Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

edX and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) will launch on May 25 a course about the science behind mRNA vaccines and their potential to radically change the way diseases are fought in the future.

The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Use of mRNA Vaccines course is taught by Dr. Drew Weissman, professor of Infectious Diseases at Penn Medicine, a pioneer of the mRNA vaccine technology.

Dr. Drew Weissman’s groundbreaking research forms a foundational part of the two mRNA vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna against Covid.

Now Weissman and researchers across Penn are investigating mRNA vaccines and treatments for HIV, influenza, and cancer.

The short, free 6-hour course is designed for non-medical professionals looking to understand more about mRNA vaccines.

IBL News | New York

Engageli.com, a Palo Alto-based collaborative learning platform designed in 2020 to give an answer to Zoom’s teaching limitation, raised another $33 million in Series A this month.

The round was co-led by Maveron and Corner Ventures. Additional investors included Good Friends, Educapital, and other technology executives. The venture capital firms that invested in Engageli’s seed round also participated in Series A.

To date, Engageli has raised over $47 million.

“The new capital will be used to further scale Engageli’s product development and fuel its continued growth,” said Dan Avida, co-founder and CEO of Engageli.

In parallel, Engageli also announced the spring release of its platform, which includes key features like attendance tracking, LMS integration, a speaker panel, and co-instructor capabilities.

“Higher education institutions, instructors, and students are looking towards a future where multiple modalities for learning exist in parallel — in person teaching, synchronous and asynchronous online education, as well as hybrid models. Engageli’s platform is designed to support and enhance all these modalities,” said Dan Avida, co-founder and CEO of Engageli.

Coursera’s Co-Founder and CEO of Insitro Daphne Koller and her husband, computer scientist Dan Avida launched Engageli last fall. Serge Plotkin was also on the founding team.

https://youtu.be/RNJTjSP-ElQ

Resources:

• IBL News, October 2020: Another Zoom Challenger: Engageli Capitalizes on Video Conferencing Limitations

• IBL News, April 2021: Blackboard’s Former CEO Attracts More Millions for Its Zoom-Based Startup

• TECHCRUNCH, May 2021: Engageli nabs $33M more for its collaborative video-based teaching platform

IBL News | New York

Google introduced this week during its year I/O Developer event, Smart Canvas, a workspace collaborative tool that puts docs, productivity, and video together. It means that users can have a video call as they work on a shared document together.

Many people in higher education use shared documents while they are on a video call, either with Google Meet, Zoom, Webex, or another tool.

The search giant said that its Smart Canvas enhances every day’s collaborative documents, like Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, with dozen new features, including emoji reactions in Doc and timeline view in Sheets.

Another interesting feature was support for live captions and translations in Google Meet. This puts Google in competition with other meeting transcription services, like Otter.ai.

IBL News | New York

Thinkific launched its App Store, intended to allow course creators to add interactive elements, games, and one-on-one lessons to their classes.

To date, the Canadian platform for course creation hosts 30 third-party applications.

The company encourages using Zapier if that external app is not on the list.

Riley Webster, from Thinkific, wrote that “connecting apps to their site will keep students glued to the course.”

This app ecosystem includes apps such as Zoom, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Typeform, Active Campaign, Shopify, and Intercom, among others.

Marketing automation-related tools for lead conversion are one of the selling points.

Thinkfic highlights the message that the use of these apps will result in an increase in audience and more revenues on courses.

IBL News | New York

Nearly 73% of students say that they would prefer to take some of their courses fully online after the pandemic is gone. A total of 68% of them would choose hybrid learning.

Faculty members are less in favor of online learning. Only 53% would prefer to teach fully online. 57% prefer hybrid.

These are the main outcomes of a survey commissioned by Cengage and conducted by Bay View Analytics. The survey polled 1,469 students and 1,286 faculty and administrators across the U.S.

In terms of digital instructional materials and resources, around 75% of faculty and students claim that they would like to use more technology in the future.

Robert Hansen, CEO at UPCEA, stated that “the pandemic did not threaten but in fact accelerated the long-term growth, acceptance, and desirability of online learning, and those numbers will only improve, as emergency remote offerings are rebuilt as modern online courses and programs.”

IBL News | New York

UNESCO — the United Nations agency for education — launched this month its Open Learning platform for online course development and dissemination of topics.

Co-founded by the Government of Flanders in Belgium, the platform includes courses from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), IHE-Delft, and Waternet, among other learning partners.

The initial focus of the courses will be on science-related topics such as water resources management, Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), climate change adaptation, remote sensing, information, and communications technologies (ICT).

The UNESCO’s (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) platform is built on Open edX.

Dr. Koen Verbist, a Programme Specialist at UNESCO, explained to edX that “empowering learners to become active global citizens is key to UNESCO’s overarching education goal of promoting a more just, inclusive, peaceful and sustainable world, based on respect for fundamental human rights.”

IBL News | New York

MasterClass.com announced this week another round of financing of $225 million in series F.

The funding was led by Fidelity Management & Research Company with participation from new investors including Baillie Gifford, Balyasny Asset Management, and Eldridge together with existing investors IVP, Javelin, NEA, and Owl Ventures.

To date, the funding of Master Class has been $475 million. Last year’s round was closed at $100 million on Series E.

The San Francisco-based company said it will use the funding to increase content production, international expansion, and launch of new Enterprise business to serve both SMBs and large corporations.

The startup also plans to open an office in easter Canada this year, and to expand its current workforce of 380 to over 500 in 2021.

“MasterClass enables that, with our incredible roster of instructors, cinematic production capabilities, and singular focus on restoring the joy of learning,” said David Rogier, founder, and CEO of MasterClass.

MasterClass.com’s courses feature about 20 video lessons, at an average of 10 minutes per lesson.

“You can learn on your own terms—in bite-size pieces or in a single binge. Cinematic visuals and close-up, hands-on demonstrations make you feel like you’re one-on-one with the instructors, while the downloadable instructor guides help reinforce your learning,” advertises the company.

IBL News | New York

The ASU+GSV Summit, which attracts EdTech top investors and entrepreneurs, announced this week its second annual GSV Cup Elite 200 competition for startups. It will be the world’s largest pitch competition for EdTech Startups, according to the organization. They develop what GSV calls “Weapons of Mass Instruction.”

A total of 200 educational companies at the pre-seed and seed stage have been selected by a panel of 152 VCs and managers. Among those judges were investors from Accel, Alexa Fund, Brand Capital International, Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders Circle Capital, Owl Ventures, and Reach Capital. Over 700 applications were received.

They will compete for $1 million in prizes while pitching at the ASU+GSV Summit live and in-person August 9-11, 2021 in San Diego, California. The prizes will consist of $550,000 in non-dilutive capital and $450,000 in Google Cloud credits.

“As the world moves from a BC to AD reality — before coronavirus to after disease — we have arrived at the dawn of the age of digital learning,” said Deborah Quazzo, managing partner of GSV Ventures [in the picture above].

IBL News | New York

Iona College, in New Rochelle, New York, announced this week it will finally acquire Concordia College’s 28-acre campus in Bronxville, New York, where it will set a school of health sciences. Iona will also introduce new student programming in the performing arts, varsity, and club athletics.

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, nor how many former Concordia employees might be employed by Iona.

Concordia will cease academic instruction before the fall semester of 2021.

Founded in 1940 by the Congregation of Christian Brothers, Iona is a master’s-granting private, Catholic institution with a total enrollment of nearly 4,000 students.

It offers undergraduate degrees in liberal arts, science, and business administration, as well as Master of Arts, Master of Science, and Master of Business Administration degrees and numerous advanced certificate programs. The Princeton Review recognized Iona’s on-campus MBA program as a “Best Business School for 2020.” Iona College also recently launched a new, fully online MBA program.

IBL News | New York

Suny Online’s Solar Energy Basics course on Coursera hit this month a milestone of 50,000-plus enrollments.

Launched in 2019, the course is in the top 10 enrollments of SUNY courses on the Coursera platform, out of approximately 60 courses.

The course, subtitled into eight languages, was developed by Dr. Neal Abrams, Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry with instructional design and technical support from the Open Academy.

This class offers an introduction to the fundamentals of solar power as it applies to solar panel system installations. It teaches to compare solar energy to other energy resources and explains how solar panels, or photovoltaics (PV for short), convert sunlight to electricity.

Solar Energy Basics is one of three courses on solar energy for Coursera developed by Abrams to provide learners with a foundation for designing photovoltaic systems.

The second course, Solar Energy System Design was launched in the summer of 2020. The third one will launch this summer.

Abrams has also been using these courses as part of a credit-bearing course this semester on the online Sustainability Management program, SUS 496- Solar Power: PV Design & Installation.