IBL News

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  • ISTE Conference Organizer Absorbs EdSurge Media – Investors Won’t Be Rewarded

    ISTE Conference Organizer Absorbs EdSurge Media – Investors Won’t Be Rewarded

    Mikel Amigot | IBL News, New York

     

    ISTE, a 40-year-old nonprofit that annually hosts one of the most influential edtech conferences, acquired EdSurge for an undisclosed amount, in a transaction expected to be finalized by the end of the year. The announcement came yesterday by surprise at the EdSurge’s Fusion conference.

    Burlingame, California-based EdSurge, that provides journalism, research, job offerings, events, and other edtech services, will become a nonprofit media organization by joining ISTE. Its shareholders, including investors such as Reach Capital, GSV Capital, and TAL Education, will not receive any return on their investment, according to Richard Culatta, ISTE’s CEO since 2017.

    EdSurge will keep its brand on news stories, newsletters, and research. Most of its 30 employees will be hired as staff members, although headcount reductions were announced. “Any time when you look at combining teams and roles, there’s always the chance that there are redundancies,” Culatta said.

    “Core to this acquisition, however, is maintaining EdSurge’s journalistic independence,” Betsy Corcoran, CEO at EdSurge, said in an email to readers. “What this arrangement gives us is an opportunity to focus on the work—not just focus on paying the bills, not just focus on survivability,” she added.

    Founded in 2011 as a venture-backed, for-profit news organization, EdSurge raised more than $8 million from a mix of investors and received millions of dollars in grants from nonprofits and foundations, such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, NewSchools Venture Fund, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

    With a revenue stream of over $16 million, staff of 60 employees and 25,000 membership educators, the Arlington, Virginia-based ISTE, publishes books and research journals. However, two-thirds of the income came from the annual conference.

    In 2017, its CEO started talks about buying a news-media outlet. He ended up buying EdSurge, although he didn’t write “a big check”, he said. Betsy Corcoran confirmed that the acquisition did not come with a huge price tag.

    Jeffrey R. Young, senior editor at EdSurge, and Stephen Noonoo, K-12 editor in the news site, posted a detailed story about the antecedents of the transaction yesterday.

    • Betsy Corcoran’s reflections on the future

  • Sachem Head Becomes One of the Top Shareholders of 2U and Advocates for a Sale

    Sachem Head Becomes One of the Top Shareholders of 2U and Advocates for a Sale

    Mikel Amigot | IBL News, New York

     

    Yesterday, Sachem Head set its sight on 2U Inc., pushing the company to explore a sale. As a result of it, the stock registered its biggest gain since 2016, almost 14% to $21.18.

    With a market value of about $1.3 billion, 2U saw its shares fall more than 70% over the past 12 months and faced numerous class-action lawsuits for allegedly false or misleading statements during the second quarter. The stock dropped 65% on July 31st after a controversial earnings call wherein its CEO and former CFO drastically tempered short-term growth plans.

    The New York-based activist hedge fund has been building a position in OPM 2U (Nasdaq: TWOU), apparently becoming one of the top shareholders, and now saying it’s time to sell. The exact size of its stake is unclear.

    Sachem Head Capital Management LP, founded by Scott Ferguson in 2012, believes that 2U would be an attractive takeover target for private equity firms and other education technology companies, sources told Bloomberg.

    Sachem Head’s positions and views tend to move the stock market. For example, the influential fund, that invests $3.2 billion on behalf of clients, recently called on Whitbread PLC to sell its Costa Coffee business before it was spun off to Coca-Cola Co. It also pushed Eagle Materials Inc to split its core businesses, before the company’s board agreed to spin off its heavy and light materials businesses into two publicly traded entities.

    Last week, Sachem Head announced that it wanted Instructure Inc –whose main product is the leading Canvas LMS platform– to pursue a full sale process, as IBL News reported quoting Reuters.

    Instructure (NYSE: INST), with a similar market cap to 2U, was the second education company that Sachem Head targeted, although that move was not apparently related.

    2U has been making some changes in management lately in an attempt to calm down investors and arrive in better shape to the crucial earnings call on November 12th. Last month it appointed a new CFO –Paul Lalljie, a former Neustar Inc executive– and new CMO –Jennifer Ogden-Reese, a former SeatGeek Inc. executive.

    •  Past reports about 2U at IBL News

     

  • An Influential Hedge Fund Pushes Instructure’s Canvas LMS to Sell Its Business

    An Influential Hedge Fund Pushes Instructure’s Canvas LMS to Sell Its Business

    Mikel Amigot | IBL News

    What’s next for Instructure (INST)?

    That’s the question that comes to investors’ minds, especially after the third quarter performance report, which represented an earnings surprise of 42.11%.

    Since the beginning of the year, Instructure shares have added about 15.8% versus the S&P 500’s gain of 20.6%, while the estimated revision trend for the company is mixed.

    In this context, New York-based Sachem Head, which has been buying Instructure’s shares over time, announced yesterday that it wants Instructure to pursue a full sale process, Reuters disclosed. Now, the notorious hedge fund plans to push the Salt Lake City-based company in this direction.

    The activist fund, that invests $3.2 billion on behalf of clients, recently called on Whitbread PLC to sell its Costa Coffee business before it was spun off to Coca-Cola Co. It also pushed Eagle Materials Inc to split its core businesses, before the company’s board agreed to spin off its heavy materials and light materials businesses into two publicly traded entities.

    On the news of Sachem Head’s stake, Instructure’s stock prices jumped as much as 6% this week, ending at $46.52.

    With a market capitalization of $1.8 billion, Instructure’s Canvas is the market leader in the LMS segment –and according to its own data continues to add customers.

    However, its employee development platform Bridge is not working that well, failing to generate considerable market share, analysts think –and that’d be the reason why Instructure has underperformed the market so far this year.

    In this regard, Instructure’s CEO Dan Goldsmith didn’t reject the idea of a sale or spinoff of Bridge, which launched in 2015.  “Nothing is off the table,” he told investors on the mentioned Q3 2019 earnings call on October 28. “But the focus for us is really making Bridge successful, making Bridge financially beneficial and accretive and healthy and then continuing to grow over time.”

    Dan Goldsmith promised to provide more details at an analyst day on Dec. 3.

     

     

  • The EdX Organization Adopts a More Commercial Structure Appointing a New Co-CEO

    The EdX Organization Adopts a More Commercial Structure Appointing a New Co-CEO

    Mikel Amigot | New York

    The edX nonprofit organization, created by MIT and Harvard University, decided to adopt a more business and less academic-focused structure with two running CEOs.

    According to the unexpected announcement made yesterday, Adam Medros, currently the COO and President, has been promoted to co-CEO, joining Anant Agarwal in this position.

    In a way, the move follows Coursera’s aggressive commercial direction when it replaced Rick Levin, former President at Yale, for Jeff Maggioncalca as CEO. Maggioncalca was mainly hired to find a successful business model and IPO-ing the company.

    Adam Medros, a business manager who moved from TripAdvisor to edX two years ago, with no previous experience in higher education, “will partner with Agarwal to drive the company’s continued growth and innovation, in service of its non-profit mission to increase access to high-quality education for everyone, everywhere,” edX said.

    Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor who has been teaching for 31 years said, “Adam’s dedication to the edX mission and his partnership have been invaluable to me in my role as Founder and CEO of edX and I look forward to further deepening our collaboration.”

    The official announcement highlighted the new business orientation that the learning organization is adopting, “Agarwal and Medros will continue to work with the edX partner network, made up of the majority of top-ranked universities in the world and industry-leading companies, to deliver stackable learning experiences that help learners and employers alike address the future of work.”

    In the last months, Adam Medros –who he stayed in TripAdvisor for 13 years– has been working in new business strategies to make edX a financially sustainable organization.

    He provided his views in an interview with IBL News recorded in March.

     

  • A Spanish University Builds a Futuristic Eco-Campus with Outside Classrooms

    A Spanish University Builds a Futuristic Eco-Campus with Outside Classrooms

    IBL News | Madrid, Spain

    The University of Malaga, in Spain, is building a futuristic eco-campus for students to take classes outside.

    Spanning a surface area of 52 acres, this innovative campus will include a green infrastructure suitable for everyday activities, such as studying, meeting and reading. The goal is to improve the climatic comfort and connectivity within an educational setting.

    A Madrid-based architectural firm called Ecosistema Urbano is designing this interactive infrastructure after winning in 2016 a public contract to transform an old campus into an environmentally-friendly and digitally connected space.

    It will be a geological garden in the works, a tropical garden, and a digital water curtain.

    By using high-tech capabilities, learners will be able to visualize real-time information and manipulate physical aspects of public space in an almost futuristic fashion, as shown in the picture below.

    Outdoor comfort will improve through solar-powered climate conditioning systems such as evaporative cooling and geothermal air circulation.

    Naturally, everything will run on renewable energy systems.


  • 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.