IBL News

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  • 2U/edX Offers Scholarships for Cybersecurity and Data Analytics Boot Camps in Tulsa

    2U/edX Offers Scholarships for Cybersecurity and Data Analytics Boot Camps in Tulsa

    IBL News | New York

    2U Inc’s edX announced a partnership with Tulsa Community College (TCC) and Tulsa Innovation Labs (TIL) to fund a scholarship initiative called the Cyber Skills Center, intended to increase the technical talent pipeline in the area.

    This scholarship will give eighty Tulsa adult learners access to free, fully online boot camp tech training programs in cybersecurity and data analytics.

    The first boot camp cohorts — applications are now open — will begin in October 2022.

    Boot camp graduates will enjoy career opportunities along with credits.

    The scholarship is funded with support from TIL’s partner, the George Kaiser Family Foundation.

    This initiative is part of edX’s Access Partnerships, a public-private partnerships program that connects colleges and universities with local workforce agencies and funding partners to offer adult learners affordable tech skills pathways. Programs currently active include Kansas University, University of Central Florida, University of Oregon, University of Utah, University of Denver, University of California-Davis, University of Minnesota, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas at San Antonio, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Wisconsin Extension, and the University of Birmingham.

    Since 2016, over 55,000 learners have graduated from boot camps offered at over 50 colleges and universities that are 2U partners.

     

  • Harvard University Starts the Search for Its Next President

    Harvard University Starts the Search for Its Next President

    IBL News | New York

    The Harvard Corporation has begun the search for the University’s 30th president. For that, the institution has started to hear diverse views and thoughts from across the Harvard community.

    The presidential search follows Larry Bacow’s announcement that he will step down from the presidency in June 2023, at the end of the 2022-2023 academic year.

    Penny Pritzker, Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation and Chair of the presidential search committee, invited the Harvard community to submit advice and nominations of individuals for the role. Advisory committees of faculty, students, and staff will structure community input.

    “We seek a person of high intellectual distinction, with proven qualities of leadership, a devotion to excellence in education and research, a capacity to guide a complex institution through times of change, a talent for advancing progress and collaboration across a wide span of domains, a commitment to embracing diversity along many dimensions as a source of strength, and a dedication to the ideals and values central to our community of learning,” Pritzker wrote in a message to the community.

    She continued: “We aim to identify a president who, like past Harvard leaders, will bring not only a deep devotion to Harvard’s excellence but also a passion for how Harvard — through its myriad programs and extraordinary people — can be a force for good in the world.”

    The members of the presidential search committee are:

    • Timothy R. Barakett, A.B. ’87, M.B.A. ’93, chair, TRB Advisors;
    • Kenneth I. Chenault, J.D. ’76, chair and managing director, General Catalyst Partners, and former chair and CEO, American Express;
    • Paul Choi, A.B. ’86, J.D. ’89, partner, Sidley Austin LLP;
    • Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar, president, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and former justice, Supreme Court of California;
    • Paul J. Finnegan, A.B. ’75, M.B.A. ’82, co-CEO, Madison Dearborn Partners;
    • Carla A. Harris, A.B. ’84, M.B.A. ’87, senior client adviser, Morgan Stanley, and former chair, National Women’s Business Council;
    • Tyler Jacks, A.B. ’83, Koch Professor of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and president, Break Through Cancer;
    • Carolyn (Biddy) Martin, president, Amherst College;
    • Karen Gordon Mills, A.B. ’75, M.B.A. ’77, former administrator, U.S. Small Business Administration, senior fellow, Harvard Business School, and president, MMP Group;
    • Diana L. Nelson, A.B. ’84, co-chair, Carlson Holdings, and former chair, Carlson;
    • Tracy Pun Palandjian, A.B. ’93, M.B.A. ’97, CEO and co-founder, Social Finance;
    • Penny Pritzker (chair), A.B. ’81, founder and chair, PSP Partners, and former U.S. Secretary of Commerce;
    • David M. Rubenstein, co-founder and non-executive co-chair, The Carlyle Group;
    • Shirley M. Tilghman, LL.D. ’04 (hon.), president emerita and professor of molecular biology and public affairs, Princeton University;
    • Theodore V. Wells Jr., J.D. ’76, M.B.A. ’76, partner, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP.

    Penny Pritzker, a former U.S. secretary of commerce, civic and business leader, nonprofit trustee, and philanthropist, has served on the Corporation since 2018.

  • META Engineers Build a Universal Translator of 200 Languages in Open Source Software

    META Engineers Build a Universal Translator of 200 Languages in Open Source Software

    IBL News | New York

    META, the social media conglomerate META, will open source a newly engineered AI model that can translate into 200 different languages.

    This tool, called No Language Left Behind, is part of Meta’s R&D project to create a universal speech translator, which would help the growth of Facebook, Instagram, virtual reality destinations, and other of its social media properties. The open source approach — with the code available on GitHub — is taken to attract more technicians to the development work.

    In an abstract, Meta explains that this universal translator is “driven by the goal of eradicating language barriers on a global scale” with the help of machine learning technologies.

    From a technical perspective, “it’s a conditional compute model based on Sparsely Gated Mixture of Experts that is trained on data obtained with novel and effective data mining techniques tailored for low-resource languages.”

    The model, that lays the groundwork for a universal translation system, achieves an improvement of 44% BLEU (which stands for Bilingual Evaluation Understudy).

    • Technical Description of the Project (PDF)

  • About 222 Million School-Aged Children Around the World Need Education Support

    About 222 Million School-Aged Children Around the World Need Education Support

    IBL News | New York

    Conflicts, wars, refugee displacement, and the COVID pandemic are taking a huge toll on children’s education. Millions of vulnerable children are holding on to the hope that education will allow them to fulfill their dreams.

    Specifically, the number of crisis-impacted school-aged children requiring educational support has grown from an estimated 75 million in 2016 to 222 million today, according to a report released by the United Nations.

    This research outlines that of those 222 million girls and boys, as many as 78.2 million are out of school. Close to 120 million in attendance are not achieving minimum proficiency in math or reading.

    In fact, just one in ten crisis-impacted children attending primary or secondary education are actually meeting proficiency standards.

    The most impacted countries are Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Yemen.

    “We need governments, businesses, foundations, and individuals to support the vital work of Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the UN global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises,” said the UN Secretary, General António Guterres.

    In September, in New York, during the 77th UN General Assembly, the UN will celebrate a summit titled Transforming Education to deal with this problem. “The Summit seeks to mobilize political ambition, action, solutions, and solidarity to transform education: to take stock of efforts to recover pandemic-related learning losses; to reimagine education systems for the world of today and tomorrow; to revitalize national and global efforts to achieve SDG-4,” states the UN.

    Gordon Brown, UN Special Envoy for Global Education and Chair of ECW’s High-Level Steering Group, called for more financial resources “to ensure that every child and young person can receive a quality education exist in the world”. He added: “Governments, private sector, and foundations can and must unlock these resources”.

     

  • The tCRIL Organization Releases Nutmeg, the 14th Version of the Open edX Platform

    The tCRIL Organization Releases Nutmeg, the 14th Version of the Open edX Platform

    IBL News | New York

    The Center for Reimagining Learning (tCRIL) — the MIT’s and Harvard University’s non-profit organization that manages the Open edX software and its community — released the 14th version of the platform, called Nutmeg.

    This release spans changes in the code of the edX platform — used at edx.org — from October 15, 2021, to April 11, 2022. The code was cut on April 12, 2022.

    To date, Open edX releases have been Maple, Lilac, Koa, Juniper, Ironwood, Hawthorn, Ginkgo, Ficus, Eucalyptus, Dogwood, Cypress, Birch, and Aspen.

    The next one will be Olive. It will be released on December 9th, 2022. The open-release/olive.master branches will be created two months earlier, on October 10th.

    In a blog post this month, Sarina Canelake, an Open edX engineer, detailed some of the new features, deprecations, removals, and security updates to the code, including overhauls on Tutor.

    The release notes feature additional breaking changes.

  • FINRA Will Invest $90M Coming from Fines to Robinhood to Educate Newer Investors

    FINRA Will Invest $90M Coming from Fines to Robinhood to Educate Newer Investors

    IBL News | New York

    FINRA, the not-for-profit dedicated to protecting investors, approved a $90.1 million initiative to reach and educate new and self-directed investors in June. The funding will come from fines paid by Robinhood Financial LLC in 2021.

    A part of this initiative will be based on promoting compliance by FINRA member firms through education, compliance resources, or ensuring that FINRA’s employees are highly trained in the market, products, and businesses it regulates.

    Also, in June, the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) launched a public-service campaign titled “Investomania” to help investors make informed investment decisions and avoid fraud.

    Earlier this month, the Securities and Exchange Commission launched “Investomania,” a public-service campaign aimed at young investors with similar goals.

    This educational campaign reminds investors to do their due diligence when making investment decisions.

    The campaign also reminds investors to take advantage of the free financial planning tools and information on Investor.gov, the SEC’s resource for investor education.

    “With the growing access to markets, it’s as important as ever for investors to take time to educate themselves. I encourage investors to go to Investor.gov for accurate and unbiased investment information,” said SEC Chair Gary Gensler.

    More than 40 million users have accessed Investor.gov since it launched in October 2009, and thousands of investors are testing their investing knowledge by taking a new quiz published each month on Investor.gov/quiz.

    These are some of the videos of the campaign:

    https://youtu.be/av3k_lcGm9g

    https://youtu.be/L3TwZOMm6Wc

    https://youtu.be/6uVGEG5W16Q

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB7KJ1nlKsM

     

     

  • Meta Delivers Five New Certificate Programs in Coursera.org in Software Engineering

    Meta Delivers Five New Certificate Programs in Coursera.org in Software Engineering

    IBL News | New York

    Meta (Facebook) announced five new Professional Certificates on Coursera.org on Software Engineering, a field projected to grow 22% by 2030.

    The programs, designed by experts at Meta, are self-paced, completely online, and cost $49 per month.

    They target professionals that don’t have relevant experience or background in software engineering. The skill areas taught revolve around HTML, CSS, Java Programming, Python, and MySQL.

    Meta said that earning the certificate will grant access to its company Career Program Job Board, a job search platform with 200+ potential employers and career support resources.

  • Class.com Completes the Acquisition of Blackboard Collaborate

    Class.com Completes the Acquisition of Blackboard Collaborate

    IBL News | New York

    Class.com will be the new proprietor of Blackboard Collaborate, once the transaction process is completed this week.

    Class Technologies (Class.com) acquired the virtual conferencing tool from Anthololgy, paying $210 million last May.

    The tool will be renamed Class Collaborate. About 1,750 educational institutions and organizations were using it as Blackboard’s clients.

    Michael Chasen, co-founder and CEO of Class and former CEO of Blackboard, announced that the tool will be changing with new features. “Educators and learners expect innovative and advanced solutions that enhance the online and hybrid learning experience,” he said.

     

    “The long-term vision is to bring together the best of both products to develop a learning platform that can support the various ways in which institutions want to engage in synchronous learning now and into the future,” the company added in a PR release.

    Under the transaction, Class will be the preferred virtual meeting technology partner for Blackboard. “The two teams are working closely together on joint go-to-market initiatives, including a large presence at the upcoming Anthology Together conference in Orlando, Florida.”

    Class is a heavily funded company after attracting $160 million within a year. It raised a combination of equity and debt from investors such as SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Insight Partners, Salesforce Ventures, Owl Ventures, Emergence Capital, Educational Testing Services (ETS), Arizona State University (ASU), Maven Ventures, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Fund, SWaN & Legend, Chimera Investment, Sound Ventures, Catalysis Capital Management, Guy Oseary, Bill Tai, and Super Bowl champion and entrepreneur Tom Brady.

     

     

  • Degreed Buys Its Former CEO’s New Company and Puts Him to Lead a New Strategy

    Degreed Buys Its Former CEO’s New Company and Puts Him to Lead a New Strategy

    IBL News | New York

    Degreed.com announced this month the acquisition of the talent academy platform, Learn In,  and the return of Co-Founder David Blake as CEO. The transactional amount of this acquisition — the fourth of Degreed — was not disclosed.

    Interestingly, David Blake was the Co-Founder and CEO of Learn In. According to the company, “Blake’s plans for the future of Degreed were divergent with the current direction, so an amicable decision was made that he return to the company as CEO and execute that vision.”

    Dan Levin, who has been Degree’s CEO since April 2021, will step down, apparently in an “amicable” transition of power.

    “Just as Degreed created the LXP market, Learn In has begun for talent academies,” said David Blake, the new CEO of Degreed. “Now together, we have the product and technology to help our customers deliver business capabilities at scale with continued innovation in the learning and skills space.”

    Learn In helps companies establish internal talent academies, supplementing the features of Degreed LXP (Learning Experience Platform), including a prepaid learning stipend card, a skills marketplace, a custom program builder, a tuition benefits manager, and dedicated coaching.

    “As Degreed and Learn In come together, it will offer a more integrated opportunity for organizations like ours to engage employees and build a broader range of skills—from curious, ‘in-the-moment’ learning through to deeper reskilling and credentials,” said Gina Jeneroux, Chief Learning Officer at BMO Financial Group.

    According to TechCrunch, “Blake said that he disclosed all conflicts and recused himself from representing Degreed during the negotiation process. He solely represented himself as the CEO of Learn In, while Degreed’s board of directors represented the other side. Even still, it’s hard to completely extract bias from any financial deal, particularly one as tangly as this — the two companies have shared investors including GSV, Firework Ventures and Album VC.”

    Degreed raised $32 million in June 2020 in a  round led by Owl Ventures. Its total capital raised to date is $182 million. Learn In launched in April 2020 with $3 million in seed financing and attracted $13 million in April 2022.

  • 2U Inc. Receives an Offer of $1 Billion with a Premium of 50%

    2U Inc. Receives an Offer of $1 Billion with a Premium of 50%

    IBL News | New York

    Indian virtual education conglomerate Byju’s submitted a buyout offer worth $1 billion in a cash deal, or about $15 per share, to 2U (NASDAQ: TWOU), according to Bloomberg. As a result, shares of 2U Inc. went up 17.42% to $10.92. This is not the first time rumors surfaced regarding a 2U buyout.

    The offer, made to 2U’s board last week, represents a 61% premium to 2U’s closing price of $9.30 on the Nasdaq on Tuesday, June 21. It gives the Lanham, Maryland-based and edX owner company an enterprise value of about $2 billion, despite having a current market cap of $841 million, and about $1 billion in debt and other liabilities.

    According to Bloomberg, the talks with 2U could still fall apart, and a deal may not materialize. 2U’s board has not taken a position yet.

    After having secured $2.4 billion for international expansion, Byju’s is trying to make a big acquisition. The Indian company — which has a valuation of $22 billion and 115 million students using its platform — is also bidding for Chegg Inc.

    With the shares of 2U having declined 80% since a peak of $55.55 in early 2021, assets acquisition looks attractive in the market, said the experts.

    2U paid $800 million to acquire edX in July 2021.

    • News about 2U on IBL News