One of the most popular resources of free knowledge on the internet, OpenCourseWare of the MIT just got better.
By teaming up with the startup OpenStudy the OCW now got a social, interactive layer where students from around the world can connect with one another and learn together.
After three years Lingueo, the Paris based language learning / teaching platform changed the look and feel of their website. If you have watched my interview with the founders on EDUKWEST you know that one of the main premises of the team is to keep it as simple and straight forward as possible.
The new page clearly stays true to that, in addition it offers some new features for students.
Great news as one of my personal heroes in education, Salman Khan, will receive $2 million USD from the Google Project 10 to the 100.
And he is not the only one in education as three out of the five winners are in fact education related projects.
Busuu is now the second language learning community to have its own iPhone applications that connect seamlessly with your online learning profile on the platform.
And if you watched my interview with Michael Schutzler of Livemocha the other day, you know that it will only take a little more time until this Seattle based community will launch their own.
Last Friday TWiST came back to Paris for its second edition. Like the first time, Lingueo was so kind to provide us with their office as venue, helped me with tech support and co hosted our guests.
On that night we had four startup pitches, two of them directly related to online education and the two other in a more indirect way.
A couple of weeks ago I would have never thought that classic subject matters like math or SAT / GRE prep would drive innovation in the online education space.
But after talking to Rohit Agarwal of TenMarks and today’s launch of Grockit TV, I have to say I was too pessimistic.
Following the invitation of the University of Luxembourg I have the pleasure of attending a panel debate on the challenges (and controversies) of social media and their role in the development of language resources and in empowering language learning communities.
This should get interesting.
Today is the big day for two education companies. Rosetta Stone launches its brand new version 4 TOTALe flagship product and Livemocha launches its new range of Active Courses in partnership with Harper Collins.
I love the smell of language immersion in the morning!
You might remember the Kno, a dual screen tablet device for the educational market, which aims to be a replacement for textbooks. When it was revealed at the D8 conference earlier this year people who saw the Kno described it as “two iPads, glued together – but bigger”.
Yesterday, the company announced that it closed a $46m debt-and-equity round led by Andreessen Horowitz that also has investments in Zynga, Skype and Foursquare.
enrolled.in already has its place in the great book on the history of the internet. It is the second company to get a funding offer on a live webcast by an angel investor who is no other than Jason Calacanis.
Last week this new social network that is targeting universities only, opened its gates to sign ups.
Back in May Skype introduced the 5 way video calling feature. Apparently, it must have worked out pretty well as with the newest version of Skype which is now 5.0, the company introduced, besides some other tweaks and fixes, 10 way video calling.
Busuu, the language learning community, just launched its seventh language: Russian.
This not only enables the already signed up community members to learn a new language but, maybe even more important, it opens Busuu a whole new market for its service as the entire platforms is from now on also available in a localized Russian version.
Udemy, the Academy of You raised a one million USD seed round led by a line up of well-known Angels and Seed Funds. After the recent launch of Udemy Academic this is the second big news from this energetic young startup.
I had the chance to interview Gagan Biyani on Sunday for EDUKWEST being one of the first to officially share the news. Below you will find an excerpt of our talk and at the end of this post you can find the link to the entire interview in which Gagan explains how they were able to raise this round.
Last week I had a very interesting talk with Matthias Spanic, the new CEO of Palabea. There has been a radical change of the board and the new team is currently working on a complete reboot of the community.
All of the three executives have an impressive track record in the German startup scene and after our first talk I believe that the platform could actually make a turn around.
Yesterday Mashable and ReadWriteWeb published an interesting study of Pew Internet that shows the group aged 55-64 grew by 88% and aged 65 and above even grew 100% in the use of social networks.
What does this mean for online education? Good times, as this is a great customer group to target.
Last week Sparkeo launched a revamped homepage, a brand new player and – drum roll – an affiliate program. This is a feature I have been really waiting for.
I am a firm believer of spreading quality educational content through affiliate systems and it was one key feature I recommended Frederic Aknin to implement in his platform, hence I am particularly excited to see the launch.
I really need to interview these guys! In June, I already wrote a small post about their video monetization feature for videos but this newest feature is also a very interesting one.
The Social Playhead of Invideous not only shows where you are currently in the video but also where other people are who are watching the video at the same time you do.
Myngle announced two new partnerships with language learning providers through its Changes Bulletin recently.
The companies are SpacedEd, a social learning platform that offers a mobile learning solution and Language Bridge which is a non memorization, non grammar method in form of a software for learning a language.
Just before I was taping my EDUKWEST interview with Thomas Whitby, Co-Initiator of the famous #edchat on Twitter today, I learned that Rosetta Stone is planning to host a Twitter chat about language learning, called #RSchat.
The first one is scheduled this coming Friday at 1PM EST.
With the upcoming release of the Dimdim 6 webmeeting, subscribers to the service will get access to some interesting new features.
The focus of those new features is more towards business meetings but nevertheless some of them could also be very useful in an online class environment .
