Dartmouth College Professor Petra Bonfert-Taylor and Institut Mines-Télécom (IMT) of France Professor Rémi Sharrock won the 2019 edX Prize for Exceptional Contributions in Online Teaching and Learning. The announcement was done during a virtual Town Hall, which replaced the annual edX Global Forum (canceled because of the uprising in Hong Kong). The winners teach, through a joint partner program, the C Programming with Linux Professional Certificate program. This class has been running on edX.org since June 2018 and will be offered again in March 2020. To date, the program has logged over 170,000 enrollments in the seven courses of the series. "Both instructors solved how to provide rich, formative feedback to learners in real-time, at scale," Anant Agarwal, co-CEO at edX, explained in a blog-post. "By using two open-source learning environments, the team was able to remove the most common barriers to beginner coders." The two professors and their team spent a full year intensively working on the design, production, and development in this seven-course sequence. Part of Bonfert-Taylor and Sharrock's team were: Joseph Beaudoin, senior video producer at Dartmouth; Michael Goudzwaard, DartmouthX lead; Delphine Lalire, MOOC program manager at IMT; Ella Hamonic, an independent instructional designer commissioned by IMT; and Mathias Hiron, developer at IMT. "The world is a better place when knowledge flows freely,” Professor Bonfert-Taylor said. "One of my biggest passions is to transform education through the development of programs that provide accessible and high-quality student-centered learning opportunities across international and socio-economic boundaries." The two winners of the edX Prize were chosen among more finalists, as shown below.
Instructure (NYSE: INST), the company behind Canvas LMS, publicly announced that it has begun to explore a number of strategic alternatives "to maximize shareholder value", including a possible sale. Canvas owns about 38% of the LMS market. "These alternatives may include continuing as a standalone public company, going private, or being purchased by a strategic partner," the company said in a statement Thursday. Instructure's board retained J.P. Morgan as its financial advisor and Cooley LLP as its legal advisor. The move of the board took place in response to the pressure by activist investors Sachem Head, Praesidium Investment Management and more recently, Jana Partners, who disclosed it had a 1% stake. They called for Instructure to explore a sale, reportedly identifying multiple potential private equity buyers. Kevin Oram, Praesidium’s Co-Founder and Managing Partner, said last week that selling Bridge –Instructure's unprofitable employee development platform– would unlock the value of Canvas, which he estimated to be worth $2.5 billion. Phil Hill, consultant and author of Phil on Ed Tech blog, wrote that competitor Blackboard went through a similar process a few years ago, going private in 2011. Blackboard considered a sale in 2015 but didn’t go through with it. Instructure's previously scheduled financial analyst day on December 3 was canceled "to allow management and the board to explore these strategic alternatives for the company," said the Salt Lake City-based corporation. The stock has gained significant value since activists hedge funds started to call for a sale, especially this week, when it moved from $47.91 on November 13 to $52.98 on November 15. • IBL News: News about Canvas LMS and Instructure
Cybrary, a web training platform used by nearly 3 million cybersecurity and IT professionals, closed this Wednesday on a $15 million Series B funding round. Austin, Texas-based BuildGroup led the funding. Existing investors including Arthur Ventures and Gula Tech Adventures also participated in the round. The round brings the Cybrary’s total capital raised to $23 million. Investor BuildGroup highlighted that Cybrary "is solving critical business problems with modern business models powered by network effects". Founded in 2015, and currently, with a staff of the 60-person, the College Park, Maryland-based company hosts cybersecurity training content, allowing individuals and enterprises to close cybersecurity skills gaps and follow career paths. The Cybrary platform provides mostly video-based training and hands-on technical assessments. “We have assembled the world’s largest cybersecurity career development network, powered by the industry’s largest network of industry subject matter expert creators,” Ryan Corey, Co-Founder at Cybrary, said. He plans to use the new round toward hiring content creators, subject matter experts, and more employees (including doubling the number of engineers on staff to 24). The free version of Cybrary comes with introductory courses, syllabi, assessments, and a live chat to help users. A premium license, which costs $99 per month, gives access to the entire course catalog, live online training, practice exams, scenario-based virtual labs, and a mentor network. With a network of 1,700 mentors, the company offers a service to train teams of employees for businesses. Cybrary is not currently profitable.
Denver-based, female-led startup Guild Education yesterday announced the close of a $157 million Series D round, becoming the newest edtech unicorn, with a post-money valuation north of $1 billion. The funding round was led by former American Express, CEO Ken Chenault, through the VC firm General Catalyst and was joined by Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, Iconiq Capital and Lead Edge Capital. Founded in 2015 by Stanford University graduates Rachel Carlson and Brittany Stich [in the picture above], Guild connects Fortune 1000 companies to 1,6000 online programs offered by nearly a dozen universities—among them, the University of Arizona, Purdue Global, Southern New Hampshire University and the University of Central Florida. Universities typically spend between $4,000-$6,000 (mostly on buying ads on Google and Facebook) to acquire a Bachelor's student and up to $14,000 for a Masters's degree student. Guild Education gets paid out of the savings universities make on student recruitment services. The company also has a team of advisors and support specialists to help students plan, apply for, and finish their programs. One of Guild's major deals was with Chiplote, which now covers the college tuition for employees. Discover Financial, Taco Bell, Walmart, Lowe’s and Walt Disney Co. are customers, too. Guild competes with InStride and Pearson is this space.
Udacity announced yesterday in San Francisco the Intel Edge AI Scholarship Program and the Intel Edge AI for IoT Developers Nanodegree Program. The pedagogical goal is to teach developers to accelerate the development and deployment of high-performance computer vision and deep learning solutions using Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit (which allows deploying pre-trained deep learning models.) In the first phase of the scholarship program, students will get access to the Intel Edge AI Fundamentals course, the first class of the Intel Edge AI for IoT Developers Nanodegree program. Students who successfully complete this course will earn a full scholarship to the Intel Edge AI for IoT Developers Nanodegree program. The number of seats is limited to 750 students. “With Udacity, we are training the next generation of AI developers to go where the data is generated in the physical world: at the Edge," said Jonathan Ballon Intel Vice President and General Manager, Internet of Things Group. "Optimizing the direct deployment of models on edge devices requires knowledge of unique constraints like power, network bandwidth & latency, varying compute architectures and more.” The deadline to apply is December 10.
