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It is April and, right on cue, it snowed here in Salt Lake City on the last typical day of snowfall. Given the drought, I suspect it made us all happy.

Here’s what caught my attention this week.

Earlier in the week over at On Student Success I wrote about the new partnership between Khan Academy, TED, and ETS to offer low-cost undergraduate degrees. My argument was that Khan Academy didn’t fully understand the challenges of learning at scale, especially when it comes to engaging students, and that this gap matters given the ambitions of the new venture.

I also suggested that the Khan TED Institute may be underestimating the difficulty of entering what is already a crowded and highly competitive market for online degrees. I stand by that assessment, and I want to come back to it in more detail, particularly in terms of how EdTech vendors think about learning.

But I missed something important, and it was surfaced in an excellent post from the Higher Education Executive Intelligence newsletter (hereafter HEEI). In my own coverage, as in much of the early commentary, the focus was on Khan and on TED. The ETS component of the partnership received far less attention. That is a mistake. ETS is not a supporting player here. It is a central part of the strategy and helps explain what this initiative is actually trying to do. And this angle deserves more analysis.

What looks like a partnership story is, in fact, a business model story, and a signal that one of higher education’s core infrastructures is being reworked. To understand that shift, you have to start with what is happening to ETS itself. The context is straightforward. Demand for standardized testing has been declining, and with it the stability of the revenue model that sustained ETS for decades. The argument in the HEEI post builds from that starting point.

These tests weren’t just products. They were part of the infrastructure that made large-scale admissions and international mobility possible. Moving away from that model is not a simple adjustment. It is an ambitious shift.