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
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
Back in September, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched a contest that aimed to challenge entrepreneurs and app developers to build awesome, innovative education apps on Facebook’s platform. The so-called College Knowledge Challenge kicked off with an EdTech hackathon co-hosted by the Gates Foundation and Facebook, located at the social network’s headquarters in Menlo Park. → Read More
With unemployment and “under-employment” rampant among grads, many college students are facing the unpleasant reality of a less-than-appealing job market. As a result, students have begun turning to alternative resources to help them prep for life after college, whether that be through skill-focused online platforms like Skillshare or online educational resources like Modern Guild. → Read More
Launched in 2010, Austin-based MyEdu set out to help students reduce the cost of earning a college diploma and remove the friction from every aspect of the higher education process, from deciding on the right school to finding post-graduate employment. Since then, the startup has been methodically collecting data from students as well as official academic data from universities to identify… → Read More
I remember my freshman year of college. It was a tiny campus, but I still found myself looking for classes and wandering through a maze-like library for most of the first year I was there. At the time, my phone wasn’t much help to me, but now that smartphones are taking over the market, Modo Labs is ready to help college students spend even more time on fiddling around on their phones.
The… → Read More
OneSchool, a free mobile app for college students which provides easy access to maps, course schedules, directories, bus routes, news, student groups and more, is announcing its official launch today in eight universities around the U.S. The company is also revealing it has raised $750,000 in seed funding from 500 Startups, Learn Capital and Magnolia Ventures. → Read More
Good startups often emerge from situations where the founder is attempting to solve a problem they themselves have. That was certainly the case with collegiate events site Fampus, created by 22-year old Brittany Brody, now a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As a new arrival to the university in 2008, Brody wanted to get involved on campus, but was frustrated by the lack of a… → Read More
Nature, the folks who brought you the free life sciences learning community Scitable, are today announcing “Principles of Biology”, a college level electronic textbook. Building upon the cross-platform success of Scitable, the new textbook offers a variety of fully interactive features, including quizzes and assessments, an online gradebook for instructors, and more. Perhaps most notable in this… → Read More
Heading off to college? Here’s my suggestion: buy a used laptop from Craigslist and install Ubuntu onto it. Seriously. You don’t need a new computer for college. If you’re pursuing a liberal arts degree, you really don’t need a brand new computer just to write all the papers you’ll write. If you’re pursuing an engineering degree, the chances are high that your department’s computer labs are better… → Read More
One or two weeks ago we learned about a World of Warcraft-themed university course. We all laughed, then went about our business, not particularly bothered by any of it. Today we learn about a zombie class being taught at the University of Baltimore. Mm. → Read More
Reasonably torn about this next story. There’s an honors class at the University of Florida this semester called “21st Century Skills in Starcraft.” Basically, you play the game for a bunch of weeks, and somewhere along the way you pick up “valuable 21st Century Skills through a hands-on approach.” Sure you do. → Read More
Three high-profile American universities, Cornell University, Princeton University, and George Washington University, have banned the iPad from their campuses. George Washington University and Princeton University call the device a “security risk,” while Cornell is concerned about students chewing through too much bandwidth. So much for the iPad being the darling of higher education. → Read More
Earlier this month college textbook rental company Chegg raised $112M as part of a combined Series D and debt round, bringing the total raised by the company to a massive $144M. Competitor BookRenter will tomorrow announce a Series A round of $6M, raised from Storm Ventures and Adams Capital Management. BookRenter has only raised a fraction of the capital of their competitor Chegg, but the… → Read More
Fresh off its fancy IPO announcement, Newegg is running an equally fancy contest for American and Canadian college students. Provided you’re 18-year-old (or older) and are attending a U.S. or Canadian college or university, you could win up to $5,000 to spend on whatever the hell you want on the Web site. What do you have to do to win such riches???? → Read More
We’re running a Back to School extravaganza right now, but one thing that I don’t know if we really addressed is: Who exactly is going back to school? Or, more accurately, who is going to college for the first time in a few weeks? (That’s who these Back to School things are usually for, freshman. If you’re going back odds are you know exactly what you need and what to expect.) What have today’s… → Read More
Well, could have been a senior manager—the job seems to have already been filled. Still, let’s talk about it. Best Buy recently posted a job ad on its Web site looking for someone who would be “he primary lead for the Best Buy’s mobile, social, and video marketing and media efforts to drive in-store and online sales, create sustainable word-of-mouth evangelists, and brand loyalists.”… → Read More
Now THAT’S how you settle a rivalry. It’s all Ducks and Beavers this weekend as far as any nerdly Oregonians are concerned, as the two universities are currently in the closing moments of a 24-hour LAN party where the schools’ respective gaming clubs have squared off in the following titles: Command & Conquer 3 Counter Strike: Source Dawn of War Peggle Team Fortress 2 Unreal Tournament… → Read More
How much does it cost to monitor college students’ anti-American P2P activities? A whole lot, and that’s money colleges could be spending on, I don’t know, education. This chart breaks down the cost of complying with, specifically, the new provisions of the Higher Education Act of 2008. That law, which the RIAA and MPAA were able to lobby their way into, requires colleges try to… → Read More
Well, well, well. It’s been quite a back-to-school week here at CrunchGear. We learned a little bit about affordable notebooks and netbooks, what time-draining video games to avoid and even what to do about feeding yourself now that you’re on your own. To close out the week and in honor of Friday, we got a little dorm room light show for you after the jump. Remember to have a little fun while… → Read More
Ok, well maybe he is not exactly giving up on the discussion part of his course, but Professor Dave Perry of the University of Texas at Dallas is taking his class online. No college professor will admit that the lecture portion of their class is unnecessary. As much as I tried to convince them otherwise, my instructors never let me get away with skipping class (too much). As much as I thought the… → Read More
The Senate has passed the Higher Education Act (the House passed it earlier this year), which, among other things, provides for federal monies for student loans. What’s most interesting to us here is a provision in the bill, which it’s expected that President Bush will sign into law, that tells college campuses to rein in wanton P2P downloading. To that end, the MPAA will provide… → Read More
Looks like Apple is considering selling the iPhone 3G at top universities throughout the country. The move would be the first by Apple to expand sales of the iPhone outside its own retail stores and AT&T’s; it’d be limited to schools where it already has a significant account and presence. Apple had thought about expanding sales of the iPhone to Best Buy last year, but freaked out… → Read More
Like years past, Apple is offering a deal for incoming college students, and it’s more or less the same one it has offered in the past. Students who buy a Mac (which includes the MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and iMac) will get a free iPod touch or iPod nano. My advice: go with the MacBook+iPod touch combo. You can’t bring an iMac to class, and an iPod touch can do so much more… → Read More
I played a lot of beer pong and flipper in college. It was fun, but it got a little unsanitary when people forgot to wash the balls after each throw. Drinking beer with whatever filth is on the table or floor is disgusting. My alma mater had a huge contingent of engineers and quite a few of them were in my fraternity, which makes me wonder why none of them thought of this contraption made by some… → Read More
Check out this bureaucratic bullshit. My wonderful school, NYU, now requires students surrender their cellphone number in order to register for Fall classes. It’s all in the name of safety, of course, as are most attacks on liberty. Think of the children, we’re only protecting you, etc. I’ve included the full text of the e-mail, if you’re so inclined. → Read More
Oklahoma Christian University joins the list of colleges across the country to “give away” Apple products to incoming freshman. New students will receive a MacBook and their choice of an iPhone or iPod Touch. Of course we all know that the costs of such giveaways are built into the ever-rising tuition at schools everywhere but it’s a nice way for kids to get some new gadgets as… → Read More
[photopress:acui.jpg,full,center] Incoming freshman at Texas’ Abilene Christian University this fall will each receive either an iPhone or iPod touch to help speed along their education. The school hopes students will use the devices in any number of academic pursuits, such as getting on-the-go homework updates, checking meal plan activity and answer in-class quizzes. That’s what the… → Read More
I don’t know about you but back in college when I used to drink enough beers in a row to necessitate some sort of accounting system, I’d simply slip each bottle cap into my pocket and count them the next morning. If I’d had the BeerTracker — with convenient LCD display that increases in numeric value with each bottle that’s opened — I could have littered my… → Read More
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