Today Learnable one of the new breed of education startups from down under officially launched its platform with more than 60 courses ranging from Yoga to PHP.
In fact, the platform gave visitors access for one or two weeks already but as the team writes on the official Learnable blog, today is the day the doors are bolted in and the sign “open for business” hangs in the window.
Gregor Gimmy, Founder and CEO of Sclipo wrote an interesting piece on social features in online education recently and asked me for my two cents on it.
His point is that just by adding social features to a classic LMS it is actually not getting more social as it still is a walled garden, only open for members of the university, academy etc. and that social would mean that you need to tear down those walls and enable everyone to connect with everyone no matter on which campus.
Apparently a new LMS / WLA called Nixty launched today. Nixty is aiming to empower education for everyone by offering simple to use tools for teachers to create multimedia enabled courses.
TeachStreet soft-launched an API for the Classes which enables web developers to get access to the class listing data and metadata.
Hence the API is purely one way at the moment as far as I understand it. You can pull data about listed classes but you cannot enter classes from outside of the platform.
Following our talk about the Groupon CityDeal deal and its possible impact on the European start up scene we went on talking about Udemy which is one of the hottest online education start ups right now.
Udemy has been largely covered on the two leading tech blogs TechCrunch and Mashable and many other blogs, including me here on KirstenWinkler.com and EDUKWEST.
Yesterday, I received one of the new and regularly coming News Bulletins from the Myngle education team. Normally you can get the news by reading the email for gist but this one caught my attention as it presents some substantial additions to the platform.
In fact the coming changes could give Myngle a lead over its competitors.
Unfortunately the two online education start ups Sclipo and English Attack! which were on the shortlist of this year’s Plugg StartUps Rally did not make it in the final round.
Nevertheless you should watch their pitches in the videos below to get an idea of their products.
This year’s edition of the Plugg conference will have two online education start ups on the Start Up Rally. Every year a jury of experts selects 20 companies for the short list of the Rally. Those companies will then pitch during the conference and eventually there will be one winner selected by the jury and one winner selected by the audience.
The Plugg conference is founded and hosted by Robin Wauters who you might also know as writer of TechCrunch.
Earlier this week I had the chance to talk to Gagan Biyani, Co-Founder of udemy.com and he invited me for a tour. The project is an interesting mixture of different tools we already know from other platforms but it also offers some new features that I think are quite useful for online education.
Last friday I hosted the third edition of the E-Teachers Conference about the Future of Teachers in a Global and Digital World. The panelists were Christopher Grant of Sclipo, Duane Sider of Rosetta Stone, Shiv Rajendran of LanguageLab and Stephan Stephensen of Mingoville.
All of them did great presentations covering various aspects of the changes teachers will have to face in this changing environment.
Yes, we are back!
The third edition of the E-Teachers Conference will be on November 27th at 6PM CET.
This week I had the pleasure talking to Christopher Grant, Senior Vice President of Barcelona, Spain, located startup Sclipo.
The company was founded in late 2006 as an educational video sharing platform as you might have guessed from the name already.
Since then it has rapidly grown and can today be seen as a full set teaching and learning platform with an inhouse developed virtual classroom. Sclipo is also a true platform and that is something I really appreciate. I also like the fact that they call themselves social learning revolution.
Let’s see if they can stand up to this statement.
