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IBL News | New York

The recent $20 billion purchase of design platform Figma by Adobe — the giant behind Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere — is causing concern in the creative community.

Over the past years, Figma built its brand and reputation as a collaborative and forward-thinking competitor to Adobe. Founded by Dylan Field [in the picture above] and Evan Wallace in 2012, the company pioneered product design on the web by adding web-based, multi-player capabilities.

Last Thursday, that competition ended when Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) announced that it closed a transactional deal to buy for $20 billion with approximately half cash and half stock.

Adobe’s move to taking, once again, a major competitor off the market dramatically reduces the list of companies capable of challenging the giant.

However, San Jose, California-based Adobe said that it will keep Figma independent, keeping it free for those in education and keeping its current pricing plans — a free starter modality plus a paid professional plan that starts at $12 per month per editor. These prices are significantly less than an Adobe Creative Cloud single-app subscription.

IBL News | New York

Learners from 69 countries have enrolled in “The Hook, the Bait, and the Fish: Approaches to Teaching Thinking”, an awarded, video-driven course launched on edX.org in November 2020 and created as a peace project to bring closer Israel’s Jewish and Arab cultures.

This MOOC was created by the Al-Qasemi Academy, a small teacher college in Israel. This 8-week, online, free class follows the purpose stated in the classic adage, “give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.”

It teaches students educational and philosophical thinking by providing students motivational tool tools to enhance their creativity and develop lifelong learning skills.

The course, a finalist for the 2021 edX Prize, is led by Professor at Al-Qasemi Academy and book author Yoran Harpaz [in the picture above], whose educational theories comprise the teachings of the course. “Giving people the tools to become independent thinkers sets them on the path to fulfillment,” he said.

To explain concepts connected to thinking, Professor Harpaz wrote light-hearted videos shot in locations like a zoo, a library, and his own kitchen. Storytelling is one of the reasons for the success of the class.

Developed in three languages—Arabic, Hebrew, and English—the course is a significant cultural achievement for IsraelX, the international arm of Campus-IL, the flagship project of the National Digital Agency and Council for Higher Education in Israel.

IBL News | New York

U.S. President Joe Biden announced loan debt relief for millions of Americans yesterday. Democrat lawmakers praised the initiative, and Republicans railed against it, claiming that forgiveness is unfair to those who tightened their belts to pay for college. Market analysts expressed their fear that this debt forgiveness could exacerbate inflation.

The Education Department estimates that 27 million borrowers qualify for up to $20,000 in relief.

Biden said he would cancel $10,000 in debt for those earning less than $125,000 per year and $20,000 for those who had received Pell grants for low-income students. (Around 60% of borrowers have received Pell grants, and the majority come from families making less than $30,000 a year.)

Current students are also eligible for debt relief as long as they were dependent on their parent’s income.

Around 45 million people owe $1.6 trillion for federal loans taken out for college in the U.S.

In remarks from the White House, President Biden said: “All of this means people can start finally to climb out from under that mountain of debt and finally think about buying a home or starting a family or starting a business.”

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

And for context on this rumored (!) $1B offer: a year ago @2Uinc paid $800M for @edXOnline and in 2019 it paid $750M to buy coding boot camp company Trilogy. https://t.co/BakQ6ZjR7c

— Goldie Blumenstyk (@GoldieStandard) June 29, 2022

IBL News | New York

The Web3 phenomenon, featured as the next big wave in crypto is gaining traction.  Experts say that marketers will use public, virtual wallet information to target users. NFTs, governed by smart contracts, will reward users registered with a credential of their choice for engaging with ads — with token drops or other on-chain benefits.

As this new marketing ecosystem begins to pop up, some start-ups are reshaping the Web3 networks with user experience as a central tenet.

Last week, London-based Neol announced it raised $5.2 million in a seed round to build out a Web3-enabled, decentralized, and tokenized cohort-powered learning and talent platform. [Neol’s founders, in the picture above].

It’s similar to On Deck, although instead of targeting founders and start-up operators, it will be aiming mostly at design and creative freelance professionals. For example, if a global fashion brand wants to reimagine its packaging or supply chain to be more sustainable, it can put the call out to Neol’s community for solutions.

A decentralized and tokenized platform community of members build their own cohorts and create a token or a kind of Neol currency, sharing this way the wealth vision that’s core to Web3 companies.

It’s like a tokenized, Web3 university with teachers that are rewarded financially, beyond their salary, for building a richer learners community rather than just supporting the school’s brand.

Similarly, it might happen in the e-learning environment for freelancers. This market is expected to grow roughly 24% annually until 2028.

Neol’s financing round was led by Kyu Collective Japan’s ad agency and VC firm Global Ventures. Other participating investors were Tony Xu, CEO of DoorDash, LearnStart, FJ Labs, and Paribu Ventures.

Neol claims to have run eight cohorts with over 600 learners and 200 customers.

A warm thank you to @siftedeu & @tech_eu for sharing the big news on our #seedround! 🚀

→ What’s next? Follow us & visit https://t.co/zX0xogINYt#NeolCommunity pic.twitter.com/lcOWDHi0VB

— Neol (@neol_co) June 24, 2022

IBL News | New York

Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO at Coursera, announced yesterday its Global Skills Report 2022, a global survey on skills proficiency and trends in business, technology, and data science, that uses data from over 100 million learners across 100 countries.

The report features digital and human skills that are critical for growth and innovation and maps out career training pathways for employees to stay competitive. It provides skills proficiency per country, as shown in the graphics below.

“With global instability and inflation on the rise, workers are increasingly looking to employers to provide job security and long-term career growth,” said Jeff Maggioncalda.

“The ‘Great Resignation’ is also the ‘Great Reskilling’ with many learners now seeking career-building skills needed to start new careers in high-demand roles like IT, digital marketing, and data analysis,” he added.

In the last year, the most popular skills in business, technology, and data science were leadership and management, probability and statistics, and theoretical computer science. However, according to the outcome of a recent survey, “not every worker needs to learn how to code, but adding digital skills to supplement foundational human and technical skills enables workers to maintain relevance as skills demands evolve.”

In the same report, three-quarters of workers said they felt unprepared for jobs in the digital-first economy — where “digital skills are the shared language of the modern economy and are essential for economic success.”

Other interesting outcomes are:

IBL News | New York

Lawrence S. Bacow announced yesterday that he will step down as Harvard University’s president in June 2023.

During his tenure, Bacow, a lifelong academic, fought a COVID infection himself, steered the institution through the pandemic, and dealt with an attack on its admission policies, one that will face a Supreme Court test later this year.

This spring, Harvard University committed $100 million to make amends for its historical ties to slavery. “Enslaved people worked on our campus supporting our students, faculty, and staff, including several Harvard presidents,” he wrote.

“There is never a good time to leave a job like this one, but now seems right to me,” he said in a statement. “Adele [his wife] and I are looking forward to spending more time with my children and grandchildren.”

His five-year tenure as Harvard president is brief compared to that of his predecessor, Drew Gilpin Faust, who served 12 years.

Bacow spent over fifty years studying, teaching at, and presiding over three major universities in the Boston area, including seven previous years as a member of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing organization.

Before being appointed Harvard’s president, Bacow spent ten years as president of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and 24 years as a faculty member and administrator at MIT.

Son of immigrants who escaped Nazi persecution, he attended college at MIT and then earned three degrees from Harvard, including a Ph.D. in public policy.

• The news on The Harvard Gazette

IBL News | New York

The Biden administration said this week that it will forgive all of the loans held by 560,000 students who attended the defunct Corinthian Colleges, one of the nation’s largest for-profit college chains, before it collapsed in 2015 after it was found guilty of defrauding students.

This debt amounts to $5.8 billion and is the largest single debt cancellation ever by the Federal Government. This Corinthian College discharge is twenty times larger than the Marinello Schools of Beauty, a predatory for-profit organization that deceived 28,000 students.

“For far too long, Corinthian engaged in the wholesale financial exploitation of students, misleading them into taking on more and more debt to pay for promises they would never keep,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. Corinthian Colleges mislead students about job placement prospects after graduation.

Vice President Kamala Harris announced the group discharge yesterday.

In 2013, Kamala Harris, at the time California’s Attorney General, sued Corinthian for using fraudulent advertising and other predatory practices.

At its peak, Corinthian had more than 110,000 at 100 campuses across the country.

In 2015, the Education Department joined the investigation and fined the organization $30 million. This event made Corinthian sink into bankruptcy, closing its 28 campuses with 16,000 students.

Later, over 1,000 students went on strike, refusing to pay back their student loans.

Today, the Biden administration will automatically forgive students’ debts. Borrowers will even be refunded on past payments if they still have an outstanding balance. However, borrowers who have fully paid off their loans will not be refunded.

Borrowers and their advocates celebrated the Corinthian decision as a watershed moment.

However, former Education Secretary Bill Bennett called the debt forgiveness “regressive” and a “mistake.” “Now, Corinthian Colleges were a scam, and they were putting a scam on a lot of students. They deserve some punishment and some accountability, but that does not mean the taxpayers have to pay for that, which is what we are doing here,” he added.

IBL News | New York

The adoption of cryptocurrency and digital assets is arriving in higher education.

A small college in the Boston area, Bentley University has become one of the first educational institutions in the U.S. to accept tuition fee payments made in Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and the stablecoin USD Coin (USDC), the university announced on May 3.

The university is partnering with the crypto exchange Coinbase to accept those three cryptocurrencies.