Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

What is the role of MOOCs shaping the 4th Industrial Revolution, especially during pandemic times? How learning communities are expanding through MOOCs? What’s the impact of Machine Learning and AI on MOOC delivery?

A panel of experts will elaborate on these and other topics on the 2020 7th edition of the LWMOOCs (Learning with MOOCs) Conference that will take place virtually from September 30 to October 2, 2020. The 2020 LWMOOCs conference was initially scheduled to be held face to face in Antigua, Guatemala.

There will be poster sessions, full-length paper presentations, shorter lightning-round presentations, active-learning workshops, and keynote presentations from leading academic and industry professionals.

The list of topics to be discussed include:

• The role of MOOCs shaping the 4th Industrial Revolution
• Expanding the learner community through MOOCs
• Social implications of MOOCs
• Assistive and inclusive MOOC techniques
• Open content, open licensing, and MOOC delivery
• International cooperation in MOOC projects
• Using MOOCs in employee training
• Scaffolding courses and planning MOOC curricula
• Online MOOC degree programs
• Learning analytics in MOOC courses
• Learning science and educational research models
• Learning engineers applying sound science with MOOC platforms
• Machine Learning, AI, and MOOC delivery

This year’s theme is “The 4th Industrial Revolution: Challenges and Opportunities”. Panelists and participants will explore the latest developments in MOOC technologies and practical ways to create and offer MOOCs to a broader audience.

The main two keynotes will be delivered by David Joyner, Executive Director of Online Education & OMSCS, Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, and Dan Garcia, Teaching Professor, at UC Berkeley.

David Joyner will elaborate on lessons learned developing an affordable degree program (OMSCS), with over 9,000 enrolled students and 2,000 graduates.

Among the Lighting Speakers will be Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX, Professor Barbara Oakley, the instructor behind the hit Learning how to Learn–who will highlight ways of creating an engaging online course–and Justin Reich, Director, MIT Teaching System Labs.

IBL News, the media branch of IBL Education, will participate as a media partner in the 2020 LWMOOCS VII Conference, along with Class Central.

IBL News | New York

An ed-tech startup company valued at $10.8 billion after raising $2.1 billion?

The massive growth of online demand in India, due to a nationwide lockdown on traditional education, has made it possible.

Byju, the leading Indian learning platform, announced yesterday it raised $500 million in a new financing round that values the company at $10.8 billion, Bloomberg reported. According to Crunchbase, Byju’s has raised $2.1 billion to date.

The round was led by Menlo Park-headquartered Silver Lake. Existing investors Tiger Global, General Atlantic, and Owl Ventures also participated in it.

“Our classrooms in India are changing possibly for the first time in 100 years and I’m really excited about the opportunities that we have to redefine the future of learning,” Byju’s said in a statement, although declined to reveal the size of the round and its valuation.

Byju prepares students to pursue undergraduate and graduate-level courses. It claims over 64 million registered students and 4.2 million annual paid subscriptions. Since the shutdown, Byju’s has added 20 million new students on its platform and doubled its revenue–after it reached $373 million for the year ended March 2020.

Silver Lake also invested about $1.35 billion in India’s Jio Platforms earlier this year.

IBL News | New York

NVIDIA announced this week three new courses on fundamentals of deep learning, recommender systems, and Transformer-based applications—which will include access to a configured, GPU-accelerated server in the cloud.

Currently, NVIDIA has over 2 million registered developers.

These courses will be first offered at the GPU Technology Conference on October 5-9, 2020. They will be developed by NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute (DLI) and will follow an instructor-led workshop format.

NVIDIA-certified experts in virtual classrooms will participate in a hands-on remote experience, interacting with learners, and tackling coding challenges.

Users will be able to earn certificates of subject competency to support their professional growth.

Some of the courses will be available in Korean, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese for attendees in their respective time zones.

Workshops launched at GTC will include:

• Fundamentals of Deep Learning — How to train a model, work with common data types and model architectures, use transfer learning between models, etc.
• Building Intelligent Recommender Systems — Create different types of recommender systems: content-based, collaborative filtering, etc.
• Building Transformer-Based Natural Language Processing Applications — Word2Vec and recurrent neural network-based embeddings, as well as Transformer architecture features and how to improve them.

Other DLI offerings at GTC will include:

• Fundamentals of Accelerated Computing with CUDA Python.
• Applications of AI for Predictive Maintenance.
• Fundamentals of Accelerated Data Science with RAPIDS.
• Fundamentals of Accelerated Computing with CUDA C/C++.
• Fundamentals of Deep Learning for Multi-GPUs.
• Applications of AI for Anomaly Detection.

IBL News | New York

Despite the pandemic outbreak, college ranking tradition goes on.

Last week, Washington Monthly released its 2020 rankings, promoted by its editors as “the socially conscious alternative to U.S. News & World Report,” measuring “how well they serve the country as a whole”.

“This issue of the magazine gives students metrics they can use to hold their own schools accountable, and ideas we can all use to turn the system around,” explained Paul Glastris, Washington Monthly’s Editor-In-Chief. “Today’s college students are the most socially active in decades, and keenly aware of how the higher education system is screwing them.”

While 19 of U.S. News and World Report’s top 20 national universities are elite private institutions, more than half of the Washington Monthly’s top 20 are public institutions.

An example is Texas A&M, that ranked 70th by U.S. News, and 12th on the Washington Monthly list because it enrolls and graduates enormous numbers of first-generation and Pell Grant students as well as science and engineering PhDs. Last year, Texas A&M graduated more Pell Grant recipients than Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton combined.

Other elite private national universities that score in U.S. News’s top 20 do less well on Washington Monthly—including Northwestern, Brown, and Johns Hopkins.

In the liberal arts category, Berea College in Kentucky, is 3rd on the Washington Monthly list for its extraordinary record of recruiting and graduating lower-income students, while it is 46th on U.S. News’s.

The top 10 of National Universities are the following:

• Stanford
• Harvard
• MIT
• Yale
• Princeton
• Duke
• U. of Pennsylvania
• Georgetown
• U. of California (San Diego)
• Utah State

This is the top 10 of Liberal Arts Colleges–baccalaureate colleges that focus on arts and sciences rather than professional programs.

• Amherst
• Wesleyan
• Berea
• Washington and Lee
• Harvey Mudd
• Pomona
• Vassar
• Middlebury
• Claremont McKenna
• Williams

The top five Master’s Universities–institutions that award a significant number of master’s degrees but few or no doctoral degrees–are Goddard, Evergreen State College, California State University – San Bernardino, State University of New York – Geneseo, and Cedar Crest College.

Bachelor’s Colleges–institutions that award almost exclusively bachelor’s degrees–are College of the Ozarks, Cooper Union, Hiram College, Ohio Northern University, and Goshen College

The list of “Colleges Where Majors Popular with Black Students Pay Best” was led by the University of Alabama. In criminal justice, the leader was Texas Christian University. In sociology, Columbia University topped the list.

The complete 2020 Washington Monthly rankings are here.

IBL News | New York

Bangalore-based online learning platform Unacademy reached a $1.45 billion post-money valuation after it raised another $150 million in a Series F round.

As classrooms shut during the pandemic, demand has soared for startups companies dedicated to virtual learning companies in India.

Unacademy’s round was backed by Facebook and Sequoia, while SoftBank Group–trough its Vision Fund 2–led the financing round. Also, Blume Ventures, Nexus Partners, and General Atlantic participated.

So far, Unacademy–which has attracted 30 million registered users and 350,000 paying subscribers on its large educational repository–has raised $348.5 million.

Unacademy’s rival Byju’s–also backed by Sequoia Capital–is the most valued startup in the world, at $10.5 billion.

In addition, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative backed Mumbai-based Eruditus raised $113 million earlier this week.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a nationwide lockdown of schools in India, boosting the valuation of its digital learning start-ups. Indian families tend to spend heavily on their children’s education in the hope of building a better future for them.

Unacademy has distinguished itself in test preparation classes by recruiting star teachers. It features live-class sessions, where students can query teachers or exchange notes with each other. Courses range from $20 a month for exam preparation of government-owned banks or Indian railways jobs to $150 a month for the tests to enter civil service jobs or elite engineering schools.