IBL News

Author: IBL News

  • Open edX & Learning Platforms Newsletter | May – June 2022: 2U, Coursera, Moodle, Degreed, Cornerstone, Canvas LMS, Class.com…

    Open edX & Learning Platforms Newsletter | May – June 2022: 2U, Coursera, Moodle, Degreed, Cornerstone, Canvas LMS, Class.com…

    [ Newsletter format  |  Click here to subscribe ]

    MAY – JUNE 2022 – NEWSLETTER #45  |  Breaking news at IBL News  |  Noticias en Español

     

    Open edX

    • NASA Launches a Community and Education Initiative to Accelerate Open Science

    • The 2023 Open edX Conference will take place at MIT in Cambridge, MA

    • Three Spanish Universities Will Fund the Transformation of Open edX into an On-Campus LMS

    • Ukrainian Raccoon Gang Showed Up on the 2022 Open edX Conference

    • Developers Gathered at the Annual Reunion of the Open edX Software

     

    edX Platform

    • 2U / edX Creates Two University Advisory Councils Following the Former Partners’ Board

    • 2U/edX Increases Revenues and Losses While It Transitions Into edX

    • “edX is to 2U What Google is to Alphabet,” Says the Founder of edX

    • Over 300 Students Will Graduate from BU Questrom’s Online MBA

     

    Coursera

    • Business Skills Rise, But Technology Proficiency Drops Significantly In the US

    • Coursera Announces New Features, Tools, and Learning Initiatives

    • Coursera Launches a Collection of Short Videos and Lessons Intended for Skills Development

    • Coursera Increased Its Net Loss in the First Quarter of 2022

     

    Learning Platforms: Functionalities

    • Moodle Commercial Provider Open LMS Integrates Zoom-Built In Tool Class.com

    • AI-Powered Platforms that Detect Plagiarized Content Online Attract Investors

    • Degreed Celebrates Its 10th Anniversary, Claiming to Be the First LXP

     

    Learning Platforms: Acquisitions and Results

    • Cornerstone Pays $200 Million in Cash to Skillsoft for the SumTotal Learning Platform

    • Cornerstone Completed Its Acquisition of the EdCast LXP Platform

    • McGraw Hill Says that Its Annual Digital Billings Exceed $1 Billion

    • Canvas LMS Continues Its Growth, Reporting an Increase of 21% in Its Quarter Revenue

    • Class.com Acquires Blackboard’s Collaborate Virtual Video Tool

     

    2022 Events | All of the Key Conferences Listed!

    • Education Calendar 2022  – JUNE | JULY |  AUGUST | SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER | NOVEMBER | DECEMBER | Conferences in Latin America & Spain

     

    This newsletter was created in collaboration with IBL Education, a New York City-based company specializing in AI-driven, skills learning platforms. We also film and produce courses for universities and business organizations. Read the latest IBL Newsletter   |  Archive of Open edX Newsletters

  • Online Learning Newsletter | May – June 2022: Andreessen Horowitz, Metaverse, UC San Diego, 1EdTech Consortium, Universities…

    Online Learning Newsletter | May – June 2022: Andreessen Horowitz, Metaverse, UC San Diego, 1EdTech Consortium, Universities…

    [ Newsletter format  |  Click here to subscribe ]

    MAY – JUNE 2022 – NEWSLETTER #51  |  Breaking news at IBL News  |  Noticias en Español

     

    Trends

    • Andreessen Horowitz Creates with Columbia and Stanford a Research Lab on Crypto and Web3

    • Americans Support Student Loan Forgiveness Up to $10,000

    • The New York Times Against Canceling Student Debt, which Reached $1.7 Trillion

    • A Report Shows that Businesses Must Dramatically Improve their Open Source Software Security

    • The Some College No Credential Population Rose to 39 Million in the U.S.

    • The Metaverse Virtual-Reality Technology Might Contribute $3 Trillion to GDP

    • Data Shows that Remote Work Is Disappearing: Less than 10% Work at Home

     

    Universities

    • UC San Diego Reaches $3 Billion in Its Fundraising Campaign

    • The University of Phoenix President Resigned Amid an Inquiry

    • An Op-Ed Calls to Rename George Washington University for Its “Systemic Racism”

    • Boston University and Other Colleges Raise Tuition Price, Attributing It to Inflation

    • Bentley University Becomes One of the First Colleges Accepting Crypto for Tuition Payments

    • ASU Creates a Certified Program for Churches Facing Declining Membership

     

    Harvard, MIT, Stanford

    • MIT, Cambridge, and Stanford Are the World’s Best Universities, According to the QS Ranking

    • Harvard University’s President Will Step Down in June 2023

    • Harvard University Endowment Saw a Decline of 43% in Its Stock Portfolio in 2022

    • Stanford Will Launch a Summer Program for High-Growth Start-Ups

    • Sanjay Sarma, Director at MIT Open Learning and Digital Learning, Steps Down

     

    Policy

    • “Arming Our Teachers It’s Just Ludicrous,” Says Education Secretary Cardona

    • The Biden-Harris Administration Will Forgive $5.8B in Federal Loans to Students of Corinthian Colleges

    • The FBI Alerts that U.S. Academic Access Credentials Are on Sale on the Dark Web

    • A San Antonio School District Will Allow Qualified Teachers to Carry a Firearm

    • Advanced Technology Will Boost the Global Market to One Trillion by 2030

     

    Initiatives

    • Georgia State University Study Showed that Chatbots Helped Students

    • IMS Global Rebrands As 1EdTech Consortium

    • MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Selects Key Leaders and Features Innovative Start-Ups

    • The Obamas and Airbnb’s CEO Launch a $100M Scholarship Fund for Public Service

    • IBM Signed a Multi-Year Collaboration Agreement with Amazon Web Services

     

    2022 Events | All of the Key Conferences Listed!

    • Education Calendar 2022  – JUNE | JULY |  AUGUST | SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER | NOVEMBER | DECEMBER | Conferences in Latin America & Spain

     

     

     

    This newsletter was created in collaboration with IBL Education, a New York City-based company specializing in AI-driven, skills open source learning platforms. We also film and produce courses for universities and business organizations. Read the latest IBL Newsletter   |  Archive of Open edX Newsletters

     

  • Americans Support Student Loan Forgiveness Up to $10,000

    Americans Support Student Loan Forgiveness Up to $10,000

    IBL News | New York

    An overwhelming majority of Americans believe that the government should prioritize making college more affordable over forgiving existing student loans, according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll.

    Meanwhile, a narrow majority of Americans support forgiving up to $10,000 in federal student loans. But support wanes for a larger amount.

    In detail, the main findings point out to the following:

    • A majority (55%) of Americans support forgiving up to $10,000 of a person’s student loan debt.
    • Fewer Americans support forgiving up to $50,000 (47%) in student loans and forgiving all student loan debt (41%).
    • Roughly four in ten Americans support extending the current federal loan pause without forgiving any loan debt (42%) and ending the loan pause now without forgiving any loan debt (41%).
    • A wide majority of those with student loans support each of the three proposals asked about: forgiving $10,000 of student debt (84%), $50,000 of student debt (78%), and all student debt (68%).

    Americans and those with student loans alike prefer the government to make college cheaper than forgive student loans, according to the poll.

    Nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say that if the government does forgive some student loan debt, it should be for graduate and undergraduate debt, as opposed to just undergraduate debt (30%).

    A majority of Americans with student loan debt say they have not made any payments since the pause began. Instead, most say they have taken this opportunity to catch a financial break.

    Nearly half (47%) of Americans with student loan debt say that the federal student loan pause has improved their mental health.

    This poll — conducted over 1,022 Americans between June 3 and 5, 2022, with an oversample of more than 400 student loan borrowers — took place as President Biden plans an announcement on federal student loan forgiveness.

  • NASA Launches a Community and Education Initiative to Accelerate Open Science

    NASA Launches a Community and Education Initiative to Accelerate Open Science

    IBL News | New York

    NASA introduced its Open-Source Science initiative (OSSI) last month, which intends to build an open science community over the next decade and share software, data, and knowledge (algorithms, papers, documents, ancillary information) in the scientific process.

    One of the key components of the program is TOPS (Transform to Open Science), which provides visibility, advocacy, and community resources.

    “From 2022 to 2027, TOPS will accelerate the engagement of the scientific community in open science practices through events and activities,” explained NASA.

    Next year will be designated as the “Year of Open Science.” The goal will be to “spark change and inspire open science engagement through events and activities that will shift the current paradigm.”

    One of the projects will be an Open Science online learning platform, which will deliver courses about this subject for internal and public use. The launch of the first learning modules is scheduled for October 2022.

    [Disclosure: IBL Education, the parent company of this news service, has been selected to develop that educational platform using Open edX technology after an RFP process.] 

     

    Video: Keynote from Prof. Lorena Barba on Open Science 

  • A Report Shows that Businesses Must Dramatically Improve their Open Source Software Security

    A Report Shows that Businesses Must Dramatically Improve their Open Source Software Security

    IBL News | Austin, Texas

    Many organizations are currently ill-prepared to effectively manage security risks resulting from the use of open source applications, according to new research from The Linux Foundations and Snyk, a leading company in developer security. Organizations also lack strategies to address application vulnerabilities arising from code reuse.

    The report, titled The State of Open Source Security, was released today during the “Open Source Summit North America”, which will attract thousands of executives of the industry to a packed conference in Austin, Texas, this week [The report in PDF].

    The study suggests industry naivete about the state of open source security today.

    Specifically, the report — based on a survey of over 550 respondents and data scanned 1.3B open source projects — notes:

    • Over four out of every ten (41%) organizations don’t have high confidence in their open source software security.
    • Less than half (49%) of organizations have a security policy for OSS development or usage (and this number is a mere 27% for medium-to-large companies).
    • Three in ten (30%) organizations without an open source security policy openly recognize that no one on their team is directly addressing open source security.
    • The average application development project has 49 vulnerabilities and 80 direct dependencies (open source code called by a project).
    • The time it takes to fix vulnerabilities in open source projects has steadily increased, more than doubling from 49 days in 2018 to 110 days in 2021.
    • Forty percent of all vulnerabilities were found in transitive dependencies. Only 18% of respondents said they are confident of the controls they have in place for their transitive dependencies.

    “While open source software undoubtedly makes developers more efficient and accelerates innovation, the way modern applications are assembled also makes them more challenging to secure,” said Brian Behlendorf, General Manager at Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF).

    “Software developers today have their own supply chains – instead of assembling car parts, they are assembling code by patching together existing open source components with their unique code. While this leads to increased productivity and innovation, it has also created significant security concerns,”     said Matt Jarvis, Director of Developer Relations at Snyk.

    The goal of the report is to raise awareness and leverage these findings to further educate and equip developers, empowering them to continue to build fast, while staying secure.

  • Moodle Commercial Provider Open LMS Integrates Zoom-Built In Tool Class.com

    Moodle Commercial Provider Open LMS Integrates Zoom-Built In Tool Class.com

    IBL News | New York

    Moodle-based Open LMS announced this month a partnership with Class.com to offer an integrated tool to K-12, Higher Ed and the workplace.

    This solution will allow Open LMS users to launch synchronous sessions without leaving its environment with the Zoom-built in platform Class.com.

    “With this partnership, we also aim to simplify the technology purchasing journey,” said Open LMS.

    “The fact that Moodle is open source meant that the Class team could experiment with it in various ways and that they could work with Open LMS to leverage the power of the Moodle platform,” explained Phill Miller, Managing Director at Open LMS, in a blog post.

    Class recently purchased Anthology’s Blackboard Collaborate virtual conferencing tool, which is one of the products that Open LMS provides as integrated technology.

     

     

     

       

    • UC San Diego Reaches $3 Billion in Its Fundraising Campaign

      UC San Diego Reaches $3 Billion in Its Fundraising Campaign

      IBL News | New York

      UC San Diego announced this month it raised $3 billion, surpassing its original goal o $2 billion, through a multibillion-dollar, 10-years old campaign concluding on June 30, 2022.

      “In just over six decades, the University of California San Diego has become an international powerhouse in research, innovation, health care, the arts, and education,” said the institution.

      Over 163,000 people — friends, alumni, foundations, and corporations — have supported the university with gifts and grants of all sizes, providing funding to 453 different areas on campus.

      Around 100 national leaders and alumni collectively donated $1 billion to the campaign, and 46,500 alumni donated $253 million in gifts.

      Among other gifts and donations, they are the following:

      • Joan and Irwin Jacobs provided $100 million in support for the landmark Jacobs Medical Center at UC San Diego Health, which opened in late 2016.
      • Ernest and Evelyn Rady committed $100 million in 2015 to help recruit and retain faculty and fund strategic priorities at the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego, which they helped establish in 2004 with a $30 million lead gift.
      • Denny Sanford donated $100 million to the creation of the Sanford Stem Cell Clinical Center at UC San Diego Health in 2013. With another $100 million commitment, he went on to establish the T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion, which focused on research into the neurological basis of compassion.
      • With a $75 million donation, alumnus Taner Halıcıoğlu ’96 donated $75 million in the largest alumni gift the campus has ever received to establish the Halıcıoğlu Institute for Data Science at UC San Diego.
      • The late Franklin Antonio ’74 became the first alumnus to have a building named in his honor – Franklin Antonio Hall – after making a $30 million gift to support the Jacobs School of Engineering.

       

    • Business Skills Rise, But Technology Proficiency Drops Significantly In the US

      Business Skills Rise, But Technology Proficiency Drops Significantly In the US

      IBL News | New York

      Coursera’s latest Global Skills Report revealed that data science skills are declining in the U.S., lagging behind countries in Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East. American learners are showing higher proficiency in essential business skills, including marketing, leadership, management, strategy, and operations.

      Overall, the acceleration of digital transformation, inflation, and global instability are creating a new economy that is in high-demand for digital and human skills.

      Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO at Coursera, wrote, “the Great Resignation and automation are mandating stronger investments in human capital, as institutions must prioritize developing the high-demand digital and human skills required to build a competitive and equitable workforce.”

      “Our data shows these skills are not equally distributed, and students and low-wage workers need access to flexible, affordable, and fast-tracked pathways to entry-level digital jobs that offer a foundation for a stronger and more inclusive economy,” he added.

      The report, which for the first time highlights changes in ranking for each country, features one of the largest data sets measuring skill trends [See IBL News’ story].

      Specifically in the U.S., business skills proficiency rose, with key areas like leadership and management increasing from 40% in 2021 to 67% in 2022. Meanwhile, technology skills proficiency overall dropped significantly from 69% in 2021 to 43% this year. Proficiency in data science also fell sharply from 73% last year to 54% in 2022.

      • U.S. learners in the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and along the Pacific Coast had the highest skills proficiency in business, while those in the South lagged behind. Three Midwestern states, including Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana, ranked highest in business proficiency throughout the U.S.
      • Idaho showed the highest levels of technology skills in the country, outpacing tech hubs like California and Massachusetts. Learners in the state also earned a perfect 100% proficiency in mobile development skills. This reflects a growing trend driven by the number of high-tech companies in the state increasing 61% in the last decade.
      • Learners in the U.S. increased focus on human skills amid rapid workforce changes. Workforce disruption caused by the pandemic and the pace of automation is forcing businesses to quickly adapt. Human skills like resilience, project management, decision making, planning, storytelling, and experiments were increasingly popular among U.S. business learners as organizations worked to navigate change.
      • The U.S. achieves greater gender parity in overall course enrollments, but women still lag behind men in STEM. The online course enrollment rate for women reached its highest point (51%) in the last year, continuing a trend that started in 2020. Despite a rise in STEM enrollments from 35% in 2019 to 42% in 2022, women still trail men in the U.S.
      • The U.S. remains behind the curve in math skills. Proficiency in mathematics among U.S. learners dropped sharply from 56% in 2021 to 40% in 2022. This lags countries throughout Europe, including Germany at 81% and the U.K. at 78% proficiency. Maine, Washington, and New Hampshire had the highest levels of math proficiency in the U.S., while Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee finished in the bottom three.

      — The Skills Report in PDF

       

    • “Digital Skills Are the Language of the Modern Economy,” Says Coursera in Its 2022 Global Report

      “Digital Skills Are the Language of the Modern Economy,” Says Coursera in Its 2022 Global Report

      IBL News | New York

      Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO at Coursera, announced yesterday its Global Skills Report 2022, a global survey on skills proficiency and trends in business, technology, and data science, that uses data from over 100 million learners across 100 countries.

      The report features digital and human skills that are critical for growth and innovation and maps out career training pathways for employees to stay competitive. It provides skills proficiency per country, as shown in the graphics below.

      “With global instability and inflation on the rise, workers are increasingly looking to employers to provide job security and long-term career growth,” said Jeff Maggioncalda.

      “The ‘Great Resignation’ is also the ‘Great Reskilling’ with many learners now seeking career-building skills needed to start new careers in high-demand roles like IT, digital marketing, and data analysis,” he added.

      In the last year, the most popular skills in business, technology, and data science were leadership and management, probability and statistics, and theoretical computer science. However, according to the outcome of a recent survey, “not every worker needs to learn how to code, but adding digital skills to supplement foundational human and technical skills enables workers to maintain relevance as skills demands evolve.”

      In the same report, three-quarters of workers said they felt unprepared for jobs in the digital-first economy — where “digital skills are the shared language of the modern economy and are essential for economic success.”

      Other interesting outcomes are:

      • Lower levels of Internet access mean lower levels of skills proficiency. Countries with the lowest 25% of learner performance had lower access rates, around 54%.
      • Courses in human skills had more learners from developed countries. “People invest in human skills to effectively and ethically make use of digital skills, while digital skills provide a gateway to employment,” said Coursera.
      • Europe leads the world in skills proficiency. The Old Continent can be the model for global education, employment, and workforce leadership.
      • In the US, learners focused on human skills like project management, decision making, and planning.
      • Skills development drives opportunity and equity.

    • Cornerstone Pays $200 Million in Cash to Skillsoft for the SumTotal Learning Platform

      Cornerstone Pays $200 Million in Cash to Skillsoft for the SumTotal Learning Platform

      IBL News | New York

      Clearlake Capital–backed Cornerstone OnDemand Inc announced yesterday it entered into a definitive agreement with Skillsoft (NYSE: SKIL) to acquire the SumTotal SaaS learning platform for approximately $200 million in a cash transaction.

      In the 2022 fiscal year, SumTotal generated approximately $123 million in bookings and $120 million in revenue. Adjusted EBITDA was roughly $37 million excluding corporate allocations and around $25 million including corporate allocations.

      Skillsoft will use a portion of the net proceeds from the transaction to partially repay its senior secured term loan B facility.

      Richard Walker, Chief Corporate Strategy and Development Officer and President at SumTotal will continue his role as Skillsoft Chief Corporate Strategy and Development Officer.

      The transaction follows Cornerstone’s recent acquisition of EdCast, also for an undisclosed amount.

      “The combined company will be positioned to deliver a differentiated, expanded portfolio of learning, and talent,” said Himanshu Palsule, CEO of Cornerstone.

      “Together, we will continue our mission in helping organizations and their people to develop future-proof skills, flexibly grow their careers, and achieve shared success,” he added.

      “Through the divestiture of SumTotal, we are aligning and simplifying Skillsoft’s portfolio to serve our customers and focus our business on the best opportunities for profitable growth,” said Jeffrey Tarr, Chief Executive Officer of Skillsoft.

      The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2022, subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions.
      .