Joining what is a newly-hot space within education — those offering massively open online courses (a.k.a. MOOCs), from Khan Academy to Coursera and Lynda.com — CreativeLIVE wants to bring quality online classes and lectures to the masses, live and at an affordable price point.
We sat down with CreativeLive co-founder Chase Jarvis to talk about the origins of CreativeLive, what differentiates… → 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
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
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
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
Last June, online portfolio startup Pathbrite announced that it had raised $2.5 million in Series A financing led by Rethink Education, alongside a strategic investment from ACT, the college and career readiness assessment company.
Now, these investors are ready to double down on the startup’s approach to next-gen online portfolio management, as Pathbrite announced today that it has raised $4… → Read More
As the founder of two KIPP public charter prep schools, an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at NewSchools Ventures and a former English teacher, Jason Singer is familiar with the starring role that technology is increasingly playing in the classroom. However, while the push to improve STEM education is alive and well, there’s a tendency to forget about the other side. When it comes to basic reading and… → Read More
“In the Studio” welcomes a first-time founder with a diverse set of experiences — ranging from economics to advertising, from product management to design, and from startup CEO to advisor of a venture capital firm — who now is at the helm of one of the most interesting online education startups on the web today. → Read More
Apple announced a new milestone for its iTunes U online digital education outlet, which has just crossed the 1 billion download mark. Alongside the announcement, Apple has also informed us exclusively that the company has so far sold more than 8 million iPads directly into educational institution worldwide. iTunes U became a standalone app, complete with its own course marketplace and catalog in… → Read More
Kickboard, a New Orleans-based startup that aims to help teachers and schools better capture, analyze and share student performance data, announced today that it has secured $2 million in series A financing. The round was led by New Markets Venture Partners and included contributions from Two Sigma Ventures and a handful of angel investors. Having $800K in seed and angel rounds to date… → Read More
Currently, outstanding national student loan debt is over $1 trillion, $864 billion of which is backed by ye olde federal government. According to the Center for American Progress, the majority of those loans have an interest rate higher than six percent — generally speaking, twice the average mortgage rate and is thrice the rate at which the government borrows. In the American education system… → Read More
Ask any startup founder, and they’ll tell you that engineering talent is in high demand, but the problem is that good talent is hard to come by. What’s more, we have a computer science education deficit in the U.S. Today, computer science is absent in 95 percent of high schools. Luckily, a gaggle of startups and websites, like Treehouse, Lynda.com, Code School, Khan Academy, LearnStreet and more… → Read More
Sokikom, a new startup that wants to help K-12 teachers motivate students to learn using games, is announcing today that it has raised $2 million in seed funding, half of which comes in the form of a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (a research branch within the U.S. Department of Education) and the other half comes in the form of angel funding from former Intel Chairman and CEO Dr. → Read More
Graduway, a startup that wants to help colleges and universities more effectively engage with their alumni, is officially launching today with $1.1 million in seed funding from BTG Pactual (Latin America’s largest investment bank), former 888 Holdings CEO Gigi Levy and RSL Venture Partners, which has recently invested in Vengo and OneSpot. → Read More
It’s almost as if there’s an arms race in online education. Which MOOC platform can expand the fastest? Place your bets now. On the heels of edX’s announcement that it will be expanding internationally with the addition of six new schools (bringing its total to 12), Coursera is doing some addition of its own. Today, the massive online course platform announced that 29… → Read More
When it comes to online education and massive open online courses (a.k.a. “MOOCs”), Udacity and Coursera have stolen most of the attention. But they aren’t the only two choices for voracious distance learners out there; in fact, the number of options has grown considerably. → Read More
Like a growing number of students, Ben Kosinski attended multiple universities over the course of his collegiate career. Although these schools differed wildly in culture and the makeup of their student bodies, the one thing that seems to remain true at any school, he says, is the level of influence online social identities have come to play in the daily life of college students. Yet, in spite of… → Read More
With early-stage capital front-loading the EdTech investment spectrum, it’s a good time to start an education business. (Even if investors are still wary about doling out larger rounds, but ssshhh on that bit.) Of course, when it comes to education, many entrepreneurs are still green. It’s not as easy as it may seem to learn the landscape and understand how best to maneuver lengthy sales cycles… → Read More
BrightBytes has been on a mission to “improve the way the world learns through data” — and, in turn, to help schools solve their technological woes. To do that, the San Francisco-based learning analytics startup provides schools with the tools and services they need to be able to more effectively measure the impact of technology on the learning process. → Read More
Tutorspree has been quiet of late, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still plugging away on its mission to make high-quality, local tutors in any subject accessible to any student — or finding continued interest from investors along the way. According to its Form D filing with SEC, Tutorspree recently closed on a new round of financing that appears to add an additional $1.9 million to its coffers. → Read More
Higher education in the U.S. is a hot mess. For decades, funding for public universities and colleges has been in steady decline, which, as spending continued, led to rising institutional debt and eventually reductions in faculty, courses, programs — you name it. To make up the difference, institutions have been jacking up tuition rates to the point that the cost of a college degree is now… → Read More
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