Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

The Amgen Foundation announced this month that it will double its investment in Harvard University’s online science education platform LabXchange.org donating an additional $30 million.

As a lead sponsor and co-founder of LabXchange, the pharmaceutical company donated $13 million for the launch of the project in January 2020. The advertised goal was to build a library of learning experiences in science to complement in-person education and inspire the next generation of scientists.

The award-winning platform was based on the vision of the late Harvard Professor and scientist Robert Lue, who sought to make science education accessible to everyone.

This Open edX software-based platform currently contains 16,000 learning resources at no cost, including curated and personalized online lab experiments, interactive lessons, and videos. Harvard’s Office of the Vice Provost of Advances in Learning (VPAL) manages the project.

“To date, we’ve reached 20 million users in 230 countries and territories around the world,” said Gaurav Vazirani, Managing Director at LabXchange. “To fully realize our vision, we aim to grow our global science classroom from 20 million people to 50 million by 2025.”

“By overcoming barriers of cost and geographical location, LabXchange is helping to level the playing field, so learners of all ages everywhere have access to world-class science education,” added Judy Brown, Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs at Amgen and Chairman for the Amgen Foundation.

According to the Foundation, “the additional funding contribution will allow LabXchange to expand and deepen collaborations with STEM organizations worldwide, and pursue opportunities to serve more learners, particularly in communities that are underserved.”

In addition, over the next three years, the platform will develop more data science, biotechnology, and environmental content, translate content into 30 languages, launch a new teacher ambassador network, and increase content for middle schoolers.

• News about LabXchange at IBL News

.@LabXchange expansion is there to help facilitate the needs of both students and teachers globally. Over the next three years, we aim to aid in providing the right resources to the right people to ensure that every student has access to science education. #AmgenFoundation pic.twitter.com/d6EYvAISYa

— Amgen Foundation (@AmgenFoundation) June 28, 2022

Amgen Foundation’s continued work with @LabXchange cements our commitment to grow the global classroom by 50 million over the next 3 years. Find out how we plan to achieve this and improve science education equality here: https://t.co/y7AbYiZWjL pic.twitter.com/CTPoQ3j9UA

— Amgen Foundation (@AmgenFoundation) June 27, 2022

IBL News | New York

Berlin-based 1:1 coaching platform CoachHub closed this month a $200 million Series C funding with the goal of fueling its global expansion, particularly in the United States.

The round, led by Sofina and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, followed an $80 million funding eight months ago. To date, this three-year-old company has raised $330 million.

Existing investors, including Molten Ventures, Speedinvest, HV Capital, Signals Venture Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank/SVB Capital, also participated in the round.

With a workforce of 850 employees, CoachHub “aims to provide a tailored coaching experience to employees at all levels to help advance their careers,” stated Yanni Pipilis, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers.

Research company Gartner said that the corporate digital coaching segment is expected to grow by up to 100 times by the end of the decade.

“We believe 1:1 coaching will continue to be one of the most effective ways of enhancing the socio-emotional and leadership skills needed to thrive in an increasingly complex and rapidly evolving workplace,” said Harold Boël, CEO at Sofina.

CoachHub matches learners to a pool of 3,500 certified business coaches in 60 languages and 90 countries. The company employs 150 product engineers along with a team of 30 leading behavioral scientists.

“The app couples human intelligence with AI technology to pair employees with their ideal coaches and curate a library of content that enhances their learning journey,” the company pointed out.

The firm claims that it is currently serving 500 customers, including household names like Coca-Cola, Danone, Toyota, LVMH, L’Oréal, Credit Suisse, and Twitter.

IBL News | New York

An overwhelming majority of Americans believe that the government should prioritize making college more affordable over forgiving existing student loans, according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll.

Meanwhile, a narrow majority of Americans support forgiving up to $10,000 in federal student loans. But support wanes for a larger amount.

In detail, the main findings point out to the following:

• A majority (55%) of Americans support forgiving up to $10,000 of a person’s student loan debt.
• Fewer Americans support forgiving up to $50,000 (47%) in student loans and forgiving all student loan debt (41%).
• Roughly four in ten Americans support extending the current federal loan pause without forgiving any loan debt (42%) and ending the loan pause now without forgiving any loan debt (41%).
• A wide majority of those with student loans support each of the three proposals asked about: forgiving $10,000 of student debt (84%), $50,000 of student debt (78%), and all student debt (68%).

Americans and those with student loans alike prefer the government to make college cheaper than forgive student loans, according to the poll.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say that if the government does forgive some student loan debt, it should be for graduate and undergraduate debt, as opposed to just undergraduate debt (30%).

A majority of Americans with student loan debt say they have not made any payments since the pause began. Instead, most say they have taken this opportunity to catch a financial break.

Nearly half (47%) of Americans with student loan debt say that the federal student loan pause has improved their mental health.

This poll — conducted over 1,022 Americans between June 3 and 5, 2022, with an oversample of more than 400 student loan borrowers — took place as President Biden plans an announcement on federal student loan forgiveness.

IBL News | New York

NASA introduced its Open-Source Science initiative (OSSI) last month, which intends to build an open science community over the next decade and share software, data, and knowledge (algorithms, papers, documents, ancillary information) in the scientific process.

One of the key components of the program is TOPS (Transform to Open Science), which provides visibility, advocacy, and community resources.

“From 2022 to 2027, TOPS will accelerate the engagement of the scientific community in open science practices through events and activities,” explained NASA.

Next year will be designated as the “Year of Open Science.” The goal will be to “spark change and inspire open science engagement through events and activities that will shift the current paradigm.”

One of the projects will be an Open Science online learning platform, which will deliver courses about this subject for internal and public use. The launch of the first learning modules is scheduled for October 2022.

[Disclosure: IBL Education, the parent company of this news service, has been selected to develop that educational platform using Open edX technology after an RFP process.] 

I’m delighted to be working with @theAGU and @ibleducation to deploy an online learning platform and launch the initial catalog of #OpenScience mini-courses for the #NASATOPS mission! https://t.co/gjYPamTEBc

— Lorena Barba (@LorenaABarba) June 8, 2022

Video: Keynote from Prof. Lorena Barba on Open Science 

IBL News | Austin, Texas

Many organizations are currently ill-prepared to effectively manage security risks resulting from the use of open source applications, according to new research from The Linux Foundations and Snyk, a leading company in developer security. Organizations also lack strategies to address application vulnerabilities arising from code reuse.

The report, titled The State of Open Source Security, was released today during the “Open Source Summit North America”, which will attract thousands of executives of the industry to a packed conference in Austin, Texas, this week [The report in PDF].

The study suggests industry naivete about the state of open source security today.

Specifically, the report — based on a survey of over 550 respondents and data scanned 1.3B open source projects — notes:

IBL News | New York

Moodle-based Open LMS announced this month a partnership with Class.com to offer an integrated tool to K-12, Higher Ed and the workplace.

This solution will allow Open LMS users to launch synchronous sessions without leaving its environment with the Zoom-built in platform Class.com.

“With this partnership, we also aim to simplify the technology purchasing journey,” said Open LMS.

“The fact that Moodle is open source meant that the Class team could experiment with it in various ways and that they could work with Open LMS to leverage the power of the Moodle platform,” explained Phill Miller, Managing Director at Open LMS, in a blog post.

Class recently purchased Anthology’s Blackboard Collaborate virtual conferencing tool, which is one of the products that Open LMS provides as integrated technology.

IBL News | New York

UC San Diego announced this month it raised $3 billion, surpassing its original goal o $2 billion, through a multibillion-dollar, 10-years old campaign concluding on June 30, 2022.

“In just over six decades, the University of California San Diego has become an international powerhouse in research, innovation, health care, the arts, and education,” said the institution.

Over 163,000 people — friends, alumni, foundations, and corporations — have supported the university with gifts and grants of all sizes, providing funding to 453 different areas on campus.

Around 100 national leaders and alumni collectively donated $1 billion to the campaign, and 46,500 alumni donated $253 million in gifts.

Among other gifts and donations, they are the following:

• Joan and Irwin Jacobs provided $100 million in support for the landmark Jacobs Medical Center at UC San Diego Health, which opened in late 2016.

• Ernest and Evelyn Rady committed $100 million in 2015 to help recruit and retain faculty and fund strategic priorities at the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego, which they helped establish in 2004 with a $30 million lead gift.

• Denny Sanford donated $100 million to the creation of the Sanford Stem Cell Clinical Center at UC San Diego Health in 2013. With another $100 million commitment, he went on to establish the T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion, which focused on research into the neurological basis of compassion.

• With a $75 million donation, alumnus Taner Halıcıoğlu ’96 donated $75 million in the largest alumni gift the campus has ever received to establish the Halıcıoğlu Institute for Data Science at UC San Diego.

• The late Franklin Antonio ’74 became the first alumnus to have a building named in his honor – Franklin Antonio Hall – after making a $30 million gift to support the Jacobs School of Engineering.