Warren Buffett billionaire appears in videos that are part of a free MOOC offered by his sister Doris on EdX's platform. "Giving With Purpose: How to get the most out of your charitable giving" course is produced by Northwestern University and Doris Buffett's Learning By Giving Foundation. It teaches to identify effective nonprofit organizations and apply course concepts by awarding more than $100,000 in grants to student-nominated nonprofits. It is designed to help students "become more purposeful givers and engage more effectively with nonprofit organizations in their communities."
OpenEd is a great content repository with 750,000 free, standard-aligned educational videos and games for the classroom – all curated by educators. Teachers and parents worldwide are using this catalog to enrich their students' learning experience. Now this website adds more than 300,000 learning assessments, tests and quizzes. These are all offered free of charge. OpenEd helps teachers enhance their lesson plans, integrates multimedia content into instruction, and assists students with their work. Teachers can also create a "Playlist" of videos that can be shared with students or colleagues. While OpenEd can be used with any learning management system, it also provides its own free LMS, allowing teachers to create courses while using a “recommendation engine” to find the best relevant material available.
This online-education platform, 2U Inc., will go public, trading on the Nasdaq and offering up to $100-million in common stock. The money will be used to expand student enrollment and to fund technology and content development. 2U counts the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Southern California among its clients. In the filing, this company, with 265-full time employees, reported a revenue of $83.1 million and a net loss of $28 million.
Educational institutions can capitalize on lead generation marketing to create sales leads and revenue. In order to achieve that, they must place emphasis on proper SEO optimization, set call-to-action tactics via contact form, request information pages, implement webinars and forums, maximize social networking sites building communities, and offer email subscriptions… This article contains a great analysis of must-do things. In addition, this Mashable's infographic explains how schools are enhancing recruitment efforts by offering virtual tours, posting student videos, promoting campus activities, reaching out to parents, and connecting with alumni through social networking.
Ever thought of a possible convergence of eLearning and ePublishing industries? This is an interesting discussion happening in the LinkedIn's Educause group. Most of the leading book publishers now publish their books in electronic format. But that is not enough to stay ahead of the competition. Increasingly, publishers will add interactivity, assessments, annotations, tracking, learning platforms as well as collaborations and integrations with third social platforms, etc. Aren't ebooks' new features very close to the elearning content? It seems that these two industries will converge soon; their ecosystems are very complementary to each other.
