Coursera, the online course provider, is one of the fastest-growing startups that is transforming how we learn.

Today, the company announced a partnership with a fellow ed-tech startup, Chegg, and is striking deals with the largest publishers. The goal is to make it easier for students of online courses to access relevant academic content on the web.

Large publishing companies, including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education, Oxford University Press, SAGE, and Wiley will experiment with offering Coursera students versions of their digital textbooks, delivered via Chegg’s e-Reader. Students won’t be charged to access these materials while they’re enrolled on a course.

“We recognize the importance of forging partnerships with other stakeholders in the education space,” said Daphne Koller, Coursera’s cofounder. “By collaborating with publishers, we are able to provide access to some of the world’s best resources to Coursera students.”

Every few months like clockwork, Coursera announces that more universities around the world have signed up to offer courses on its video platform. The Silicon Valley-based company recently achieved a major milestone when a handful of its courses were approved for college credit.

Coursera was formed by Stanford university professors Koller and Andrew Ng. With the technology proving to be a hit with students, the founders are currently working with California state legislators and local educators to encourage state colleges and university to give credit to online courses.

”The movement is still relatively young, but I’m pleased we’re seeing so many of the best universities committing to teach online classes” Ng told VentureBeat in a recent interview. “This proves we’re no passing fad.”

Top image via Coursera

The Federal Communications Commission announced today it has hired Michael Steffan as the director of digital learning. In his new role, Steffen will lead initiatives to expand access to broadband Internet in schools.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski explained, “Broadband and digital tools have game-changing potential for education.” Improving connectivity is a first step toward teachers and students taking advantage of the new education technology.

The appointment is timely given that senators, like John D. Rockefeller IV, are pushing for an extension of the 2010 E-rate program, which subsidizes Internet services for schools and libraries. The FCC believes that these institutions should offer lightning fast connections to the web.

The FCC, which is currently the largest funder of Internet Connectivity in K12 schools across America, has endorsed E-rate reforms. In January, Chairman Genachowski called for the nation’s mayors to bring one-gigabit Internet access to one community in each state by 2015.

Steffen will draw on experience bringing connectivity to America’s most remote school districts. Most recently, he served as the Chairman’s legal advisor on wireline, international, and Internet policy issues. During that time, he oversaw the creation of the Connect America Fund, a broadband infrastructure program for rural America.

The FCC has stepped up its involvement in education, but is also concerned with other sectors, including health care. Last month, the commission appointed Matthew Quinn as Director of Healthcare Initiatives. In this role, Quinn is helping to facilitate the availability of medical devices that require spectrum; and ensuring that rural hospitals and other health care facilities have required connectivity.

Top image via Shutterstock

This is a guest post by Andrew Smith Lewis, executive chairman at Cerego.

Why is it that so many people who opine on matters of education do so by espousing an “either or” position, reducing their argument to a zero sum game, thereby forcing readers to take sides?

Isn’t that the exact opposite of what education and learning are supposed to be all about?

Take, for instance, the recent Washington Post piece by Sabrina Joy Stevens, a teacher-turned-education activist based in Washington D.C, who wrote an opinion-editorial piece for the paper criticizing personalized learning tools. 

In her piece, Stevens propagates common misconceptions about personalized learning tools. But as the executive chairman of a company focused on personalized learning, who works closely with great teachers to find a balance between technology and instruction, I am compelled to point out how misguided — and misleading — her arguments are.

First of all, I take issue with her basic definition of personalized learning, which betrays a few bad assumptions. Stevens believes that personalized learning tools are nothing more than a patch for a broken education system, suggesting that the promise of personalized learning is built around a goal of “digitized, standardized learning.”

It is an error to think that personalized learning is just set of digitized practice problems. We’re not talking about old multiplication tables in newly digitized form, where students get increasingly difficult questions until they get one wrong, then get easier problems until they get them right again. Those kinds of tools are trivial, and they’re not oriented to change outcomes. Digitized drill-and-kill is not revolutionary, nor is it personalized.

The fact that any learning tool is digital is simply table stakes these days. Digital is a condition of modern living and learning — nothing more, and nothing less.

Second, true personalization is the exact opposite of standardization. True personalization accepts that we all learn differently and at different paces, and that what actually makes it into our brain can vary drastically from student to student. The desired outcomes may be standardized, but the path to that outcome, and the goal of increasing the speed and likelihood of reaching positive outcomes is precisely the goal of some of the most innovative companies leading the personalized learning charge.

But the argument that irks me most is the suggestion that personalized learning tools are trying to be a replacement for teachers.

Personalized learning tools are not replacing teachers. They don’t seek to replace personal interaction, either.  Any argument to such effect is fear-mongering fabrication.

The truth of the matter is, personalized learning tools are a way for teachers to learn more about their students, and a way for students to learn at their own pace. These tools are designed to be a powerful supplement for teachers, not a replacement. They give teachers more context, and more data upon which to make pedagogical and intervention decisions.

Embrace this idea:  humans are wonderful at certain tasks, and decidedly less than wonderful at others. The most stubborn among us may resist this truth, but the most stubborn among us have also resisted nearly every positive technological change since…forever.

Personalized learning tools are not created to subtract something from the classroom as Stevens suggests. Rather, they aspire to be additive and empowering. They free up teachers to spend more time interacting with students on an individual basis, foregoing the rote call-and-response of yore. Any honest teacher will admit that when it comes to certain aspects of her profession, she may as well be a machine, and that’s bad for everyone.

Teachers should not be charged with transferring knowledge to students in bulk, playing to the median, the mean, or in many cases the lowest common denominator. Personalized learning tools can fundamentally improve the quality of student-teacher interactions by stratifying roles and enabling more frequent, bespoke, high-intensity, and high-functioning engagement.

The role of teachers is shifting from “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side.” That’s a fact. Modern, forward-thinking teachers can be more effective with their talents when they are enabled to cater to each student’s own trajectory, rather than preaching to tuned-out masses. We should be empowering students to explore self-directed learning paths. And we should enable teachers enrich that journey, helping a student move forward if and when they get stuck.

Personalized learning tools, in the hands of savvy teachers, make those teachers more effective, and improve student learning outcomes non-trivially. They build on what teachers already do best.

I will continue to fight for one of education’s biggest and most important ideas, and I know that many others will too. Substance needs to win over self-preservation and ignorance. We need to summon enough courage to recognize that attacking individual weaknesses and playing to individual strengths is nothing short of necessary.

Andrew Smith Lewis heads Cerego’s US operations and runs Cerego’s Advisory Board, which is an international group of experts and practitioners in scientific, technological, and commercial areas directly relevant to the company’s activities.

Currently based in Palo Alto, Andrew lived in Japan for 25 years and is fluent in Japanese.

Top image via Shutterstock

Ed-tech company Kno has the support of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, but it has struggled to find its niche, until today.

Kno’s CEO Osman Rashid is confident about a product that can turn a boring PDF into an interactive ebook in “minutes.”

This new publishing tool was originally called “Evolve,” but due to a potential patent issue, the company changed the name to “Advance.” Rashid said in an interview that Advance was initially built for internal use, but they started getting requests from the largest book publishers, including McGraw Hill Education and Wayside Publishing.

Publishers can submit a file to Kno, which can be updated with rich multimedia content, including videos, audio, websites, 3D objects, calculators or simulations. Publishers can add a new interactive element at anytime, then instantly push that new element to all the readers of their digital book.

Advance has a competitive edge over competitor, Apple iBooks, as it is available for iPad, Android, Windows 7 and 8. The company also competes with interactive e-book publishing platform Inkling, which recently launched its online ebook store.

Since launching in 2009, the well-funded startup has worked with about 80 publishers to bring more than 200,000 higher education and K-12 digital books across a variety of platforms, including tablet devices and smartphones.

In the early days, the founders had intended to sell mobile hardware to help students learn. But tablets came along, so Kno made the shift to digital textbooks.

Kno has raised about $70 million in funding from firms like Andreessen Horowitz and SV Angel and is under pressure to produce some revenue-generating tech. Rashid said the product will be available to publishers free of charge, so it’s unclear how the company will make money in the long-term.

Image credit: patrisyu // Shutterstock

Udemy, the online learning platform that offers videos and live lectures from hundreds of expert instructors, has closed its second round of venture capital funding.

The company website features over 5,000 courses on technology and business, as well as lifestyle, the arts, and sports. In the month of October alone, Udemy added 400 courses.

The courses are diverse: On Udemy, you can learn how to develop mobile applications, build pivot tables on Excel, or master the basics of photography. Simply type in a subject you’re interested in, and surf the results. As you might expect, the most popular courses are taught by renowned business leaders, such as Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer or Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg. 

There are both free and paid courses, so teachers can earn money. In 2011, the top 10 instructors garnered $1.65 million in combined sales. Last week, the company announced that one in four of its instructors will close out the year with over $10,000.

In an interview, Udemy CEO Eren Bali said the goal is to “democratize education.” For Bali, this means enabling the top experts to teach any student anywhere in the world and reduce the price point so anyone can receive high-quality education.

Related: Read our summary of a panel where Udacity and Khan Academy’s CEOs called for disruption in higher ed.

“To do this, though, we need to be big,” said Bali. The company will use the funds to drive its marketing efforts so more instructors and students sign up. They will also use the funds to build out the course catalog to include more adult education classes as well as add accredited and certified content. To accelerate the development of the mobile product, Bali brought on a new COO and President, Dennis Yang. Previously, he was the senior vice president of operations at 4INFO and has been an executive advisor to Flipboard.

The founding team does not intend to replace higher education, but Bali hopes Udemy’s inexpensive courses will “force traditional educational institutions [to] lower their prices.” On Udemy, prices typically hover at a few hundred dollars, and most of the popular courses are free.

Bali explained that education-technology startups like Coursera and Khan Academy have stimulated investors’ interest in this space. However, Udemy is doing it a little differently by enabling anyone with expertise in a subject area to moonlight as a teacher. “In 10 years, we believe every expert in the world will be teaching online,” said Bali.

The Series B round was led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from Lightbank, MHS Capital, and Learn Capital, bringing the company’s total funding to $16 million.

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