Ed-tech startup Coursera has announced that 29 more schools will offer courses on its online platform, bringing its total to 62 schools.

This latest round of expansion clearly demonstrates that the interest in open access education is a very global phenomenon,” said cofounder Daphne Coller (pictured, top left at a meetup) in an interview with VentureBeat. “We are excited about the opportunity to offer a much more international educational experience to Coursera students.”

The latest colleges and universities to sign up include Northwestern University, City University of Hong Kong, National Taiwan University, IE Business School in Spain, and New York’s Rochester University. Sixteen of the 29 are outside the U.S.

Santiago Iñiguez, dean of IE Business School, said the institution will offer courses on Coursera in a few short weeks. “The blended programs and multimedia materials of IE Business School provided an ideal synergy with Coursera’s portfolio of MOOCs [massive open online courses] and related online programs, which are irreversibly transforming the landscape of higher education,” he said in a statement.

Over the next few months, Coursera will offer about 90 new courses taught in a variety of languages, including French, Spanish, and Chinese.

The company has seen nearly 2.8 million students enroll in its video courses from 33 institutions. But public confidence in MOOCs has not been consistent. Last week, Coursera had to suspend one of its online courses due to technical glitches and complaints.

However, the Silicon Valley-based company announced that students can now apply credit to their college degree for five of its free courses. The company was the first to gain a recommendation from the American Council on Education (ACE), ahead of such competitors as Udacity.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Preparing for the SATs in metropolitan DC involved test books, courses, study groups, practice programs, tutoring, flashcards, and the occasional panic attack about my fate if I didn’t break 1500. Effective as those strategies were (I’m not flipping burgers, am I?), new developments in educational theory and technology indicate that perhaps there are other, more constructive ways to learn.

Grockit, a startup that applies social learning to online test preparation, has raised $20 million in new funding. The investment is part of a partnership with Discovery Communucations, which led the round, and the two companies will work together to promote Grockit’s new product, Learnist.

Learnist launched to the public in May and expanded Grockit’s domain beyond standardized testing. The site looks a lot like Pinterest for online learning. Users can view lessons in a user-friendly board format as well as build their own and share. The platform supports over 30 types of embeddable media.

There is content on a wide range of topics, spanning art and design, business, education, food, music, politics, science, sports, technology, and travel. The selection is curated and comes mostly from a “small army” of teachers who know how to present information in a meaningful manner.

“Learnist lets users curate content online in a way that is sequenced, so it functions similar to a lesson plan,” said CEO Roy Gilbert in an email Q&A. “Unlike other online boards, Learnist allows users to upload a wide variety of media, including full Wikipedia pages, Google Maps, photos, and images, to name a few. The core differentiator for all Grockit products is that they include social, gaming, and mobile components to help students learn from and teach each other wherever, whenever.”

Before joining Grockit in 2010, Gilbert served as an officer in the US Navy and spent seven years working at Google, where he led Global User Operations, led Google’s operations in India, and launched the business operations for Gmail.

The company was first founded in 2006 by Farbood Nivi. Nivi migrated to the US from Iran as a child and has spent most of his career in education. He worked for the Princeton Review and Kaplan, where he witnessed first hand the power of social earning. Nivi founded Grockit, and then Learnist, with the goal of making education as engaging to today’s students as possible.

Learnist has grown to hundreds of thousands of users, largely driven by the introduction of the iPhone and iPad apps at the end of August.

Through this partnership, Discovery will create a dedicated channel for its content on the Learnist web, iPhone, and iPad platforms. Students will be able to learn from this material, while Discovery will benefit from seeing how people interact with its content.

This marks the fifth round of institutional funding for Grockit and is by far the largest. Over the course of six years, Grockit has raised a total of $24.7 million. This $20 million almost doubles that amount. Summit Group also participated in this round, along with previous investors Atlas Venture, Benchmark Capital, Integral Capital Partners, and GSV Capital Corp.

Grockit is based in San Francisco.

First music, and now online education. Inspired by the success of Spotify, education technology startup, BenchPrep, has transformed into a subscription-based service.

Now, for $30 a month, you can access test prep (GRE, LSAT, SAT, and more) and a variety of courses on your laptop, smartphone or tablet device. The Chicago-based company, which launched in 2011, differs from a free online course service like Coursera, as its curriculum-based courses and test prep are supplemented by licensed textbook content from publishers, including McGraw Hill, O’Reilly Media, and Pearson.

BenchPrep will continue to offer its professional and certification courses on a per-course basis but has shifted to a subscription model for its courses tailored to high school, college, and grad students. As opposed to paying up to $100 for lifetime access to a single course, students can pay $30 a month to access hundreds of courses.

“This is more aligned to the education-as-a-service model,” said cofounder Ashish Rangnekar, meaning that users can dip in and out of learning at any time. Rangekar uses the example of a corporate finance student, who can go back and brush up on introductory finance in a few clicks.

According to Rangnekar, this has disruptive potential and may be an alternative to traditional higher education. “But in the near term, we see this as a complementary tool.” BenchPrep says it wants to replace basic entry-level college courses, so universities can focus on advanced or research-driven courses.

In the future, BenchPrep will expand its focus to tuition so students can get the extra help they need. It’s no surprise given that the competition, Course Hero, recently acquired Cardinal Scholars, a tutoring service. The startup is also investigating ways to use data and analytics to pinpoint gaps in users’ education and bring personalization to the learning experience. Read more about this trend here.

BenchPrep is used by 275,000 students. After raising a $6 million round from NEA and Revolution Ventures, it entered the lucrative textbook market and expanded its range of courses to include information technology, medicine, healthcare, finance, and insurance education. By the end of the year, it will add another 500 courses.

BenchPrep, the company that creates entire digital courses for high school and college students, is aiming to up its 100-course portfolio to 500 by year’s end.

The company hopes to accomplish this goal with a $6 million round of funding it announced today led by New Enterprise Associates and Revolution Ventures.

BenchPrep launched in July 2011 after spinning out from educational app developer Watermelon Express. The company creates digital courses based on education material from an arsenal of more than 20 publishers, including McGraw Hill, Wiley (which creates the Cliff Notes series), and Princeton Review. BenchPrep turns content from these publishers into interactive digital lessons for high school and college students, as well as test prep such as the SATs and GMATs.

Publisher content isn’t all you’ll find in a BenchPrep session, however. The company also recently added YouTube and Wikipedia as supplemental material, accessible through a pop-up window over highlighted words. This move helped recognize the legitimacy of the information found in free-content portals.

These lessons exist on the desktop, phone, or iPad and can sync between all three devices. So if you’re in the middle of a BenchPrep session on your iPad but need to get off the train, you can save it and pick up exactly where you left off if you open it up on your laptop later.

Around 250,000 students use BenchPrep, and they log around nine hours of engaged use a month.

Pricing varies per course. Chicago-based BenchPrep is also backed by Lightbank, a venture fund run by Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.