Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

Data cloud company Cloudera (CLDR) announced yesterday that it will be acquired by private equity firms Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (CD&R) and KKR, in an all-cash transaction valued at $5.3 billion.

The transaction will result in Cloudera — today with a market cap of $3.7 billion — becoming a private company.

Activist investor Carl Icahn, who had an 18% stake in Cloudera, was pushing for the deal. Now, along with other shareholders, will get a 24% premium, that is, $16.00 in cash per share. Prior to the market opening yesterday, the stock was traded at $12.86.

The closing of the deal is subject to the approval of Cloudera shareholders and antitrust approval.

In 2018, Cloudera merged with Hortonworks, another key startup in the Hadoop space, for $5.2 billion. It also bought Datacoral and Cazena, two startups that would help the company to reposition itself in the big data self-service market.

The Hadoop software was the way to process big data a decade ago.

Cloudera went public in 2018, closing at $18.09 a share after raising $1 billion. The vast majority of that was a $740 million investment from Intel Capital in 2014. In December 2020, Cloudera bought Intel’s stake for $314 million.

Cloudera’s Hadoop powered the edX Insight Analytics platform. In addition, Cloudera used the Open edX platform for a part of its internal training.

 

IBL News | New York

The controversial billionaire investor George Soros — whose hedge fund has earned an average annualized return of 33% from 1970 to 2020 — has strongly recommended this month buying Coursera’s stock (COUR).

Moreover, Coursera is one of the three “Strong Buy” stocks recommended, along with luxury goods and brands Fartech, Ltd (FTCH) and Sotera Health (SHC), according to Nasdaq.com.

Soros Fund Management took a position of 105,000 shares, valued at $4 million, at Coursera’s IPO at the end of March this year. Overall, the IPO raised $519 million, before expenses.

In this regard, 5-star analyst Ryan MacDonald, of Needham, laid out a clear case:

“Given the increasing role of automation, the widening skills gap, and the shift to online learning, we believe Coursera’s comprehensive platform will help it gain share in a large TAM that we size between $47B-$50.6B.”

To this end, MacDonald rates COUR shares a Buy and his $56 price target indicates confidence in a 47% upside over the next 12 months.

Despite analysts’ support, the stock is at $38.53, below its opening on March 31 when it closed at $45.

Yesterday, Coursera announced that 16 new universities and higher ed institutions across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa embraced its initiative of Coursera for Campus.

On the other hand, Tencent Cloud will roll out in the coming months, several courses designed to develop in-demand cloud skills, starting with the beginner-level Tencent Cloud Practitioner class.

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MAY – JUNE 2021 – NEWSLETTER #37  |  Breaking news at IBL News  |  Noticias en Español

 

edX 

• “The New Normal Will Be Blended Education,” Says Agarwal at the Annual Open edX Conference

• A Course from Penn on edX About the Potential to Fight Diseases with mRNA Vaccines

• The Linux Foundation and CNCF Issue a Free Kubernetes on Edge Training on edX.org

• UNESCO Releases Its Learning, Open edX-Based Platform

 

Coursera

• SUNY’s Class on Solar Energy and Panel Installations Gets Over 50,000 Enrollments

• Coursera’s Stock Price Drops Despite Analysts’ Endorsement

• Coursera Partners with Microsoft to Launch a Certificate on Azure

• Coursera Announces Five New Degrees While the Stock Drops Below the Debut Day

 

Learning Platform Raising Funds

• Engageli.com Nabs Another $33 Million While Announcing the Launch of the Platform

• MasterClass.com Continues Its Funding Spree Raising Another $225 Million

• Outlier.org Raises Another $30 Million for Expanding Its Catalog of College-Level Courses

• Thinkific Goes Public on the Toronto Stock Exchange and Raises $129 Million

• Blackboard’s Former CEO Attracts More Millions for Its Zoom-Based Startup

• The French OpenClasrooms.com Raises $80 Million for Its International Expansion

 

Initiatives

• The Moodle Platform Company Buys Three Partners and Creates Moodle US

• Thinkific.com Creates an App Store for the Integration of External Tools

 

2021 Events | All of the Key Conferences Listed!

• Education Calendar  –  MAY — JUNE — JULY-DECEMBER  |  Conferences in Latin America & Spain

 

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This newsletter is created in collaboration with IBL Education, a New York City-based company specializing in AI-driven learning platforms and communities. We also a course production studio. Read the latest IBL Newsletter   |  Archive of Open edX Newsletters• Coursera’s CEO Says that Its Valuation Won’t Drop After the Pandemic Winds Down

• Coursera Rallies 36% on Its Debut, Giving the Company a Whopping Valuation of $5.8 Billion

• Coursera.org Aims for a Valuation of Over $4 Billion on its IPO

 

Initiatives

• Instructure Launches a Tool that Assesses Students’ Learning Loss During the Pandemic

• Udacity Launches its School of Cybersecurity to Address Market’s Demand

 

Learning Platforms

• Degreed Reaches a Valuation of $1.4 Billion After Raising $153 Million

• The OpenSAP Micro-Learning Free Platform Reaches Five Million Enrollments

 

2021 Events | All of the Key Conferences Listed!

• Education Calendar  –  APRIL — MAY — JUNE — JULY-DECEMBER  |  Conferences in Latin America & Spain

 

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This newsletter is created in collaboration with IBL Education, a New York City-based company specializing in AI–driven learning platforms and communities. We also a course production studio. Read the latest IBL Newsletter   |  Archive of Open edX Newsletters

IBL News | New York

“The new normal will be blended education in 2025,” said Anant Agarwal, Founder and CEO at edX during the annual Open edX Conference, which took place in a virtual format yesterday. “50% will be online and 50% in person,” he explained.

During the conference’s opening keynote, Mr. Agarwal predicted that the shift will also impact the corporate world. “Remote work and learning are here to stay, and all businesses will go into some kind of blended work model.”

Anant Agarwal stated that “edX has become the movement of the moment”. The non-profit organization created by MIT and Harvard reached 38 million learners and 1,000 corporations as clients. [See slides below].

The 2021 Open edX virtual conference — which attracted a limited audience on a paid subscription platform — hosted Sanjay Sarma, Vice President of Open Learning at MIT, as the main speaker. He elaborated about the future of work.

Sarina Canelake, an edX engineering manager, revealed that 70% of total code contributions on the Open edX platform come from its community of developers.

One of the successful case studies analyzed was the Harvard University-promoted initiative LabXchange.org. Launched in January 2020, this educational platform has attracted 6.2 million unique users to date.

As an upcoming development, in addition to the new version of the Open edX platform called Lilac, Marco Morales, from edX, announced that the organization was working on an app that will include “a fully mobile learning experience,” not dependant on the desktop version.

[Disclosure: IBL Education, the parent company of IBL News, uses Open edX software in its platforms]

 

A lot of friends playing to grow @openedx and doing some insights with @agarwaledu & @nedbat about the last year and trends and needs in online learning. The @graspway team sends thanks for the event and a lot of strength to keep changing the world with #opensource pic.twitter.com/MwTk77jso7

— Javier Viñuales (@vigu) May 27, 2021

IBL News | New York

While the frenzy over cryptocurrencies continues in Wall Street — despite a severe correction last week — colleges and universities launch a message to donors: we are happy to accept your crypto.

In addition to cash, art, land, or stock, institutions understand that gifting cryptocurrency — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Ripple… — is quite beneficial for donors since the money goes directly to the university, avoiding to pay capital gains tax.

Colleges and universities also do not have to pay capital gains taxes on the gift, because nonprofit organizations are exempt from many taxes.

IBL News | New York

The Economist organization announced yesterday that its new division of Education launched its first course: “The New Global Order: How politics, business, and technology are changing.”

This 6-week, 6 to 8 hours per week course is part of a new online executive education program, designed “to give business executives an edge in their careers.” It is priced at around $2,000 and has been created in collaboration with GetSmarter, a 2U subsidiary.

“What makes this program different is that it is created by Economist journalists and features experts from around the world,” said a representative of The Economist to IBL News yesterday.

“Twenty Economist journalists helped to put together the first course and a number of high-level outside speakers will present including Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia, and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google.”

The second course of Economist Education will be on How to Write and is scheduled for the Fall.

IBL News | New York

Around 460 million children experienced reading difficulties in 2020. That number jumped by 20% to 584 million in 2020, due to the COVID-19 crisis and the school closures.

This dramatic increase of 100 million children falling behind the minimum proficiency level in reading is wiping out two decades of education gains, according to UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency. The recovery to the pre-pandemic pathway may take a decade, says this institution.

The UNESCO’s study One year into COVID: Prioritizing education recovery to avoid a generational catastrophe elaborates on the learning losses. “It’s a generational catastrophe,” states the report.

The partial or complete shutdown has disrupted schooling for an average of 25 weeks, especially in Latin America and Caribbean countries, as well as in Central and Southern Asia.

To tackle the problem, UNESCO is calling for schools to reopen “with greater support for teachers; initiatives to prevent pupils from dropping out, and an acceleration of the availability of digital learning tools.”

The problem of lack of learning gets aggravated with the fact that many nations — one in eight in the world — spend more on debt than education, health, and social protection combined, says a recent report from UNICEF, UN Children’s Fund.

In this regard, Henrietta Fore, Chief at UNICEF, called for a global effort, with international agencies, creditors, and national governments acting together for debt relief and restructuring. “The personal and public costs are enormous, leaving children, their communities, and their countries with little hope for sustainable economic and social development,” Fore explained.

One year into the #COVID19 crisis, 2 in 3 students worldwide are still affected by full or partial school closures. @UNESCO’s high-level event finds solutions on how to prioritize education recovery & avoid a generational catastrophe. https://t.co/cjm2onqPSq #LearningNeverStops pic.twitter.com/G563M8TfG4

— UNESCO 🏛️ #Education #Sciences #Culture 🇺🇳😷 (@UNESCO) March 25, 2021

IBL News | New York

Singapore-based Emeritus.org announced this week the acquisition of ID Tech, an American leading summer camp company specialized in youth STEM education, for $200 million.

The transaction — which was made through Emeritus’ parent company Eruditus — marks  Emeritus’ expansion into K12 STEM education. Based in Campbell, California, ID Tech will operate independently.

STEM career opportunities are projected to grow exponentially, with an estimated 3.5 million jobs in the U.S. alone that need to be filled by 2025.

Emeritus hosts over 200 short courses, online degree programs, boot camps, and CXO programs offered in collaboration with 50 top universities. The main skills taught are related to AR/VR, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, software engineering, design thinking, and leadership to professionals.

“We believe that proficiency and mastery of skills should begin in K12, and that iD Tech will be instrumental as we jointly pursue our goal of closing STEM skills gaps globally,” said Ashwin Damera, Co-Founder and CEO at Emeritus.