Category: Online Learning Newsletter

MARCH 2018  –  NEWSLETTER #8 ON LEARNING INNOVATION

• eLearningIndustry.com has published a list of the top 20 LMSs based on user experience. Those are Loop, Learn Amp, Agylia, Skolera, iSpring Learn, Matrix LMS, NEO, Bolt, TalentLMS, Unicorn LMS, Skillcast LMS, Docebo, Totara Learn, UpsideLMS, Learndash, DynDevice, Litmos, Moodle, Open edX, and Brightspace.

• This year’s SXSW EDU conference (March 5-8, Austin) will put emphasis on employability, the implications of artificial intelligence and international education, separating sessions into 25 distinct tracks.

• Tutoring is big business. Varsity Tutors has raised $50 million –provided by Learn Capital– for its instant tutoring mobile app. Already boasting 40,000 tutors covering 1,000 subjects, the company is on the hunt for more teachers. Students pay $60 to $70 by the hour. Kumon, Sylvan Learning, Chegg, and Wyzant are other players in this industry.

• Singularity University has raised $32 million. Funding might go to enhance conferences and executive education programs.

• The IMS Global Learning Consortium has announced Caliper Analytics v1.1, an interoperability standard designed to foster an open ecosystem for learning data.

• Macmillan Learning will make available this spring Intellus Open Courses, a course materials’ product that brings together open educational resources (OER), instructor supplements and on-demand support. The materials are priced at $14.99 per student per course.

• Video lectures should be redesigned for student engagement by properly framing questions, using animations, adding a quizzing functionality, expert instructors and in-video prompt.

• Schools gather student data, but they don’t have the means to easily interpret and make use of it because this data often lacks interoperability, according to The Hechinger Report.

• McGraw-Hill Education will launch this spring a textbook and e-book rental program on more than 250 of its copyright 2019 titles. It will be available via Barnes & Noble and Chegg’s connected platform.

• Strive Talent, a San Francisco-based startup that trains adults for jobs in sales and other “middle-skill” occupations, has raised $3.8 million in venture capital. Other companies that offer online assessments and interviews to match candidates for sales positions with employers are Sales Bootcamp, Sales2Job Academy and Always Hired.

The IBL newsletter is a topic-curated email report compiled by Michael Amigot, Founder at IBL Education, a company specialized in Open edX technology and video course production. If you enjoy what you read please consider forwarding it. Click here to subscribe.

Archive:
IBL Newsletter #7 – February 2018
IBL Newsletter #6 – January 31, 2018
IBL Newsletter #5 – January 15, 2018
IBL Newsletter #4 – December 2017
IBL Newsletter #3 – November 2017
IBL Newsletter #2 – October 2017
IBL Newsletter #1 – September 2017

FEBRUARY 2018  –  NEWSLETTER #7 ON LEARNING INNOVATION

• 2U will pay $13m to lease WeWork’s Flatiron School Learn.co platform technology. Additionally, 2U will provide up to $5 million in scholarship funding for WeWork 175,000 members and 4,000 employees interested in pursuing graduate degrees in 2U schools. The 13,000 students enrolled in 2U programs will access to WeWork co-working office space.

• Laureate, the global education giant, is shifting its focus by selling off some international institutions in Morocco, China, Malaysia, Italy and Cyprus, and refocusing on emerging markets such as Spain, Portugal, and Latinoamerica.

• ACT, the test-maker nonprofit organization, is investing $7.5M in Smart Sparrow as a way to become more involved in the learning process, provide more analytics and adaptive solutions to teachers and students, and go fully digital in the next 3 to 5 years.

• Businesses are expanding their internal training programs to serve the needs of learning audiences that include customers, channel partners, contract workers and others who need product knowledge and skills. This is called extended enterprise, and it requires better LMS technology and custom developed proprietary content to help sell products or services.

• Edraak.org, the Queen Rania Foundation’s educational site, has announced its expansion into K-12, in order to meet the needs of school-aged children across the Arab world. The project has been powered by a $3 million grant from Google.org.

• EMC School, a language-learning unit of New Mountain Learning, has acquired Zulama, a Pittsburgh-based company founded at Carnegie Mellon University, which currently offers a game design curriculum.

•  Chile passed a historic major education reform law that guarantees free higher-education at state universities  –which will receive $495 million over the next 10 years.

The IBL newsletter is a topic-curated email report compiled by Michael Amigot, Founder at IBL Education, a company specialized in Open edX technology and video course production. If you enjoy what you read please consider forwarding it. Click here to subscribe.

Archive:
IBL Newsletter #6 – January 31, 2018
IBL Newsletter #5 – January 15, 2018
IBL Newsletter #4 – December 2017
IBL Newsletter #3 – November 2017
IBL Newsletter #2 – October 2017
IBL Newsletter #1 – September 2017

JANUARY 31, 2018  –  NEWSLETTER #6 ON LEARNING INNOVATION 

• Distance ed is saving higher ed: college enrollment online has steadily climbed its way up to 31.6 percent of the student population, as face-to-face continues to plummet and despite faculty resistance to digital education, has explained Robert Ubell, vice dean emeritus of online learning at NYU and author of the Going Online book.

• Stanford University has named its first CIO, Stephen Gallagher, currently occupying the same position at Harvard Business School. He will oversee an IT organization with 550 staff members and a budget of $150 million, and determine which technology, systems, and data should be moved to the cloud.

• Chicago plans to teach 500,000 young people in K-12 and community colleges how to code, starting with Swift, the iOS app creator language. It will follow Apple’s “Everyone Can Code” program.

• Highly innovative CIOs are redefining how IT works. They’re ditching legacy systems, developing innovation-focused processes, reimagining work, leveraging their positions, and building the right talent and culture.

• The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has built a three-story production studio that can accommodate multiple camera views and presenters, green screen operations and teleprompting when producing iMBA and other courses.

• Candace Thille, a pioneer in the science of learning and open education, has taken a leave from Stanford and joined Amazon to help the retailer better train its corporate workforce (half million employees). Amazon has a history of investing heavily to produce its own top-notch internal technologies.

• The use of analytics in the classroom helps to make more effective the learning experience for the student. edX’s “Analytics for the Classroom Teacher” course offers many insights in terms of using descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics. This post elaborates on this.

The IBL newsletter is a topic-curated email report compiled by Michael Amigot, Founder at IBL Education, a company specialized in Open edX technology and video course production. If you enjoy what you read please consider forwarding it. Click here to subscribe.

Archive:
IBL Newsletter #5 – January 15, 2018
IBL Newsletter #4 – December 2017
IBL Newsletter #3 – November 2017
IBL Newsletter #2 – October 2017
IBL Newsletter #1 – September 2017

JANUARY 15, 2018  –  NEWSLETTER #5 ON LEARNING INNOVATION 

• Oracle opened its newly-built Design Tech High School Video, a free public charter school, located on company’s corporate campus in Redwood City, Calif. The school serves 550 students, described by Oracle’s CEO as “ambassadors for the future of education”.

• The New York-based Thinkful has raised $9.6M in funding to grow in-person hubs for its online coding boot camp.

• Complaining that higher-ed is producing too few graduates with skills they need, many employers are taking matters into their own hands by designing courses themselves. A good example is Microsoft and Linux Foundation, who have teamed up with edX.

• edSurge has put on a calendar the key 50 edtech conferences happening this year. However, its events page is more exhaustive.

• Coursera is shifting towards B2B. In 2017, it went from 30 to 500 companies. Each year corporations spent $150 billion spent on training.

• Revature talent development company has doubled the number of engineers trained in 2017, following its model of training college graduates and placing them as consultants with their Fortune 500 client base.

• Chip Paucek, CEO at 2U, said that we are now in the “third wave” of ed tech innovation with top-tier universities offering full courses online. With a $3bn valuation, in 2017, 2U saw its stock increased 114% and bought the course specialist GetSmarter for $103 million.

• Having a data-driven management strategy has become a necessity at higher ed. This is one of the key trends for 2018, along with immersive learning, digital course management, enterprise-wide video, mobile tech, Internet of things and learning space design.

The IBL newsletter is a topic-curated email report compiled by Michael Amigot, Founder at IBL EDUCATION, a company specialized in Open edX technology and video course production. If you enjoy what you read please consider forwarding it. Click here to subscribe.

Archive:
IBL Newsletter #4 – December 2017
IBL Newsletter #3 – November 2017
IBL Newsletter #2 – October 2017
IBL Newsletter #1 – September 2017