Tag Archives: chegg

Monday RoundUp

MRU: Free Math Help Online, College Recruiting and Videos in Education

The Ministry of Education of Ontario in Canada is offering free online math help for students grade 7-10 via a platform called Homework Help. All teachers are employed by the state and students connect via live chat and interactive whiteboards.

Following its strategy of becoming the one-stop-shop for students from college to university Chegg acquired Zinch, a platform that connects students to scholarships.

Also in the student recruiting space McGraw-Hill lead a $1.6 million funding round for Unigo, an information and resource platform for college application and financial aid.

The University of London became YouTube EDU’s 100th partner. Looking at the history of the university it is a natural fit as the University of London is the world’s oldest provider of distance degrees.

CommonCraft videos and the website are now available in 8 different languages, making a truly global resource for educators and trainers world wide.

I also interviewed Dave Schappell of TeachStreet about the Startup Weekend EDU in Seattle at the end of this month.

Finally, you can listen to all the education news that did not make it into a blog post in the new “After Hours” format on EDUKWEST.

Monday RoundUp

MRU – Facebook as Study Tool, Amazon Student App, Funding and Second Life

As you know, this blog here has become my personal sandbox again and all the news in education 2.0 are now over at EDUKWEST. In case you did not know, now you know ;) .

For all of you who check back regularly on KirstenWinkler.com for your dose of education 2.0 related updates, I thought I will post a weekly “Monday Roundup” with links of what has been going on over at EDUKWEST.

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The Kno alters into Software – Will it inherit Chegg’s Market Share?

Interesting news from Kara Swisher over at All Things Digital. Apparently, the Kno is in talks to sell its hardware manufacturing part of the company and then focus on software and digital textbook delivery only.

According to sources the “quicker than expected uptake” in tablet production of other manufacturers basically made the need for a dedicated educational hardware device “less critical”.

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Disrupting Disruption – Flat World Knowledge raises $15 million

Flat World Knowledge, the world’s leading publisher of open source text books raised $15 million USD in a series B round from Bertelsmann Digital Media, other investors and angels.

The really interesting thing about Flat World Knowledge is that it actually disrupts two business models of other startups in the $8 billion USD textbook market. They are disrupting disruption if you will.

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R:ED January 2nd to January 8th 2011

  1. Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google
  2. Internet Users Still Cheap, Spend Only $1 to $10 on Digital Content
  3. Chegg: Saving College Kids Money Through Textbook Rental
  4. The Case for the Virtual Classroom
  5. After the Skype Ban: China’s Changing Online Landscape
  6. Biggest Mobile Breakthrough of 2011? Survey Says: Payments.
  7. School Tech: 6 Important Lessons From Maine’s Student Laptop Program
  8. Chegg Hires Former Netflix COO To Manage Massive Textbook Warehouse
  9. Internet Surpasses Television as Main News Source for Young Adults [STUDY]
  10. Flattr rolls out direct donations, Wikileaks likely to benefit greatly
  11. Schools Across the Country Adopt the iPad
  12. Zimride: Carpooling for College Students
  13. Wikipedia Saved by Founder Jimmy Wales’ $16M Gaze, Elite Supporters
  14. Salesforce Buys Web Conferencing Platform DimDim For $31 Million In Cash
  15. Citing Facebook Effect, Salesforce.com Buys Dimdim
  16. Confirmed: Skype Buys Mobile Video Startup Qik
  17. Skype Adds Group Video Calling To Enterprise Offering
  18. Skype Is Killing It on Long Distance
  19. Ustream Is Also Coming Bundled On Verizon’s 4G Android Phones
  20. 100+ Online Resources That Are Transforming Education

R:ED December 5th 2010 to January 1st 2011

  1. More Details On Skype’s Big Move To The Web
  2. State Department Warns Students Against Discussing WikiLeaks on Facebook, Twitter
  3. Interview with Sean Conway of Notehall
  4. Skype Creates Bespoke Software to Help Refugee Workers
  5. Test Prep App Startup Watermelon Express Raises Funding From Groupon Co-Founders
  6. Little Bookrenter Is Narrowing The Gap With Chegg
  7. World Map Of Social Networks Shows Facebook’s Ever-Increasing Dominance
  8. Watch an Apple Engineer Recreate a 2,000-Year-Old Computer Using Legos
  9. Digital Learning Now
  10. KHAN ACADEMY IN THE CLASSROOM, DAYS 1 AND 2
  11. Flat World Knowledge Expands Beyond Business Curriculum with Affordable College Textbooks for General Education Courses
  12. ooVoo Releases Android App for Six-Way Video Chat
  13. Why Your Smartphone Will Replace Your Wallet
  14. Word Lens Translates Words Inside of Images. Yes Really.
  15. Kobo Looks to Social Reading to Distinguish It From Kindle
  16. How Twitter Users Changed in 2010 [CHARTS]
  17. 81% of Gen Yers Use Facebook Daily [STUDY]
  18. Another Key Feature Of Google +1: Massive-Scale Social Video Conferencing
  19. FitFu Wants To Get You Exercising At Your Desk, And Everywhere Else
  20. Google Ventures Gives $600K to iOS App Maker Miso Media
  21. Mint.com Hits The Books; Offers Personal Finance Curriculum To Students
  22. Language Learning Service Voxy Closes Another 600K, For A Total Of $1.2 Million
  23. Send & Receive Money From Twitter & Facebook Friends With Dwolla
  24. Huge Growth Projected for Tablet PCs [REPORT]
  25. Virtual Holiday Dinner Brings Families Together via Robot Proxies
  26. Massive Change Ahead in Middle East: Women Control $700 Billion and Counting
  27. Fair Trade Shopping Site Worldstock.com Profits Without Trying
  28. 2011 TED Fellow Studies Tech Needs in Low-Income India–and Builds a Braille Phone in His Spare Time
  29. 5 E-Book Trends That Will Change the Future of Publishing
  30. Why the Kids Don’t Blog and Grandma’s on Facebook
  31. Skype’s New App Brings Video Chat To The iPhone, iPad And iPod Touch
  32. Why iPad Magazine Sales Are Not As Bad As They Seem
  33. Chinese and Indian Entrepreneurs Are Eating America’s Lunch
  34. Unhappy Helicopter Parents
  35. 65% of Internet Users Paid for Digital Content [STUDY]
  36. So Much For FREE!: Apple Will Sell $2B in Apps in 2011
  37. The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be

R:ED September 26th to October 2nd

  1. On Language – Learning Language in Chunks – NYTimes.com
  2. Japan to pilot digital textbooks in classrooms
  3. The United States Is Losing Its Innovative Edge: Report
  4. Textbook Rental Juggernaut Chegg Adds Another $75 Million To Its Coffers
  5. UK Med School Students Get a New Prescription: iPhones
  6. We are not Waiting for Superman, We are Empowering Superheroes
  7. Forrester: Social Networking On The Rise Worldwide, Content Creation Not So Much
  8. Authors Feel Pinch in Age of E-Books
  9. Pinger Now Turns Your iPod Touch Into A Free Cell Phone
  10. Voxy Helps You Learn A Language By Text, iPhone, Email And Web
  11. Skype and Facebook to Announce Partnership [REPORT]
  12. Social Learning Company Koofers Raises $5 Million From Revolution, Others
  13. Peter Thiel Has New Initiative To Pay Kids To “Stop Out Of School”
  14. Exclusive: Facebook and Skype Readying Deep Integration Partnership
  15. The Case For Social Media in Schools
  16. Most Tweets Produce Zero Replies or Retweets [STUDY]
  17. Survey of Kids: Physical Books Here to Stay, In Parallel to Rise of E-Readers
  18. Obama’s World-Beating Business Plan: Keep Kids in School Longer
  19. Togetherville Helps Parents, Kids, And Schools Connect With New ‘Communities’ Feature
  20. Learning Curves on the Career Path

Chegg + Kno = Apple for Higher Ed?

Two very interesting announcements from the textbook market today that underline my first thoughts about Chegg and the Kno from a couple of months ago.

The first one is that textbook rental platform Chegg just closed another funding round, adding a whooping $75 million USD to the war chest, ramping up the total funding to nearly $220 million USD.

The second announcement came on TechCrunch Disrupt where the manufacturer of the Kno tablet stated that they will also deliver a cheaper one screen version of the device.

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The Hard or the Soft Way? Thoughts on the Kno and Inkling

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.

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R:ED August 15th to August 21st 2010

  1. Chegg’s First Acquisition: CourseRank
  2. Invideous adds ‘social playhead’ to its video monetization platform
  3. Are Your Facebook And Twitter Friends Using Other Languages? Try XIHA
  4. Digital Textbook Startup Inkling Scores Sequoia Funding, Publisher Deals
  5. China’s position as an economic superpower may be hampered by the patrimony and poor academic ethics of its universities
  6. Roommates Who Click
  7. As Private Tutoring Booms, Parents Look at the Returns
  8. Looking for Baby Sitters: Foreign Language a Must

review:ed #4.2 – Textbook Rentals and Chegg – Money Printing Machine?

In the second part of review:ed #4 Dave and I talked about Chegg, the biggest textbook renting company in the US. In a recent TechCrunch article about Chegg it is said that the company owns already 80% of the market and will generate a revenue of about $130 million in 2010.

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