Chair, Construct Education

Policy Fellow, Centre for Science and Policy

In 2023, it will have been 10 years since Carl co-founded Construct. Construct is a former edtechUK company of the year and was named as one of the fastest growing companies of the year in the Deloitte Fast 50. Construct has a team of 385 people on four continents delivering courses to millions of learners worldwide.

After leaving the nuclear industry, Carl helped Construct navigate the birth of open education and its migration to becoming online and hybrid learning; from MOOCs to certificates to credentialing to full online undergraduate and postgraduate programmes being taught online.

Construct has over that time delivered programs for universities including Oxford in the UK, Tennessee and Michigan in the United States, and HBKU and KAUST in the Arabian peninsula. Today, Carl has taken a step back from the day-to-day delivery to focus on applying the lessons from tens of thousands of courses delivered over the last few years. As part of this in 2021 Carl switched his focus to support institutions and governments on a policy level. This work has included the World Bank, UK Government and Centre for Reimagining Learning (which is part of both MIT and Harvard University.)

This new focus has seen him develop economic and delivery models in hybrid and blended learning. The central premise of this work is that modality as a concept is now potentially redundant.

As part of this, online/offline/in-classroom/at home are becoming the same thing and institutions are about to transform accordingly to maintain stability and growth; between now and 2025 with short term solutions, and from 2025 to 2030 with more rigid strategies.