Howard University sneaks in a $100 “globalization fee” to fund international travel, regardless of whether students study abroad. Another school charges $185 for an “undergraduate entering fee”, reports ProPublica. “It’s all smoke and mirrors in some ways, the issue of tuition and fees,” admits Terry Meyers to, an English professor at the College of… → Read More
As new models of digital learning sweep across higher education, colleges and universities across the globe are scrambling to get on board and make their course catalogs available to a wider audience via the Web. Of these new models, few have seen more attention than massive open online courses (a.k.a. “MOOCs”), which, starting with Khan Academy, promise to offer access to quality, affordable… → Read More
Udemy launched in 2010 to help students of all ages continue their education through video-based, online courses — and in turn, give teachers (and experts) a way to make a buck by sharing their knowledge with the masses. Capitalizing on the growing interest and buzz around online learning and MOOC platforms pioneered by sites like Khan Academy, Udemy has been on a mission to create the largest… → Read More
If knowledge is a door to information, data is the key. When you’re talking about politics and government, information is extremely important to those who are making decisions on who to vote for and what legislation to get behind or block. Today, a company called ElectNext has raised a seed round of $1.3M led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures along with other strategic investors like Liberty City… → Read More
Adafruit, the DIY electronics website and marketplace, is espousing the popular strategy of “get em’ young” with a new live action short video series broadcast on YouTube. The series, called Circuit Playground, takes an alphabetical approach to teaching kids about the basics of circuits, components and concepts that will come in handy if the tots watching have aspirations of becoming electrical… → Read More
Wondering who has won a Google Glass? Stanford PhD student Andrej Karpathy has used Twitter’s API to compile a partial list of the so far close to 4,000 winners of Google’s Glass Explorers first adopter competition who applied to buy the high tech specs via Twitter. Google still hasn’t confirmed that the last Glass winners have been named yet so there may yet be a few more invites to go out. → Read More
Since emerging on the scene in early 2012, the Boston-based Boundless has been on a mission to give students of all ages a free, open-source digital alternative to the pricey world of hard-copy textbooks. But when you try to rock the boat, the powers-that-be will likely have something to say about it — especially when thousands of beta testers across 2,000 universities are using free, open… → Read More
AlumniFunder launched in beta this week with a simple mission: Help create a deeper relationship between current students and alumni, while supporting collegiate entrepreneurship and creativity. To do that, AlumniFunder wants to give alumni a platform by which they can invest in innovative projects created by students at their alma mater. Whether it be for a new science lab, natural language… → Read More
Leybovich and long-time friend Francis Escuadro founded Meograph last year with the goal of creating an “Adobe for everybody” — to let anybody create four-dimensional digital stories without having to know how to use more advanced content creation tools, like Final Cut Pro, Photoshop and so on. Using Meograph, in under 10 minutes, he says, anyone can log in and create a story through a simple… → Read More
Google, the world’s largest search engine and one of the most powerful tech companies around, is now using its muscle to search for something new: social entrepreneurs. Today, the company is announcing the Global Impact Challenge, a new prize that will award £2 million ($3 million) between four non-profit startups based in the UK that are using technology for social good in areas like education… → Read More
This is not a good sign for online education: 72 percent of professors who have taught Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) don’t believe that students should get official college credit, even if they did well in the class. More importantly, these are the professors who voluntarily took time to teach online courses, which means the actual number of professors who discount the quality of MOOCs is… → Read More
The world of language learning startups is going international. Today, Berlin-based Babbel, which creates online and mobile-based language learning courses, is buying PlaySay, a TC Disrupt finalist that focused on creating mobile apps that turned the process of learning languages into a game — modelled somewhat loosely on the back-and-forth paired-play concept of “Draw Something.” Financial terms… → Read More
EverTrue, the education fundraising and mobile alumni networking platform, is showing today that it’s not familiar with this “Series A Crunch” you speak of — in the education technology market or otherwise. The Boston-based startup announced today that it has closed a $5.25 million series A funding round, led by Bain Capital Ventures. The round also included participation… → Read More
The bring your own device (BYOD) movement has been sweeping through the business world, contributing to the so-called “consumerization of enterprise,” as employees are increasingly bringing their own laptops, tablets and smartphones to work. While this makes for a more convenient and flexible work experience for the end-user, allowing employees to access sensitive company data and information can… → Read More
Another day, another acquisition in the education technology market. As the old, familiar names in publishing and education move to get in line with the digital revolution, they’re finding plenty of opportunities amidst today’s growing roster of young EdTech startups. → Read More
Teachers and students have suffered through the same model of educational testing for years. Sure, the SAT has changed — it’s now out of a possible 2,400 points, not 1,600 — but both standardized testing and good old in-class quizzing are still in the dominion of paper and pencil. Terascore, a Y Combinator-backed startup that launches today, is on a mission to help bring testing online. → Read More
Amazon introduced Whispercast for Kindle back in October of 2012, and now the service is getting an update that allows it to deploy not just books and documents, but also apps. that means organizations like schools and businesses can now widely deploy apps across a number of Kindle Fire devices quickly and easily. → Read More
Google has learned all that it needs to learn about the reception of its Chromebook laptops in the U.S. and UK and has announced availability of Acer, HP and Samsung flavors of its device in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. As we’ve spent time with Google’s Chromebook and OS, it has become apparent that the goal of the operating system is to focus on… → Read More
Top Hat Monocle, the Toronto, Canada-based service that provides a web-based clicker and online homework tool that aims to make large lecture-based classes more engaging, just announced that it is expanding its reach to the Asia-Pacific region, with a focus on Australia and New Zealand. The company also announced that more than 25,000 students are currently signed up to use the services in the… → Read More
Last summer, we told you about the launch of Noodle Education, a startup co-founded and led by John Katzman, perhaps better known as a co-founder of The Princeton Review and 2U (formerly 2tor). The startup is on a mission to bring a Netflix-style recommendation engine to the fragmented and noisy world of education. Not unlike Google, Noodle Education wants to organize the world’s learning… → Read More
As web-based learning platforms proliferate, and education increasingly happens in formal and informal settings and in both real and virtual classrooms, there is a growing need for a new form of credentialing that reflects these changes. Traditional, paper-based diplomas and certificates are no longer enough, but designing a meaningful, universal replacement for the old standard doesn’t happen… → Read More
Well, Google’s M&A strategy is nothing if not diverse in focus. In November, it acquired package delivery startup Bufferbox. Last month, Google it made its first acquisition of the year, buying eCommerce startup Channel Intelligence. Today, Google dug into the Computer Science at The University of Toronto to acquire DNNresearch, a young startup founded by professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of… → Read More
CreativeLIVE, the startup looking to bring a live, online classroom to creative entrepreneurs, announced today that it has raised $8 million in series A financing from Creative Artists Agency, William Morris Endeavor, CrunchFund and Google Ventures. The new investors join Greylock in backing CreativeLIVE, which invested $7.5 million in the startup back in October of last year, bringing the… → Read More
The fast expanding universe of MOOCs has a new addition. Berlin-based startup iversity, founded in 2011 to offer online collaboration tools for learning management, has relaunched itself as a platform for massive open online courses. Its first batch of MOOCs are due to go live around September/October, at the start of the winter study term. → Read More
The EdTech space is growing fast — from every angle — talent is starting to cross over from consumer-facing companies, schools are looking to go digital, national policy is changing and student debt is out of control. While there’s a lot of early-stage capital flowing into the market, the follow-on money is much more scarce. To support the growth of the ecosystem and encourage young startups and… → Read More
Our education system is broken, from lower-level public schools all the way up to higher learning. EdTech startups are coming at the numerous problems from every angle. Boundless, a startup out of Boston, is aiming to offer an open alternative to the college textbook.
But major publishers like Pearson Education, Cengage Learning, and Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group aren’t so… → Read More
Real-time creative collaboration startup, Scoot & Doodle, which piggybacks on Google+’s Hangouts feature as the arena for its learn-through-play app aimed at middle school age through to college students, has closed a $2.25 million seed round. The investment comes from unnamed Silicon Valley angels and educational publishing giant Pearson. → Read More
After spending years working as technicians at public schools, Jeff O’Hara and Nicolas Borg launched Edmodo in 2008 to address what they had come to see as a huge gap in the teacher-student relationship: The need for a better, safer way for teachers to connect and communicate with their students. However, with the launch of its APIs early last year to allow developers to build apps on top of its… → Read More
Public school systems are cheerfully decorated dictatorships: discipline, standards, and testing are the driving concepts of modern k-12 education. The very reason why districts purchase bundles of the same textbooks is so they can keep classrooms in lockstep alignment as teachers meticulous meet timely instructional goals. Amplify, NewsCorp’s new education division, finally revealed its… → Read More
The U.K. MOOCs alliance, Futurelearn, which was announced last December and will be offering its first free courses “from mid-2013″ with the aim of creating a globally accessible British higher education brand, has added another member to its consortium of backers. The British Council is the latest to add its name to the Futurelearn alliance. → Read More
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