DECEMBER 2017 – NEWSLETTER #4
• Oracle will open in early January a $43 million building that will house an innovative, free public high school with 550 students, the sleek Design Tech High School, known as d.teach. “Nobody has done anything like this before,” said Colleen Cassity, the executive director of the Oracle Education Foundation.
• Cengage Learning has joined the open educational resources (OER) movement and announced OpenNow, a suite of digital products for general education courses. Fees start at $25 per student per course, a price point in line with Lumen Learning, which has also developed proprietary OER courseware. Available courses now include psychology, American government and sociology.
• Most higher education CIOs say their organizations’ business models will change as a result of the digital transformation. Top tech areas for new spending will include cybersecurity, ERP, Analytics, ERP, CRM, LMS, digital marketing and cloud services.
• Saint Michael’s College, a private institution in Vermont, has created new “pop-up”, short-term courses about timely issues not accommodated in the traditional curriculum and offered for 0-1 credits, pass or fail. Other institutions are implementing the pop-up approach, including Bennington College (VT) and Stanford University (CA).
• Cornell Tech, a graduate school at Cornell University, inaugurated the Tata Innovation Center, after this IT services firm contributed $50 million to help the school invest in technology research and expand K-12 digital literacy programs in New York City.
• Noodle Partners, one of the newer players to step into the online program manager (OPM) space, got a boost attracting $14 million in funding. Its CEO John Katzman started 2U, one of the companies, along with Academic Partnerships, Bisk, Pearson Embanet and Wiley Education Services that today control half of the OPM market, which is estimated at around $1.1 billion. Noodle Partners has signed on nearly a dozen universities like American, Tulane and New York University.
• Forbes has made a list of young entrepreneurs with its list of 2018 “30 Under 30”. There is a lot of innovation on what they are doing.
• VitalSource, dedicated to offering tools to create digital courses and materials, has acquired the corporate LMS Intrepid Learning, which claims to serve 20 million users globally.
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The Learning Times monthly newsletter is a topic-curated email report compiled by Michael Amigot, Founder at IBL Education, a company specialized in Open edX technology and course production. If you enjoy what you read please consider forwarding it. Click here to subscribe.
Archive:
The Learning Times Newsletter #3 – November 2017
The Learning Times Newsletter #2 – October 2017
The Learning Times Newsletter #1 – September 2017
