On the heels of faculty backlashes to massive open online courses, three universities have pulled out of an online learning program with education company 2U. Read more »
Professors at San Jose State University argue that massive open online courses (MOOCs) could seriously compromise the quality of education at public universities. Read more »
Feast CEO David Spinks is combining the e-learning model pioneered by education sites like Udemy and Coursera with his experience in building online communities, and he’s applying it all to building on online cooking school. Read more »
Minerva Project, a San Francisco-based startup aiming to bring a Harvard-level education to the web, plans to recognize innovative educators with a $500,000 prize. Read more »
Elite liberal arts college Amherst voted against partnering with massive open online course (MOOC) non-profit edX this week, bringing attention to institutions’ concerns about how MOOCs could impact higher education. Read more »
Treehouse, a Portland, Ore.-based startup that offers online coding lessons, has raised $7 million in new Series B funding. Read more »
Despite its initial efforts at building its own open-source online learning platform, Stanford said it will fold that platform into the edX platform launched by Harvard and MIT. Read more »
San Francisco-based online learning startup Udemy has launched a new mobile app to help students enroll in and take courses from their phones. Read more »
Language learning giant Rosetta Stone has acquired Seattle-based Livemocha to shift its products to the cloud. Read more »
Pluralsight, a Salt Lake City-based developer training company, has released new programming courses for kids in elementary, middle and high school. Read more »
In the past year, startups bringing online education to mass audiences have gained a lot of attention. But several startups are finding success with an opposite approach — instructing online students one at a time. Read more »
Publishing giant Wiley has launched Digital Classroom, an online marketplace of software training videos and digital books. Read more at paidContent »
Professors pioneering the new massive open online courses have mostly positive things to say about the “MOOCs” but most don’t believe their schools should award credit, says a survey from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Read more »
Benchprep, a digital learning startup based in Chicago, is rolling out video-based software training courses targeting college and high school students, not adults looking for professional development. Read more »
Moving closer toward its vision of being an open-sourced learning platform, edX on Thursday released its XBlock SDK, the underlying architecture supporting edX course content. Read more »
A new bill proposed by a state senator in California would create a new system that would allow public universities across the state to accept college credit for online courses. Read more »
CreativeLIVE, a Seattle-based provider of online skill-focused classes, has raised a small amount of funding from big name Hollywood agencies Creative Artists Agency and William Morris Endeavor, as well as Google Ventures and the Crunchfund. Read more »
Even if providers of massive open online courses don’t intend to provide degrees or degree equivalents, that doesn’t mean degrees fully powered by informal sources aren’t on the horizon. Read more »
SXSWedu, an annual conference on all things ed tech, kicks off Monday. From the growing role of data to debates on online education to DIY approaches to education, here’s a look at what’s ahead. Read more »
In a short film released by non-profit Code.org, sports and pop stars join Silicon Valley luminaries in encouraging more people to learn to code. Read more »
Thinkful, an online education startup co-founded by a Thiel Fellow, has raised $1 million from a group of investors including Peter Thiel’s FF Angel, RRE Ventures and Quotidian Ventures. Read more »
Online learning startup Coursera said that it has added 29 new school partners, about half of which are international. With the new partners, Coursera will now offer courses in French, Spanish, Chinese, and Italian. Read more »
edX, the online course provider launched by Harvard and MIT, has added six new schools to its X University Consortium, including its first international partners. Read more »
Learn-to-code startup Codecademy is building on its recently-launched track of API classes with lessons created in partnership with Twitter Gilt Groupe, Box, 23andMe, Dwolla and others. Read more »
Over the weekend, a professor on Coursera announced that he would no longer be teaching a course that was only in its fifth of ten weeks, marking the second time in a month that a Coursera class has hit a stumbling block. Read more »
Washington, D.C.-based Quad Learning has raised $11 million to provide an online platform and program intended to help community college students more successfully transfer to four-year colleges to complete a bachelor’s degree. Read more »
Online learning site lynda.com has purchased video2brain, an Austria-based company that provides online courses in web design, programming and other computer skills in multiple European languages. Read more »
The American Council on Education says that it has approved a handful of Coursera courses for credit equivalency, meaning those classes could count toward a degree. Read more »
Over the weekend, online education startup Coursera suspended a class on how to run an online class after complaints from students. Read more »
Backed by the founders of Jawbone and others in education, entrepreneurship and career readiness, New York-based Modern Guild aims to connect college students with professionals for fee-based online career readiness courses. 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 »
To help its students learn by doing, Codecademy is partnering with several popular websites and services for a new track of lessons on building with APIs. Supplied by the companies, the lessons teach students how to build apps around YouTube videos, NPR newscasts and more. Read more »
Online education startup Coursera has announced that it will charge students $30 to $100 for “verified certificates” that authenticate students’ identity and provide a more valuable credential. At launch, the program includes four universities out of the company’s nearly three dozen partners. Read more »
Craftsy’s bread and butter may be classes on quilting and sewing, but its success among students who tend to be less tech-savvy could be interesting to all kinds of online learning startups. Read more »
On the heels of a new set of project-based courses, New York-based Codecademy on Monday launched CodeCards, a program that enables anyone to create and share their own online holiday cards. 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 »
Online learning site lynda.com on Monday announced that it had hired Frits Habermann as its new CTO. The former PopCap and Adobe executive will oversee the expansion of the company’s cloud infrastructure and build out new mobile and international platforms. Read more »
Cerego, a company that has operated out of Tokyo since 2000, has opened an office stateside and is launching a new memory management tool based on principles drawn from cognitive science. Read more »
Udemy, a San Francisco-based online learning startup, on Friday announced that it had raised $12 million in Series B funding in a round led by Insight Venture Partners. In the past year, the company said revenue has climbed 400 percent. Read more »
With its new employer-matching service, Coursera has opened up a key revenue stream in which it receives payment from employers in exchange for information about students who may be good job candidates. Read more »
