Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

The former edX Inc. organization, which now stewards the Open edX software, has adopted as an interim name The Center for Reimagining Learning, Inc.

This surviving nonprofit organization, still led by MIT and Harvard University, will announce a permanent name in the future, as a blog post the Open edX website announced this week.

The Center for Reimagining Learning, Inc. is a Delaware corporation.

The edX brand, along with the edX Inc. organization, was acquired by the for-profit, publicly traded, and global education company 2U, Inc. last June for $800 million. The transaction was completed on November 16, 2021.

Along with the name, the new organization issued a new Open edX Contributor License Agreement (CLA), “changing where the source code is contributed and the agreement from a grant of ownership to a grant of license.”

The Center for Reimagining Learning, Inc., governed by a board of trustees appointed by Harvard and MIT, said that “it expects to pursue its original mission through research and thought leadership activities that improve the accessibility and viability of online education and advance technical innovations for teaching and learning including via ongoing support for the Open edX open-source platform.”

In terms of the code, the public repositories that encompass the Open edX platform have been moved from the edX GitHub organization to the Open edX organization.

IBL News | New York

Five major publishers — McGraw Hill, Pearson, Macmillan Learning, Cengage, and Elsevier — sued Canadian Shopify Inc., saying that the e-commerce company is failing to remove listing and stores that violate trademarks and copyright.

These publishers claim that Shopify is liable for the unauthorized school textbooks, test packs, and solutions manuals sold by websites using Shopify’s online tools.

The lawsuit was filed in Virginia federal court on Wednesday.

Ottawa-based e-commerce start-up, with 1.75 million businesses hosted and a market value of $180 billion, said that its policy outlines that “these practices are not permitted on our platform.” “We have multiple teams that handle potential violations, including copyright and trademark infringement, and we don’t hesitate to action stores when found in violation.”

The plaintiffs asserted that Shopify received detailed legal notices nearly every week since 2017 identifying specific vendors who commit piracy.

The lawsuit contends, “Shopify knows that it is assisting subscribers to infringe, but it does not care.” (…) “It provides its repeat-infringer subscribers with the tools they need to run their illegal businesses, but also provides them with anonymity, a false veneer of legitimacy, and a safe haven from which to break the law.”

Textbook piracy, in part, is driven by the soaring prices of textbooks and learning materials. Textbook costs rose 88% between 2006 and 2016, according to a study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

IBL News | New York

Online Q&A discussion platform Piazza introduced a new training program for universities to help institutions scale the adoption of this tool.

Through this program, universities will be able to appoint “independent Piazza Specialists”, empower institutions’ admins to quickly respond to faculty requests and inquiries, and share best practices, among other measures.

These specialists will attend training sessions on how to use the Q&A platform. They will also take advantage of personalized demos, covering the accessibility feature Piazza Lite,  the mobile app and web interface, and LTI 1.3 connection.

Palo Alto, California-based Piazza — used by 30,000 professors — said that it can create custom sessions and provide support to faculty geared toward solving different use cases.

Every live training session is recorded and provided to Piazza Specialists so they may leverage it in their admin and instructor training materials or as a future reference.

“We have built an incredible support team that is at the ready to help each institution and its instructors get the most out of Piazza’s features,” said Pooja Sankar, CEO of Piazza.

IBL News | New York

Colombian start-up Griky.co, which aims to become the leading life-long learning in Latin America, announced it raised $5 million in a seed round led by the private equity fund Enfoca.

Griky’s Founder and CEO, Andrés Núñez, explained that Enfoca “is the disruptive investor we’ve been seeking for a long time.”

“This funding will allow us to consolidate our learning platform and achieve our goal of reaching a million students at the end of 2022,” said Andrés Núñez to IBL News.

“This way, we will become the leading learning platform for universities and businesses in Latin America.”

Founded in 2019, Griky has served over 20 universities and 10 companies, with a total of 200,000 learners in seven countries to date.

“With Griky, universities are able to implement in four weeks their own branded ecosystem with over 50,000 educational resources,” explained Andrés Núñez.

The platform uses Open edX-based technology provided by IBL Education, the parent company of the IBL News service.

IBL News | New York

USAF (U.S. Air Force) partnered with Udacity to develop job-ready instructional content, according to the learning platform.

IBL News | New York

Georgetown University announced a Master in Strategic Digital Transformation,
intended for working professionals, and scheduled to launch in Fall 2022. “It is one of the few master’s degrees in the U.S. that focuses on business innovation, organizational change, and digital transformation,” said Dean Kelly Otter.

This 33 credits degree, priced at $48,939, will be delivered by Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies (SCS). Students will be able to enroll on either a part-time or full-time basis and will have options online, on-campus, or hybrid.

“The program will instruct students on business strategy development, transformation, and decision-making,” according to the institution. “It will empower students with the knowledge and tools needed to be agents of change in their organizations, or to build exciting new ventures,” stated Kelly Otter.

The courses will employ executives from Afiniti, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Telos, and Google as adjunct professors.

IBL News | New York

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning, cloud computing, and 5G will be the most important technologies in 2022, according to a survey to global technology leaders from the U.S., U.K., China, India, and Brasil, conducted by IEEE.

These 350 chief technology and information officers and IT directors agreed that the pandemic accelerated the adoption of those tools.

The survey, titled “The Impact of Technology in 2022 and Beyond: an IEEE Global Study”, stated that 95% of tech leaders said that AI will drive the majority of innovation across nearly every industry sector in the next 1 to 5 years.

These surveyed executives consider eight areas as most benefited from 5G:

IBL News | New York

Google introduced this month an updated version of its citation feature for Google Docs.

The feature is intended to allow an easy search of cited materials on books and online sources and then add them, formatted, into Google Docs.

The tool will be available automatically for end-users. It is expected to roll out in late November to early December.

“By automating part of the source creation process, and ensuring correct formatting, we hope to save you time and reduce manual errors while managing citations,” said Google in a blog post.

This feature will be introduced in all languages, but the elements the tool generates in the user document only will appear in English at this time.
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