Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

Mental health and coaching start-up BetterUp closed this month its $300 million Series E fundraising, bringing the company’s valuation to $4.7 billion. The company has raised $600 million to date.

Wellington Management, ICONIQ Growth, and Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with participation from existing investors Salesforce Ventures and Mubadala Investment Company, also customers of BetterUp, along with Sapphire Ventures, Morningside Group, SV Angel, and PLUS Capital.

The San Francisco-based, eight-year-old company claims to be “the largest mental health and coaching startup in the world.” Last month, BetterUp acquired people experience platforms Motive and Impraise.

The new influx of capital will be used to open new offices in Munich, London, and Amsterdam, and “fuel new product innovation to further democratize coaching and reach hundreds of thousands of individuals within an enterprise.”

1/ I believe that Mental Health is THE issue of the decade- for families, companies, as well as healthcare providers. @BetterUp is a category-creating company providing a unique solution for employers to invest in the mental health of their employees. https://t.co/UzYNcIOK1v

— Emily Melton (@emelton) October 8, 2021

IBL News | New York

Instructure (NYSE: INST), the company behind the leading Canvas LMS, announced new features and functionalities for its platform during its annual InstructureCon education event, this week.

These functionalities — to be released this month — refer to updates on Discussions, Canvas for Elementary, Course Templates, Studio, Catalog, and Impact for K-12.

In the case of Canvas Studio, recent improvements include offering Chromebook support, administrator analytics, annotations, and improving accessibility with 2.1 WCAG Support.

Canvas Catalog plans to add a new shopping cart, the ability to bulk purchase courses, and integration with the Stripe payment gateway.

IBL News | New York

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released a range of jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree and are expected to be in high demand over the next ten years. [See the list below]

A high school diploma, associate’s degree, or a postsecondary non-degree award will be sufficient for these jobs. Community colleges often offer these programs.

Heightened demand for sustainable energy, an aging population, and renewed interest in self-care are three trends driving the rise of nearly all jobs, said Michael Wolf, Chief of Bureau of Labor Statistics Division at CNBC.

More specifically, the urgency of climate change and the resulting demand for sustainable energy are prompting wind turbine service technicians and solar photovoltaic installers.

Another high-demand area is healthcare. Occupational therapy assistants, physical therapy assistants, personal care aides, and physical therapist aides will become critical roles.

In addition, people are investing more in personal services like massages and self-enrichment courses, leading to increased demand for massage therapists and teachers.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics  Get the data

IBL News | New York

Microsoft announced a new pricing scheme for education customers. Starting November 1, the new Microsoft 365 AI for devices license will cost $38 per device for up to six years.

This new license will include cloud management, Minecraft: Education Edition, and the full suite of Microsoft 365 apps—including Office and Microsoft Teams.

The Seattle-based software giant explained that Microsoft Teams Content from camera will give educators and students the ability to share physical handwriting from a whiteboard or document using their laptop’s camera.

“Students will be able to see the whiteboard in real-time, even if their educator is standing in front of the whiteboard,” wrote the company in a blog post.

Microsoft Teams Content from camera joins other features included in Reading Progress and Speaker Coach in PowerPoint and Teams, and the new Reflect social-emotional learning characters in Teams.

The company will continue making Office 365 available free to users with an EDU e-mail address on a per-user basis.

IBL News | New York

Ivy League universities continue showing reticence to online learning, despite unprecedented growth of remote learning nationwide due to the pandemic. In terms of online degree programs, this elite group of colleges only offers about two dozen of them.

Author Robert Ubell explains that the Ivies fear that digital teaching will damage their centuries-long accumulated prestige. In their risk-averse, they believe their traditional pedagogy is the finest with no other approach coming close, especially not online.

In an article on EdSurge, Robert Ubell — Vice Dean Emeritus of Online Learning at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, columnist, and author of the essay Going Online: Perspectives on Digital Learning — writes that “nothing can topple their exalted position at the pinnacle of the academic world, least of all online students clacking away on keyboards far from campus.”

In addition, Ivy League colleges now offer over 450 MOOC-style courses.

“Donors—who have made the Ivies astonishingly wealthy, now with combined endowments totaling more than $140 billion—are highly unlikely to stop giving if their alma maters go online more aggressively,” said Robert Ubell.

Currently, these are the online degree programs by Ivy League universities:

IBL News | New York

Udemy.com filed regulatory paperwork for an IPO (initial public offering) yesterday, in the wake of the successful Duolingo’s and Coursera’s launch in the secondary market this year. The company plans to be listed on the Nasdaq under the symbol “UDMY.” Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan will be the lead underwriters for the IPO.

In the filing, the San Francisco-based company showed that its revenue grew 55.6% to $429.9 million in 2020 from a year earlier. However, the start-up incurred a net loss of $77.6 million.

Udemy learning platform has raised to date over $300 million, which will give the company a valuation of about $3.2 billion. However, the company is expected to go public at a much higher valuation, according to Reuters.

Its main investors are Insight Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Mindrock Capital, and Tencent.

Udemy claims to provide over 183,000 courses to 44 million learners in its platform, while its corporate business, named Udemy for Business (UB), is being used by 42% of Fortune 100 companies.

Among other companies, it competes with the likes of Pluralsight, Skillsoft, LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, and edX.

IBL News | New York

Researchers from MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab released this month a report investigating teaching and learning during the pandemic.

The primary finding was that “teachers have not been valued as partners in designing educational response to COVID.”

This exclusion from decision-making processes has demoralized teachers, “especially when combined with worsening working conditions and widening inequalities.”

The report — titled “The Teachers Have Something to Say: Lessons Learned from U.S. PK-12 Teachers During the COVID-impacted 2020-21 School Year”— concludes that “teachers have developed a variety of effective instructional strategies in response to the challenging conditions of COVID.”

After noting that “the Delta variant is already disrupting school openings across the country,” the report forecasts that the most effective school systems will be “those that listen seriously to the concerns and insights of teachers and include them in design and decision-making.”

IBL News | New York

Stanford University reached an agreement to takes steps to acquire the Notre Dame de Namur University’s (NDNU) 50-acre campus in Belmont, California, for an undisclosed amount.

This Wednesday, the two schools announced the agreement, which gives Stanford the exclusive right to buy the property until June 15, 2025.

Notre Dame de Namur University’s (NDNU), a private non-profit Roman Catholic institution established in 1851, will continue its operations until the sale is complete.

In the face of a financial crisis, after years of declining enrollment and tuition revenue, Notre Dame de Namur announced in January that it would “transform into a primarily graduate and online university.”

Beth Martin, President of Notre Dame de Namur, said in a statement that the institution “will be able to continue the programs for which we are so well known, and to add new programs directly targeted to changing student needs, including a mix of in-person, hybrid, and fully online programs.”