One of the country’s richest nonprofits dedicated to online education has been handing out grants for more than a year. But so far, the group, known as the Axim Collaborative, has done so slowly and rather quietly.
“There’s been very little talk about them in digital learning circles,” says Russ Poulin, executive director of WCET, a nonprofit focused on digital learning in higher education. “They’re not absent from the conversation, but their name doesn’t come up very often.”
At the end of last month, An article Online course review site Class Central put it more starkly, calling the nonprofit’s promise “hollow.” The op-ed, written by Dhawal Shah, a longtime observer of online education, noted that according to the group’s most recent tax filing, Axim is sitting on $735 million and had expenses of just $9 million in fiscal 2023, with $15 million in investment income revenue. “Rather than an innovator, Axim Collaborative appears to be a nonentity in the edtech space, its promises of innovation and advancing equity largely unfulfilled,” Shah wrote.
The group was formed with money made when Harvard University and MIT sold their online platform edX to the for-profit company 2U in 2021 for about $800 million. At the time, many online learning leaders criticized the move, as edX had long touted its nonprofit status as differentiating it from competitors like Coursera. The purchase didn't end up working out as planned for 2U, which this summer declared bankruptcy.
What is Axim investing in? And what are its plans for the future?
EdSurge reached out to Axim CEO Stephanie Khurana for an update.
Not surprisingly, she has rejected the idea that the group isn't doing much.
“We have launched 18 partnerships over the past year,” he says, noting that many of the grants Axim has awarded have been given since it filed its last tax return. “It’s a start and it’s generating a lot of innovation. And that, for me, is very important.”
One of the projects she says she’s most proud of is Axim’s work with HBCUv, a collaboration of several historically Black colleges and universities to create a shared platform and technology framework for sharing online courses across their campuses. While money was part of that, Khurana says she’s also proud of the work her group did to help establish a course-sharing framework. Axim also plans to help with “building student success metrics into the platform itself,” she says, “so people can see where they could support students with different types of advising and different types of student support.”
The example embodies the group's philosophy of trying to provide expertise and convening power, rather than just money, to help promising ideas scale up to support disadvantaged students in higher education.
Listening tour
When EdSurge spoke to Khurana last year, she emphasized that her first step would be to listen and learn across the online learning community to see where the group could make the most difference.
One thing that struck her while doing it, she says, is “hearing what barriers students face and what prevents them from persisting in their programs and finding jobs that match their skills and being able to really do better.”
Grant amounts the group has awarded so far range from about $500,000 for what she calls “demonstration projects” to as much as $3 million.
artificial intelligence has become a key focus of Axim's work, though Khurana says the group is proceeding cautiously.
“We are looking very carefully at how and where ai is beneficial and where it could be problematic, especially for these disadvantaged students,” she says. “So we try to have a clear vision of what those possibilities are and then take advantage of the most promising opportunities for the students and institutions 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 to explore research-based approaches to using ai to improve student advising. “They’re developing an ai tool to have a student-oriented approach to understanding, ‘What are my academic resources? What are career-based resources?’” she says. “A lot of times, it’s hard to discern those.”
Another key task of Axim is to maintain an old system instead of creating a new one. Axim Collaborative manages the Open edX Platformthe open-source system that hosts edX courses and can also be used by any institution with the technological know-how and computing servers to run it. The platform is used by thousands of universities 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, also sits on an Open edX technical committee.
He says Open edX's support structure through Axim is modeled after the way the open source Linux operating system is managed.
While edX remains platform-dependent, the software is run by the community. “There has to be someone who maintains the repositories, maintains the release schedule, and provides funding for certain projects,” Agarwal says. And that group is now Axim.
When war broke out in Ukraine, Agarwal says, the country “suddenly pivoted and universities and schools started offering courses on Open edX.”
WCET's Poulin says it's too early to tell whether Axim's model is working.
“While their profile and impact may not be great at the moment, I am willing to give startups some time to determine whether they take off,” he says, noting that “Axim is, essentially, still a startup.”
His advice: “A creative philanthropic organization should take some risks if it works in the field of ‘innovation.’ We learn from failures as well as from successes.”
For Axim CEO Khurana, the goal is not to find a magic answer to the deep problems facing higher education.
“I know some people want something that’s a silver bullet,” he says. “And I think that’s hard to do in a space where there are so many different ways to solve problems. Starting with the people who are working on the ground, with humility, is probably one of the best ways to generate innovations and get started.”
