khurana last year, she emphasized that the first step was to listen and learn from the entire online learning community to figure out where the group could make the most difference.
In doing so, she says, one of the things that struck her was “hearing what barriers students were facing and what was preventing them from completing their programs, finding a job that aligned with their skills, and actually realizing better outcomes.”
The grants the group has awarded so far range from about $500,000 for what she calls “demonstration projects” up to a maximum of $3 million.
While artificial intelligence has emerged as a key focus of Aksim’s operations, Khurana says the group is approaching it cautiously.
“We’re thinking very carefully about where and how AI can be beneficial, and where it might be problematic, particularly for underserved learners,” she says, “so we’re trying to have a clear line of sight to those possibilities and bring the most promising opportunities to the students and institutions that we support.”
One specific AI project the group has supported is a collaboration between Axim, Campus Evolve, the University of Central Florida, and Indiana Tech that is exploring research-based approaches to using AI to improve student advising. “They’re developing AI tools to approach students in a way that helps them understand, ‘What resources are going to help me academically? What resources are going to help me career-wise?'” she says. “A lot of times, those are hard to discern.”
Another important task of Axim is to maintain old systems rather than start new ones. The Axim Collaborative Open edX Platformis an open-source system for hosting edX courses that can be used by any institution with the technical know-how and computer servers to run it. The platform is used by thousands of universities and organizations around the world, and an increasing number of government agencies are also using it to deliver online courses.
Anant Agarwal, who helped found edX and now coordinates its use at 2U, is also a member of the Open edX technical committee.
The structure supporting Open edX through Axim is modeled on how the Linux open source operating system is managed, he says.
edX still relies on the platform, but the software is now community-driven: “There needs to be someone who manages the repository, manages the release schedule, and funds certain projects,” Agarwal says. And that group is now Axim.
When war broke out in Ukraine, the country “transformed and universities and schools started offering courses on Open edX,” Agarwal said.
WCET’s Poulin said it’s too early to tell whether Axim’s model is working.
“They may not have a lot of name recognition or clout right now, but I’m willing to give startups runway time to see if they can succeed,” he said, noting that “Axim is still essentially a startup.”
His advice: “Creative and philanthropic organizations operating in the field of ‘innovation’ should take some risks. We learn as much from failure as we do from success.”
For Khurana, Axim’s CEO, the goal isn’t to find magic answers to the deep-rooted problems facing higher education.
“I know people are looking for a silver bullet,” she says, “and I think that’s hard to find in a world where there are so many ways to solve problems. It starts with the people doing the work on the ground.” [with] “Humility is one of the best ways to sow the seeds of innovation and get it started.”
