According to venture capital database, CB Insights, education technology companies raised a total of $1.1 billion in 2012, with about one-third of the funding going to about ten companies. Read more »
After an $8 million Series A round in July, Toronto-based education startup Top Hat Monocle said it has accepted $1.1 million in funding from Felicis Ventures. Read more »
According to GE’s annual Innovation Barometer, business leaders around the world ranked improving education and encouraging a more entrepreneurial school environment as priorities in encouraging innovation. Read more »
As new online learning startups have attracted media attention and investor dollars, lynda.com, a veteran of the industry has remained relatively quiet. But on Tuesday the company said it raised $103 million in its first venture round since launching in 1995. Read more »
StudyBlue, a Madison, Wisc.-based education technology startup, on Friday announced that it has raised $9 million in funding from Great Oaks Venture Capital, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and other investors. Read more »
Social learning startup Grockit on Tuesday announced a $20-million-dollar round of financing led by Discovery Communications. The company launched in 2007 to help students with text prep but with the May release of Learnist expanded to a wider audience of lifelong learners. Read more »
University Ventures, a $100 million education technology fund, on Monday announced the launch of UV Labs, a company that will partner with schools to build new online learning products. Read more »
As Pearson – along with the entire textbook publishing industry – rethinks its role in education, one of the company’s executives says it could look to build the core competencies of digital content creators like video game giant Electronic Arts. Read more »
The U.S. Department of Education has announced that it will partner with online learning startup Knewton and publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for a program aimed at helping millions of at-risk youth transition to traditional schools and prepare for the workforce. Read more »
As online learning platforms like Coursera, Udacity and edX raise the stakes for students with increased partnerships with traditional universities and credit-bearing classes, here are five technologies that can help them thwart cheating. Read more »
2U (formerly 2tor) is partnering with 10 top U.S. universities for a new online learning program for undergraduates that aims to create the online equivalent of quality offline education, with small classes, live instruction and teacher-student interaction. Read more »
Online learning startup Coursera is working with the American Council on Education to evaluate course equivalency for its courses. The company said the process will start in early 2013 and hopes it encourages more students to ultimately pursue a college degree. Read more »
San Francisco startup Degreed is challenging the traditional college diploma with an online service that tracks and scores educational achievements from established institutions as well as new online learning platforms. Ahead of a public launch in 2013, Degreed this week began a crowd funding campaign. Read more »
Online learning platform Udacity, which was founded by former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun in January, has raised another $15 million. The Series B round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included Charles River Ventures and Steve Blank. Read more »
As part of an open online course on entrepreneurship in education, Union Square Ventures managing partner Fred Wilson talks about the role of venture capital, potential business models in ed tech and a few areas that are most ripe for innovation. Read more »
Leading entrepreneurs and thought leaders provide a look at the future of education in a short documentary from Ericsson. It discusses how technology is changing the way students learn as well as what it means to learn and teach in a connected era. Read more »
This week, online education startup Coursera said that it would no longer be able to offer courses to residents of Minnesota because of a decades-old policy. Now, it’s raising questions among the states’s local tech community. Read more »
With the launch of Whispercast, a new service for purchasing and managing content across a fleet of devices, Amazon is ramping up its competition against Apple in the education market. Read more »
Marrying the quality of cable TV quality with convenience and access of online education, Seattle-based CreativeLIVE has announced that it has raised $7.5 million from Greylock Ventures. The online learning platform offers higher quality video instruction to “creative entrepreneurs.” Read more »
As digital learning platforms continue to personalize education, McGraw-Hill SVP Jeff Livingston believes schools, particularly at the high school level, will need to rethink grouping students by age and instead organize students by competency. Read more »
Online education startup Coursera has added 17 more university partners — including schools in Australia, Hong Kong, Canada and Israel — bringing its total number of academic partners to 33. Read more »
Ed tech may be booming in the U.S., but a survey from Dell suggests that Chinese students use technology more comprehensively than Americans. It also found that Chinese parents, teachers and students were more receptive to social media in the classroom. Read more »
The use of “clickers,” which let students respond to professors during class, is gaining adoption in college classrooms nationwide. But Top Hat Monocle, which Wednesday announced $8 million in new funds, aims to replace those devices with software that runs on any student device. Read more »
In some circles, the phrase “gamification” may have gone out of fashion but, with help from Bunchball, Course Hero is intent on showing that it can still pack a punch in education and released some data to illustrate its point. Read more »
In addition to announcing $6 million in new funding, online education startup Coursera Tuesday announced that was adding a dozen new university partners, including three international partners. Read more »
Apple’s e-textbook tools and platform announcement wasn’t a huge surprise. But what’s become more clear after hearing Apple’s pitch, which is aimed at K-12 school teachers, school districts, homeschooling parents, publishers and students themselves, is that the future of textbooks isn’t a book at all. Read more »
