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“There has been little buzz about them in digital learning circles,” says Russ Poulin, executive director of WCET, a nonprofit focused on digital learning in higher education. “They are not absent from the conversation, but their name is not raised very often.”

Late last month, an article in the online course review site Class Central put it more starkly, calling the promise of the nonprofit “hollow.” The op-ed, by longtime online education watcher Dhawal Shah, noted that according to the group’s most recent tax return, Axim is sitting on $735 million and had expenses of just $9 million in tax year 2023, with $15 million in revenue from investment income. “Instead of being an innovator, Axim Collaborative seems to be a non-entity in the edtech space, its promises of innovation and equity advancement largely unfulfilled,” Shah wrote.

The group was formed with the money made when Harvard University and MIT sold their edX online platform to for-profit company 2U in 2021 for about $800 million. At the time many online learning leaders criticized the move, since edX had long touted its nonprofit status as differentiating it from competitors like Coursera. The purchase did not end up working out as planned for 2U, which this summer filed for bankruptcy.

So what is Axim investing in? And what are its future plans?

EdSurge reached out to Axim’s CEO, Stephanie Khurana, to get an update.

Not surprisingly, she pushed back on the idea that the group is not doing much.

“We’ve launched 18 partnerships over the past year,” she says, noting that many grants Axim has awarded were issued since its most recent tax return was filed. “It’s a start, and it’s seeding a lot of innovations. And that to me is very powerful.”

One of the projects she says she is most proud of is Axim’s work with HBCUv, a collaboration by several historically Black colleges to create a shared technology platform and framework to share online courses across their campuses. While money was part of that, Khurana says she is also proud of the work her group did helping set up a course-sharing framework. Axim also plans to help with “incorporating student success metrics in the platform itself,” she says, “so people can see where they might be able to support students with different kinds of advising and different kinds of student supports.”

The example embodies the group’s philosophy of trying to provide expertise and convening power, rather than just cash, to help promising ideas scale to support underserved learners in higher education.

Listening Tour

When EdSurge talked with Khurana last year, she stressed that her first step would be to listen and learn across the online learning community to see where the group could best make a difference.

One thing that struck her as she did that, she says, is “hearing what barriers students are facing, and what’s keeping them from persisting through their programs and finding jobs that match with their skills and being able to actually realize better outcomes.”

Grant amounts the group has given out so far range from around $500,000 for what she called “demonstration projects” to as much as $3 million.

Artificial intelligence has emerged as a key focus of Axim’s work, though Khurana says the group is treading gingerly.

“We are looking very carefully at how and where AI is beneficial, and where it might be problematic, especially for these underserved learners,” she says. “And so trying to be clear-eyed about what those possibilities are, and then bring to bear the most promising opportunities for the students and institutions that we’re supporting.”

One specific AI project the group has supported is a collaboration between Axim, Campus Evolve, University of Central Florida and Indiana Tech to explore research-based approaches to using AI to improve student advising. “They’re developing an AI tool to have a student-facing approach to understanding, ‘What are my academic resources? What are career-based resources?,’” she says. “A lot of times those are hard to discern.”

Another key work of Axim involves keeping up an old system rather than starting new ones. The Axim Collaborative manages the Open edX platform, the open-source system that hosts edX courses and can also be used by any institution with the tech know-how and the computer servers to run it. The platform is used by thousands of colleges and organizations around the world, including a growing number of governments, who use it to offer online courses.

Anant Agarwal, who helped found edX and now works at 2U to coordinate its use, is also on a technical committee for Open edX.

He says the structure of supporting Open edX through Axim is modeled on the way the Linux open-source operating system is managed.

While edX continues to rely on the platform, the software is community-run. “There has to be somebody that maintains the repositories, maintains the release schedule and provides funding for certain projects,” Agarwal says. And that group is now Axim.

When the war in Ukraine broke out, Agarwal says, the country “turned on a dime and the universities and schools started offering courses on Open edX.”

Poulin, of WCET, says that it’s too early to say whether Axim’s model is working.

“While their profile and impact may not be great to this point, I am willing to give startups some runway time to determine if they will take off,” he says, noting that “Axim is, essentially, still a startup.”

His advice: “A creative, philanthropic organization should take some risks if they are working in the ‘innovation’ sphere. We learn as much from failures as successes.”

For Khurana, Axim’s CEO, the goal is not to find a magic answer to deep-seated problems facing higher education.

“I know some people want something that will be a silver bullet,” she says. “And I think it’s just hard to come by in a space where there’s a lot of different ways to solve problems. Starting with people on the ground who are doing the work — [with] humility — is probably one of the best ways to seed innovations and to start.”

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America’s education system was a groundbreaking effort to help a growing nation thrive in the 19th century. Now, 200 years later, the world has changed; the horizon looks drastically different. Collectively, we need to redesign our education system to enable all of our children — and, by extension, our nation —  to thrive today and tomorrow. “Horizon Three” or “H3” names the future-ready system we need, one that is grounded in equity serving learners’ individual strengths and needs as well as the common good. This series provides a glimpse of where H3 is already being designed and built. It also includes provocations about how we might fundamentally reimagine learning for the future ahead. You can learn more about the horizons framing here.

Some Good News

Every day you read grim news about K12 education. That’s not what you’re going to read about here. In this new blog series, we’re here to give you hope. 

All across the country, there are folks who have experienced the grim news, often before it made the headlines, and they’ve been taking steps to create a different present and future. 

They’re building locally, regionally, and nationally; in schools and school systems; in nonprofits and startups; in community organizations and policy shops. They’re gathering stakeholders and value networks to ensure that transformation is possible and sticks. They’re working to accomplish one common goal: redesign the education system to prepare young people to thrive and construct a common good in a world of accelerating change. 

These are not folks tinkering around the edges, creating the next iteration of the horse-and-buggy or the adding machine. They’re taking on our big assumptions about education; the core grammar of schooling, to leap us to the self-driving car or the AI-powered smartphone. We call this the Third Horizon or H3 Learning.

Humans are at the center of the H3 educational system. The emphasis is not first and foremost on structural elements like standards or test scores or evaluation systems or credit hours or even technology, but rather on humans having conversations and creating innovations to solve real problems to meet human needs. This new system redesigns the structural elements to enable education to grow humans and to feel human again.

We live in a world where things often feel out of control, or at least out of our control. Institutions seem huge and unbending, moving forward with a will of their own. Change feels impossible. In this series, we want to highlight that great things can happen when small groups of humans come together to build the world they want to live in.  

A Lasting Example

Reggio Emilia is a tiny little region in Italy most widely known for the hard Parmesan cheese you put on spaghetti. It also has a long tradition of parent-created preschools. In 1945, right after WWII ended, some exhausted, frustrated mothers came together to make a change. They sold a leftover tank, three trucks, and a few horses to raise money, got a local farmer to donate some land, scavenged bricks from bombed buildings, and built a preschool that they hoped would create a better, freer future for their children. Over time,  that one school became a network with child-centered values that now has thousands of schools across the globe – with 1200 in the US alone. 

Reggio schools are deeply human places. In the words of the psychologist/teacher with whom the mothers partnered, the goal is “to make a lovable school, industrious, inventive, liveable, documentable and communicable, a place of research, learning, re-cognition, and reflection, where children, teachers, and families feel well.”  Community is at the heart of Reggio, as is learner agency. Young people learn from caring adults, they learn from each other, and they learn from their environment. And the adults equally learn from them. 

In the Reggio method, learners are invited to experience materials that may provoke them into taking some sort of action. Unlike traditional education with clear learning objectives attached to specific curricular materials and teaching activities, the Reggio approach is more open-ended and emergent. It assumes that the learner is curious and will explore what compels them.  It assumes the learner will create and build, given materials, experiences, nurturing care, and opportunities for reflection. This personalized approach to building learner agency is a lasting example of what is possible in an H3 education system.

Sparking Meaningful Conversations

The past two decades have seen a lot of education reform initiatives, primarily focusing on ensuring that all children are capable readers and writers, and have strong foundations in math. Kentucky, as a state, has taken a different approach. For over a decade, they’ve been exploring deeper learning, a grassroots and grass tops approach to rethinking how communities and schools can come together to nurture and grow young people to thrive in a changing world. They are collectively and locally exploring what H3 might look like.  Two years ago, Tony Wagner, Ulrik Christensen, and I were writing a book on mastery learning, and we had heard that Allen County Public Schools were shifting from traditional learning to project-based learning. 

As a part of our research, we asked two 6th graders, Melanie and Cassie, what had been meaningful learning for them. They both told us about a project that explored how to bring more business to the county to make it a better place to live. Middle schoolers decided what sorts of businesses they were interested in bringing into their community. They were then tasked with designing a prototype of the business, as well as a prototype of a toy that could be sold to raise money to bring in the business. Melanie and her group, for example, wanted a new restaurant so they designed a restaurant (Melanie, who wants to be an architect, created the floor plan). They then built a toy restaurant on wheels, complete with branding and minifridge. 

Tony and I weren’t really sure what this project was all about. There seemed to be some disconnects: Toys? Fund-raising? Was this a food truck? What the heck was happening here? But we stayed quiet and listened. 

Trey Harper, the assistant principal of the school, explained what happened next: “Then some members of our community came in and listened to kids’ presentations about their businesses and the toys. They helped them with two of the graduate portrait competencies our community had decided were important – ‘accountable collaborator’ and ‘effective communicator’.” 

The community members then chose three toys as winners. The students and community built them on a large scale and put the large-scale models into the county’s parade to highlight the work that the school had been doing around project-based learning.

At this point, Tony and I were even more unsure of where this was heading. It seemed to us that this might be the sort of project that made people skeptical about project-based learning. Was there rigor here? What was the actual learning? What was the actual connection to Allen County?

Then we got our first surprise. The middle schoolers were even bigger skeptics than we were. They understood that this was just a start. They appreciated that the project had something to do with the real world, but they argued that it had the potential to be even more connected. Melanie and Cassie, two 6th graders you’ll remember, suggested it needed to “continue to stay in the real world, and not like ‘what if’ something happened’.” They cared about their community and wanted to help make it a better place for real.

All the adults and young people in the room listened intently to the 6th graders. Travis Hamby, the superintendent, apologetically explained that these were early days, and the teaching team was still learning about project-based learning. 

What happened next though, struck Tony and me as remarkable. The superintendent, the assistant principal, two 6th graders, a couple of high school students, a teacher, and Tony and I all engaged in a robust conversation of equals around how this and other projects might have been designed differently. Eleven-year-olds felt empowered to voice their thoughtful opinions on their own learning experiences, and adults – including adults in power –  listened to them, and vice versa.

There was no showboating, no blame or recrimination, no defensiveness or self-justification. 

These are the sorts of work-in-progress, ‘let’s roll up our sleeves to build and improve’ conversations we need many, many more of. 

This blog series is designed in that spirit, as an invitation to explore what learning can be and a provocation for you to take action to make something that’s not grim news but rather hopeful and moving towards the next horizon. 

We look forward to starting an H3 conversation with you. Please read our blog posts, reach out to us via comments below or this form, build things, and reach out to us again to share what you’re building.

This blog series is sponsored by LearnerStudio, a non-profit organization accelerating progress towards a future of learning where young people are inspired and prepared to thrive in the Age of AI – as individuals, in careers, in their communities and our democracy. 

Curation of this series is led by Sujata Bhatt, founder of Incubate Learning, which is focused on reconnecting humans to their love of learning and creating. 

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