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  • Docebo Learning Platform’s Stock Dropped 28% after Raising C$75 Million on its IPO

    Docebo Learning Platform’s Stock Dropped 28% after Raising C$75 Million on its IPO

    IBL News | New York

    The cloud-based LMS company Docebo didn’t show promising performance on its first trading days on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

    The stock, listed under the ticker symbol “DCBO”, started trading at C$16.00 (Canadian Dollars) on October 8 and closed at C$11.50 on Friday 18, losing over 28% of its value. [Update: on Monday 21, the stock gained 13% until C$ 13.04].

    An imperfect balance sheet with weak fundamentals discouraged investors, according to some analysts.

    Toronto-headquartered Docebo had raised high hopes after it successfully closed its IPO at a price of C$16, obtaining C$75 million.

    A total of 4,687,500 common shares were sold, with Canaccord Genuity Corp. and TD Securities as the lead underwriters. Docebo’s pre-IPO backers included Intercap Equity, and Canadian enterprise software equity firm Klass Capital.

    “Completing this IPO is a significant milestone for Docebo and a testament to the talent and dedication of our team and support from our global base of customers,” said during the offering, CEO Claudio Erba, an Italian computer consultant who founded the company on March 2005 in Florence, Italy. “With the proceeds raised, we will continue to strengthen our market position and look to continue our track record of innovation in the enterprise learning industry.”

    Written in PHP, Docebo (Latin for “I will teach”) is focused on providing a SaaS learning platform to train workforces, partners, and customers worldwide. It claims to have a customer base of more than 1,600 companies in 68 countries.

     

    Claudio Erba, CEO, Docebo at Learning Technologies 2019 from Learning News.

  • The 10 IT Issues Higher Ed Leaders Are Focusing on, According to Educause

    The 10 IT Issues Higher Ed Leaders Are Focusing on, According to Educause

    Mikel Amigot, IBL News (Chicago)

     

    The 2019 Educause Annual Conference yesterday recognized four prominent educators, highlighting their achievement during the opening talk in Chicago’s convention center.

    • Leadership Award: Linda Jorn, Assoc Vice Provost for Learning Technologies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
    • Community Leadership Award: Mark Askren, Senior Advisor to the President, University of Nebraska
    • DEI Leadership Award: Melissa Woo, President for Information Technology and Enterprise Chief Information Officer, Stony Brook University
    • Rising Star: Tina Pappas, Associate Director, Innovation and Technology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey


    In addition, the Educause staff announced the 2020 Top 10 IT Issues index,  stressing what’s important and where to focus on in terms of higher education:

    1. Information Security Strategy
    2. Privacy
    3. Sustainable Funding
    4. Digital Integrations
    5. Student Retention and Completion
    6. Student-Centric Higher Education
    7. Improved Enrollment
    8. Higher Education Affordability
    9. Administrative Simplification
    10. The Integrative CIO

    “The 2020 IT Issues reveal where the integrative CIO must simplify, sustain, and innovate as higher education drives to digital transformation,” said Susan Grajek, Vice President, Communities and Research at Educause.

    “Institutions know they need to innovate to achieve a competitive advantage in today’s complex marketplace, and almost none of today’s innovation can happen without data and technology,” she added.

    On this edition, the gathering attracted over 8,000 attendees. “This year’s attendance has been a record-setting,” John O’Brien, CEO at Educause, said without providing further data. “Every year there is something new in the air that captures imagination,” he said. “We know innovation is everywhere.”

     

     

    [Promotional Video]

     

     

  • 99% of MIT Undergrads Have Taken an MITx Class – Impressive Numbers After Two Decades

    99% of MIT Undergrads Have Taken an MITx Class – Impressive Numbers After Two Decades

    Mikel Amigot | IBL News

     

    In May 2012, Susan Hockfield, former president at MIT, made a statement that turned into a belief at the institution: “Online education is not an enemy of residential education but rather an inspiring and liberating ally.”

    The idea caught fire, and MIT increased its commitment to online education.

    The same year, MIT teamed up with Harvard University to launch edX, the free open-source platform for digital learning. It also increased the number of online classes.

    Today, MIT’s OpenCourseWare website hosts 2,450 classes and receives 2 million monthly visitors, while edX contains 90 MIT courses.

    MITx, the online learning unit of the institution, reports an average number of people who register for an MITx MOOC every day of 3,307. So far 176 MOOCs have been produced.

    More interestingly, 99% of MIT undergrads have taken a class that uses MITx tools. Also, 15% of undergrads took an MITx MOOC before being admitted.

    The most popular MITx class on edX.org, Introduction to Computer Science using Python has achieved a total of 1.3 million enrollments to date.

    This number shows that the impact is global. In fact, 75% of learners live outside the U.S. In total, 3.8 million unique learners from 200 countries have earned 195,000 certificates. Only 1,805 learners earned MicroMasters credentials, and 76 went on to complete MIT master’s degrees on campus.

    In 1999, President Charles Vest asked a faculty committee how to best use the Internet to further MIT’s mission. He got risky advice: put all of MIT’s course materials online for free.

    MIT’s Open Learning initiative has served amazingly well both its students and learners around the world. It is one of the breakthroughs in education in the last two decades.

  • A Practical Course on edX to Learn How to Deploy an IBM Watson-Based Chatbot

    A Practical Course on edX to Learn How to Deploy an IBM Watson-Based Chatbot

    Mikel Amigot | IBL News (New York)

     

    IBM launched yesterday on edX.org a free course to learn how to create a turbocharged chatbot with Watson Services.

    The online class  (3 weeks, 2-4 hours per week) teaches the intricacies of Watson Discovery, allowing to surface answers and patterns from large unstructured data sets.

    Designed for intermediate learners, this practical course, Programming Chatbots with Watson Services, requires learners to have previous basic knowledge of object-oriented programming, as well as command line, Node.js, and IBM Watson Assistant.

    In addition, “if you have a large repository, the contents of which could answer customer questions, you’ve got the makings of a great FAQ chatbot,“ said the instructors of the course – four IBM’s developers and cloud experts.

    The AI-powered chatbot application, that interacts in natural language, is the result of ingesting data that can be queried to extract sentiment, concept, entities, and taxonomy by using Watson Discovery.

    WordPress and edX Plugins

    AI-based agents or chatbots are expanding in all the industries including education. Gartner predicts that by 2020, 85% of businesses will have their own chatbot.

    In digital education, many questions on the discussions, especially the repetitive ones that pop up in every class, can be answered by a chatbot. Inquiries and follow-up requirements within the course can be solved by this type of automatic help desks.

    These IBM agents are now created for the overall course catalog, rather than the use of a Teaching Assistant (TA) for individual courses and pedagogical answers.

    • Today, IBM is considering developing a Watson-based extension or plugin to integrate with edX.org and Open edX sites, sources told toIBL News.
    • In September, IBM issued a plugin for WordPress, that uses Watson’s Assistant on the cloud. This plugin helps to quickly deploy a chatbot on WordPress-based sites.
  • 2U Announces a Deal with RIT to Deliver an Online Master’s Degree in Architecture

    2U Announces a Deal with RIT to Deliver an Online Master’s Degree in Architecture

    IBL News | New York

    Less than thirty days from the third quarter of earnings calls, 2U (NASDAQ: TWOU) announced yesterday a new partnership with Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) to deliver an online Master of Architecture degree. The program is 2U’s first architecture offering and represents a new vertical for the company.

    With the firm’s stock price currently trading around $16.43, 2U has been unable to gain investors’ trust and recover most of the two-thirds of the value that evaporated after the earnings call on July 30th.  The Lanham, Maryland–based company now has a market capitalization of $1.04 billion – it reached $4.7 billion a year ago, with the stock traded at $80.49.

    The deal reported on Monday with RIT didn’t impact 2U’s stock price. Top stories and financial alerts continued to bounce around investors’ class-action lawsuits alleging misleading statements made between February and July.

    RIT Architecture Online is scheduled to be launched in September 2020. Rochester Institute of Technology faculty will deliver the curriculum through a combination of asynchronous and live classes on 2U’s online platform.

    “We are very delighted to begin this significant and important collaboration with 2U,” said Dennis A. Andrejko, Head of RIT’s Department of Architecture. “Partnering with 2U can certainly allow us to add momentum in advancing our sustainability and resiliency agenda, while inextricably linking this to the opportunities, power, and value of design inquiry and architecture.”

    On behalf of 2U, Andrew Hermalyn, President of Global Partnerships, indicated: “Working together, we will take the best of the RIT architecture program online and into the digital era, and prepare the next generation of leaders in the field to address the most pressing sustainability and design challenges.”

    Update: 2U Inc. had a rough trading day on Tuesday, October 8th, as the stock price dropped 5.26%, to close at $15,57. As a result of the decline, 2U Inc. now has a market cap of $985.81 million.

     

  • Coursera for Campus Is Not an Alternative LMS to Blackboard, Canvas and Moodle, Says Maggioncalda

    Coursera for Campus Is Not an Alternative LMS to Blackboard, Canvas and Moodle, Says Maggioncalda

    Mikel Amigot | IBL News


    “Coursera for Campus is not a full-featured LMS,”     said Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera, during the announcement event in India, on October 3rd. “We expect many universities to stay on their LMSs.”  

    According to the company, Coursera for Campus’ LMS is designed to supplement the existing Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle systems.

    Its main utility refers to authoring content for private audiences such as residential students, alumni, faculty members, and staff.

    The SSO (Single Sign-On) and APIs are apparently intended to facilitate further integrations. The collection of distinctive features include analytics, live-hands on labs, in-browser coding, plagiarism detection, Jupyter Notebooks and gradebook integration.

    Jeff Maggioncalda insisted on the message of collaboration and not being an alternative LMS.

    So far 20 partner universities, including Duke and Illinois, have piloted Coursera for Campus, and 10 additional universities are using an early version of it.

    Last week, when Coursera for Business was advertised, representatives of the company highlighted that this new LMS was designed to deliver online courses and interactive lessons better than most LMSs.

    “We’re talking about a potential major disruption to the LMS market,” Leah Belsky, Coursera’s Vice President of Enterprise said on EdSurge. “We don’t have all the features of an LMS but what we do have is all the tools to create cutting-edge interactive learning experiences.”

    Michael Feldstein, a known consultant and author at the eLiterate blog, doubted that universities will replace their learning management systems with Coursera’s. “MOOC platforms are interesting and have some innovative features, but they are neither mature for their original purpose nor tuned for the broad range of usage that a campus LMS must serve,” Michael Feldstein wrote.

    The edX Consortium had always offered to its affiliated members a private, yet unbranded, authoring platform called Edge.

    • Michael Feldstein’s Blog Post: The MOOC-Courseware Convergence

     

     

  • The Power of Data and Analytics Can Save Higher Education, Says Educause, AIR and NACUBO

    The Power of Data and Analytics Can Save Higher Education, Says Educause, AIR and NACUBO

    IBL News | New York

    Analytics can solve some of higher education’s biggest problems.

    To reaffirm this idea, and given that progress has faltered, three important associations joined forces and made a collective call-to-action for colleges and universities.

    Data and analytics are institutional strategic asset; using analytics to make better decisions will result in improved student recruiting, student outcomes and completion rates, cost management and campus operations, according to these organizations.

    Educause, the Association for Institutional Research (AIR), and the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) – who collectively serve 2,500 institutions and represent over 80% of post-secondary students in the U.S. – released a statement last month recommending six guiding principles:

    • Go big—make an institutional commitment to analytics.
    • Analytics is a team sport—build your dream team.
    • Prepare for some detours on the road to success.
    • Invest what you can—you can’t afford not to.
    • Analytics has a real impact on real people—avoid the pitfalls.
    • Tick-tock, tick-tock—the time to act is now.

    “For a while now, our progress on institution-wide analytics initiatives has not hit its stride,” said John O’Brien, President and CEO of EDUCAUSE. “We hope this statement encourages a sense of urgency and fosters a deeper understanding of the benefits of data analytics for institutions of all kinds.”

    The associations created a website to further support colleges and universities in their implementation processes.

     

  • A Conference to Find Viable Business Models to Commercialize Open Source Software

    A Conference to Find Viable Business Models to Commercialize Open Source Software

    Mikel Amigot  | San Francisco

     

    Organizers of the Open Core Summit – which took part this month at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco – announced the COSS (Commercial Open-Source Software) Platform.

    The goal of this initiative is to help commercial open-source organizations develop viable business models. “We want to educate, grow, fund and connect leaders of COSS companies,” as explained to IBL News by Joseph Jacks, founder of OSS Capital, a venture-capital firm who put together the Open Core Summit.

    Today open-source licenses like Apache 2.0 have no requirements to compensate those who craft software. Consequently, many software companies have been struggling for years.

    To solve it, open-source code cobblers such as Elastic, Confluent, InfluxData, MongoDB, Neo4J, and Redis Labs, among many others, are experimenting with improved business models and alternative software licenses.

    Commercial open-source software is often developed as a substitute for costly proprietary software.

    “In addition, COSS companies are fundamentally more capital efficient at running on and innovating with far less capital,” OSS Capital Founding Portfolio Partner Heather Meeker recently wrote.

    Despite the ups and downs, open-source has become a standard for software development and fast-paced innovation. Its collaboration and knowledge sharing model has transformed software’s development and delivery over the last two decades.

    Open-source is getting increasingly popular, with 30 million developers exchanging code and ideas and collaborating on GitHub.

    From the business perspective, companies like Red Hat and Canonical are proof that an open-source model can turn a profit. Other examples of companies which follow the model of “commercial support” include Docker, GitLab, and Databricks.

    In this new environment, the open-source services industry is set to exceed $17B in 2019, and expected to reach $33B by 2011, according to CB Insights.

    An indication of the growth can be found on Canonical/Ubuntu‘s plans to march into an IPO and recent acquisitions (Red Hat by IBM for $34B, and GitHub by Microsoft for $7.5B), alongside large public market valuations like those of MongoDB ($7.9B) and Elastic ($7.3B).

  • Learners at Coursera, Canvas and Blackboard Will Be Able to Ask Alexa for Course Updates

    Learners at Coursera, Canvas and Blackboard Will Be Able to Ask Alexa for Course Updates

    IBL News | New York

    “Alexa, when is my next assignment due?”

    Coursera will introduce a new tool for Alexa in October, taking advantage of the new API, Alexa Education Skills, created by Amazon for any edtech company.

    Along with the MOOC portal, CanvasLMS, Blackboard, Kickboard and ParentSquare plan to activate this feature soon.

    By simply asking Alexa, learners will get updates based on the latest information on their student account.

    Voice assistants, like Alexa and Siri, are being rapidly adopted.

    Available to all learners with a Coursera account and Amazon Alexa-enabled device, this tool will help learners access course assignment and quiz scores, due dates, and progress updates, among other pieces of information.

    “Recognizing this trend, we introduced a new tool that helps learners fit education into their daily lives, we’ve taken another exciting step toward our mission of providing transformational learning experiences to anyone, anywhere,” Alex Sanchez, Product Management, Mobile Experiences, and Emerging Technology at Coursera, wrote in a blog post.

    The Alexa Education Skill API integrates with Learning Management Systems (LMS), Student Information Systems (SIS), Classroom Management providers, and massively open online course (MOOC) platforms.

    The new API will be available in preview by invitation only for the following interfaces:

    • Alexa.Education.Profile.Student
    • Alexa.Education.Course
    • Alexa.Education.Coursework
    • Alexa.Education.School.Communication
    • Alexa.Education.Grade.Course (coming soon)
    • Alexa.Education.Grade.Coursework (coming soon)

     

  • Automattic, the Company Behind WordPress, Valued at $3 Billion After Its Last Funding

    Automattic, the Company Behind WordPress, Valued at $3 Billion After Its Last Funding

    Mikel Amigot | IBL News

    Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, the Jetpack plugin and soon Tumblr, announced on Thursday that it closed a     $300 million funding round in Series D from Salesforce Ventures. The investment puts Automattic’s valuation at $3 billion post-funding.

    Today WordPress powers more than 34% of all sites on the web, claims Automattic CEO and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg [in the picture].

    The company will have close to 1,200 employees when the Tumblr acquisition closes. In August, Automattic purchased Tumblr from Verizon for $3 million, a fraction of what it was worth when Yahoo bought it for $1.1 billion in 2013. Tumblr is seen as complementary to WordPress.com; therefore, no major changes are planned.

    The freemium business model with an open-source philosophy at its core has been working very well for Automattic Inc.

    WordPress, as a free open-source software platform, is owned by a non-profit group called The WordPress Foundation, while the popular domain WordPress.com is privately held.

    Automattic makes most of its money by selling subscriptions to software services related to the WordPress platform, like WooCommerce, an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress; Jetpack, a customization and security plugin for WordPress; and enterprise WordPress for businesses, such as WordPress.com VIP. It also gets revenues by selling advertising against some of the free blogs that users create on WordPress.com.