Category: Views

IBL News | New York

Three Princeton University grads–in the picture below–have created a university-like environment at a resort in Texas. Students will take online classes with the colleges they are enrolled in while staying in a COVID-safe environment. It costs a $10,000 minimum for housing and meal packages.

So far, it has received over 1,500 applications, enough to fill the 150 available slots, the startup company said.

The U Experience plans to bring students for the spring 2021 semester, from January 28 to April 18 at Tanglewood Resort near Lake Texoma, Texas. It accepts students from traditional four-year universities as well as virtual programs.

The resort includes rec sports, weekly “TEDx-style” guest lectures, nightlife, and a private room for each student. “No masks. No social distancing. A real college experience. Spring 2021,” advertises the company. However, people chatting on social media are skeptical about keeping the premises virus-free and a possible outbreak.

Students will be tested for the coronavirus upon arrival and regularly examined thereafter. They won’t even be allowed out to buy groceries, but they’ll have access to all the resort’s amenities.

“We see online learning as the future of higher education. It has the potential to make college cheap and accessible to all,” said its CEO and Co-Founder, Lane Rusell. “The impediment is it’s not very attractive to think of being stuck at your parents’ house taking lessons on a computer and never going outside.”

The application process will be nontraditional. Students can view each others’ online profiles and “like” those of their friends or students they want to meet. The student feedback won’t determine admission but will play a role. The founders have almost 150,000 followers on Instagram.

College kids at a resort or just a lavish online learning experience?

Inside of Higher Ed wrote a critical piece about it, titled “Bursting Their Buble”.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by The U Experience (@theexperienceu)

IBL News | New York

Duolingo, the popular language-learning app, announced this week it had secured $35 million in a Series H round, achieving a valuation of $2.4 billion, almost a billion dollars more than a year ago.

The Pittsburgh-based company–co-founded by Hispanic immigrant Luis von Ahn–has raised $183 million to date. It expects to go public in 2021.

With over 1 million subscribers who pay $6.99 per month and 40 million active users who receive ads on the free version, Duolingo says that it is now cash-flow positive and it will double its annual revenue to $200 million.

Duolingo, which offers 98 courses for 40 different languages, recently launched a new app that teaches children ages 3 to 7 how to read.

Another breakthrough service is the Duolingo English Test, a low priced online English certification exam, that has seen a 1500% year-over-year growth in test-takers.

The iconic company was founded in 2011 by computer whiz Luis von Ahn, 42, an immigrant from Guatemala. As a student at Carnegie Mellon, he designed the CAPTCHA system, along with a crowdsourcing device he sold to Google. This week, Luis Von Ahn reaffirmed that is considering an initial public offering as early as next year.

IBL News | New York

Traditionally, the U.S. educational system has been slow to evolve, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed that weakness.

At pre-pandemic educational shows and conferences, keynote speakers often joked that if Benjamin Franklin were to have visited our country today, the only place he would recognize would be the school classroom.

But the classroom has changed overnight, and LMS platforms haven’t been incapable to evolve for the new teaching environment.

Instructors must radically rethink how to efficiently engage students. The shift from face-to-face to remote teaching requires a non-legacy, new generation, pedagogically–robust Learning Management Systems (LMS). It is not about managing the classroom but coping with the new demands of education.

Your new learning platform or ecosystem should be the foundational rock that supports the new learning environment.

These are seven key chapters to consider when choosing the right learning platform to deliver an effective, rock-solid experience in this new challenging time.

1. Simplified, user-friendly, and scalable access for students, enhanced with Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication. Interactive and easily accessible, downloadable, offline-viewable content.
2. Easy to use CMS for instructors, not needing to be tech-savvy, and avoiding any dependence on the IT department. Admin dashboard.
3. Mobile friendly, elegant, and visually distinctive UI-UX enhanced platform.
4. Course catalog website, learner portal, landing pages, along with integration with other LMS and applications within the university or business organization.
5. Social-learning powered platform, enriched with digital, blockchain-based, and career-advancement ready credentials.
6. Data-driven and AI analytics dashboard, plug-and-play interoperability with other systems, and Student Information Systems (SIS).
7. Backed by a reliable, experienced–check its portfolio of customers–and forward-thinking LMS supplier and partner, who provides robust post-implementation technical support and is able to optimize the platform with the latest pedagogical innovations. Consulting service review and recommendations.

IBL News | New York

Google announced the introduction of its new Google Analytics with machine learning at its core, which is privacy-centric by design. They are built on the foundation of the App + Web property presented last year.

The goal of the giant searching company is “to help users to get better ROI and improve their marketing decisions.” It follows what a survey from Forrester Consulting points out that improving the use of analytics is a top priority for marketers.

The machine learning models include will allow the ability to alert on trends in data, like products seeing rising demand, and help to anticipate future actions from customers. “For example, it calculates churn probability so you can more efficiently invest in retaining customers at a time when marketing budgets are under pressure,” says in a blog-post Vidhya Srinivasan, Vice President, Measurement, Analytics, and Buying Platforms at Google.

It also adds new predictive metrics indicating the potential revenue that can be earned from a particular group of customers. “This allows you to create audiences to reach higher-value customers and run analyses to better understand why some customers are likely to spend more than others, so you can take action to improve your results,” wrote Vidhya Srinivasan.

The new Google Analytics provides customer-centric measurement, including conversion from YouTube video views, Google and non-Google paid channels, search, social, and email. The setup works with or without cookies or identifiers.

They come by default for new web properties. In order to replace the existing setup, Google encourages to create a new Google Analytics 4 property (previously called an App + Web property). Enterprise marketers are currently using a beta version with an Analytics 360 version with SLAs and advanced integrations with tools like BigQuery.

IBL News | New York

IBM (International Business Machines) announced yesterday it will split into two public companies, in a bid to focus more on higher-margin businesses like cloud computing and AI. Currently, AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft dominate the market for cloud services.

The 109-year old company shifted into the cloud with the acquisition of Red Hat for $34 billion in July 2019.

IBM –which currently has more than 352,000 workers – said it expects the separation to cost $5 billion.

The tech giant will list its legacy IT infrastructure services unit as a separate entity named NewCo by the end of 2021. Software sales and demand for mainframe servers have been in decline in recent years.

NewCo will have 90,000 employees and $19 billion in annual revenue. It will serve 75% of Fortune 100 companies when it makes its share market debut, according to IBM.

The market received well IBM’s announcement, and investors praised the move by CEO Arvind Krishna [in the picture], with shares closing nearly 6% higher.

“We divested networking back in the 1990s, we divested PCs back in the 2000s, we divested semiconductors about five years ago because all of them didn’t necessarily play into the integrated value proposition,” Arvind Krishna – who took over as CEO in April –wrote in a blog post. “To drive growth, our strategy must be rooted in the reality of the world we live in and the future our clients strive to build. Today, hybrid cloud and AI are swiftly becoming the locus of commerce, transactions, and over time, of computing itself.”

IBL News | New York

Course-creation platform Thinkfic announced that it raised $22 million in new funding led by Rhino Ventures, which was already an investor. Previously, the Canadian startup raised $3 million.

Vancouver–based Thinkific claims that over 50,000 users have earned over $650 million by building and selling online courses through its platform. The startup company also reported a 200% increase in people making courses since March.

“We have been profitable for many years [since 2018], but we chose to raise this additional funding to accelerate innovation, and scale our team,” wrote Greg Smith, CEO & Co-Founder at Thinkific in a blog-post. The plan is to grow from a current team of 180 employees to 500 people within a year or so. “We want to help one million knowledge entrepreneurs grow successful businesses in 5 or 10 years.”

The company – which competes with Udemy, Teachable, and Skillshare, among others – highlights “stories like those of John Michaloudis, who was able to grow an Excel course to $20,000/month in just 6 months, or Tim Vipond, co-founder and CEO of Corporate Finance Institute (CFI), who’s been able to train 600,000 financial advisors.”

“Our users want control over their brand, own customer relationship, and build their own sustainable businesses,” explained Greg Smith. The firm doesn’t take a cut of the revenue from creators nor charges transaction fees, contrary to its competitors.

“Thinkific’s business model, user numbers, and ~ 150% year-over-year revenue growth tracks, by stage, very closely to Shopify which is now Canada’s most valuable public company,” stated Rhino Managing Partner, Fraser Hall.

The company was built out of a need for Greg Smith when he wanted to offer an LSAT class online as an instructor. Along with three more co-founders [in the picture below], he created Thinkific to enable entrepreneurs to build and commercialize courses of their own.

IBL News | New York

The education of over 90% of the world’s enrolled student population–nearly 1.6 billion learners–continues to be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Teachers have worked individually and collectively to find solutions and create new learning environments. For six months now, teachers around the world have been finding creative approaches to face school closures, adapting, and improvising to keep their students learning.

There are many inspiring stories on how teachers kept doing their job throughout the crisis. They remind us that teachers are a vital lifeline for their students.

Some teachers traveled for hours each day to establish small learning groups around a laptop, others walked door to door to distribute thousands of much-needed school meals during the lockdown, yet others delivered their classes from the back of a truck.