July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Online-learning platform Udemy has just released some rather astonishing statistics. The startup said it’s closing in on a big user milestone with 800,000 students and serves up more than 8,000 courses.

But the real stunner is the money earned by the site’s top instructors. Collectively, the 10 most popular teachers on Udemy have earned a grand total of $5 million dollars.

“We’re at an unparalleled time where technology meets education, and we can now say unequivocally that with minimal time investment, any expert, anywhere, can teach the world,” said Udemy marketing vice president Dinesh Thiru in a statement on the news.

Udemy is also announcing a grant program. Called the Summer of Teaching, the program gives Udemy instructors a chance to win $5,000 plus 100 percent of their course revenues for life. It’s more a sweepstakes than a grant since any instructor who signs up before September 1, 2013, is automatically entered for a chance to be awarded the grant — no proposal required.

For would-be ballers, here’s the full list of Udemy’s top earners for specific categories along with how long they’ve been teaching and how many students they’ve amassed:

1. Web Development – Victor Bastos $452,985.78; 7,502 students (teaching since 11/11)
2. Photography – Ken Schultz $65,003.37; 4,157 students (teaching since 6/12)
3. Graphic Design – Tara Roskell $30,371.92; 3,702 students (teaching since 7/12)
4. Business Software – Huw Collingbourne $128,729.83; 4,214 students (teaching since 7/11)
5. IT Certifications and Training – Chris Bryant $260,822; 13,000 students (teaching since 7/11)
6. Yoga – Dashama $43,599.59; 981 students (teaching since 7/12)
7. Video, Animation, and Multimedia – Miguel Hernandez $146,512.81; 2,882 students (teaching since 7/11)
8. Writing and Content Development – Len Smith $59,532.72; 2,926 students (teaching since 1/12)

Founded in 2010, San Francisco-based Udemy is funded by Insight Venture Partners, Lightbank, MHS Capital, 500 Startups, and other investors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

SAN JOSE, Calif. — California’s colleges are facing a funding crisis, so universities are turning to massive open online education (dubbed “MOOCs”) to bolster pass rates and help students graduate on time.

At a press conference today, San Jose State University announced it would be expanding its online course offerings and opening a facility for adaptive and blended learning. This new center will train faculty members at the 11 participating California State University campuses.

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has been pushing state universities to move more aggressively into online education. He first approached San Jose State University to come up with a technological solution to many of its problems, including the large and oversubscribed introductory courses.

But with Gov. Brown on a trade mission in China, it was another prominent figure in state politics who spoke today at San Jose State. California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) serves on the boards of University of California and CSU, and he is also a keen supporter of online courses.

“We need to learn to compete with limited resources,” Newsom said. “We have to provide more access.”

With all the initial hype around MOOCs, it’s not often we see real results. However, one of the first trials at San Jose State has proven promising.

San Jose State University’s campus.

In the fall, professor Khosrow Ghadiri used a blended learning model for his introduction to circuits analysis course. The class received instruction from an online video component — an MIT course via EdX‘s website – which students could complete at home, coupled with in-class problem solving and discussion with Ghadari.

Although the numbers of students were small, the pass rate in the blended class was 91 percent, far higher than the usual 55 percent.

Michelle Rhee-Weise, an education researcher at the Clayton Christensen Institute, refers to this trial an example of “sustaining innovation,” meaning that it’s a “palatable or less controversial step.”

“It focuses on blended learning techniques and not on moving an entire campus experience online,” said Rhee-Weise. The circuits course will now be offered to 11 other CSU schools.

San Jose State first announced its partnership with edX in October. Edx is a nonprofit founded by MIT and Harvard that has subsequently grown to 12 university partners. Formed in 2011, it is one of the pioneers of MOOCs, and competes with Coursera and Udacity.

Education technology startup Udacity also offers San Jose State students access to its online video courses, the New York Times reports. The pilot program from Udacity includes a remedial algebra course, a college-level algebra course and introductory statistics.

“Our work is about trying many new approaches, identifying what works and pushing forward a national conversation on effective ways to infuse the opportunities offered by technology into the way we teach and learn,” San Jose State President Mohammad Qayoumi said. According to Qayoumi, the school’s location in the heart of Silicon Valley makes it a natural fit to test many of the new online education tools.

This San Jose State expansion follows a bill, which was under consideration in the California State Senate in March, and would force California’s universities and colleges to give credit for online courses. The bill was proposed to tackle the problem of students failing to graduate because they couldn’t get a seat in a required course.

Senate President pro tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) said the state’s 112 community colleges each had an average of 7,000 enrolled students who were on waiting lists, and at the 420,000-student, 23-campus California State University, only 16 percent of students graduate within four years.

Steinberg and others view MOOCs as a potential solution; students can enroll in an online course, rather than wait until a spot opens up in an oversubscribed — but required — introductory course.

San Jose State claims the expansion of the partnership will benefit thousands of students. The university hopes it will pave the way for community colleges and universities to examine new styles of learning.

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc/campus image via San Jose State University

This is a guest post by Dale Stephens, founder of the “UnCollege” movement 

At the 2007 EG Conference for youth and young adults, Kevin Kelly told the audience that 10 years ago no one would have believed the Internet was coming, least of all him.

If someone told us that we would all be connected and have access to literally all of the world’s information, we would have said that it was impossible. What I’m here to say today is that education is being transformed by technology. The future is here, but educators and deans, the ones who hold the gauntlet, are choosing not to believe it.

I run UnCollege, an organization that believes that college isn’t the only path to success. The idea was forged during my time at the Thiel Fellowship program (fellows are given $100,000 to forgo college and “make something amazing”). Of course, many people would disagree with the sentiment that I’ve created something worthwhile. In fact, critics say I’ve created something destructive. Naturally, I disagree.

Why do I believe that college is not the only path to success? It’s the technologies that we’ve grown accustomed to. But the problem is that not everyone is seeing the ramifications of what this access means.

We now live in a “connection economy.” You can access someone just by emailing them. You can connect to people through social media, and I’ve corresponded with, and have met, thought leaders through the Internet. What you’re looking at is, as Seth Godin puts it, “the connection machine.”

I’d argue that the access you get from being connected levels the playing field. Now, you can complete an internship with a Silicon Valley startup, even if you live in the middle of Idaho. Being connected means you get access to people who you normally couldn’t even shake hands with. Now, all you have to do is reach out and you’re in. I’ve gotten backed by the first investor of Facebook, launched a social organization that’s barged its way into the pages of The New York Times and CNN, and have connected with thought leaders I would have never dreamed of speaking with. How? It’s because the Internet connected me to them. Twenty years ago, who knows — if I’d dropped out of college, I may have just ended up smoking pot in my parent’s basement.

But I’ve been able to marshall online resources to avoid that frightening fate. I’d argue that technology has intensified the resources we’ve grown accustomed too so much that it’d be a huge mistake not to take advantage.

Unlike college, the beautiful thing about these resources is that they’re practically free. Online courses, internships, apprenticeships, apps, videos, and essays now offer not only the latest, but the best education you can get.

If you’d like to completely recreate the college experience for the cost of free, you can just use Massive Online Open Courses (often referred to as “MOOC’s”) to replace lectures. These include Udacity, Khan Academy, and M.I.T Open Course Software. (Here’s a list of the best resources we’ve found. Not only are they free, but you can learn at your own pace. You can’t pause real professors.)

Now, we have connection. Now, we have the resources. What do colleges have? They have an arbitrary credibility marker, and besides that, they very well could be broke. But they aren’t — and it’s because we’re still buying into the big myth. Technology has, and will, change education. When you see people looking up philosophical texts on their iPhones, how can you still say that education is limited to the walls of a college?

Ten years from now, speakers will remark on how far we’ve come and how surprising this would have seemed a few short years ago. Technology will make education even more accessible and more reliable than it has today. The real question is, when will the educators in charge finally start to believe that?

Dale Stephens is the founder of UnCollege.org, author of Hacking Your Education to be published on March 5th from Penguin, and a 2011 Thiel Fellow. 

ABC keyboard image via Elnur // Shutterstock

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.

It’s almost midnight, and you’re stuck on a math problem that is due first thing in the morning.

In stressful situations like these, online tutoring startup Instaedu can help. The Silicon Valley company specializes in finding stumped students a tutor or homework assistants at any time of day or night.

When the company launched, its core innovation was the pay-by-the-minute model, and the on-demand access to tutors. But with its new features, the startup is moving into the realm of personalized learning.

The Instaedu team is honing its abilities to better match its students with tutors based on their academic needs and interests, so they’ll be tempted to set up regular sessions.

Currently, there are 1,500 tutors signed up from top colleges like Harvard and MIT, but the founders aren’t disclosing the number of registered students. Tutors are paid a fixed rate of $20 an hour (Instaedu keeps the rest), and working hours are flexible.

The tutors connect with students using video chat, text chat and document editing — it’s all online, so there are no travel costs. Alternatives include Edoboard, which provides tutors with online tools, and TutorCentral.net.

“The goal is for our students to get to know tutors better before even having that first lesson,” said Alison Johnston, Instaedu’s 25-year-old cofounder (pictured above). So the new features also make it a bit easier to schedule a regular time to meet with the best possible tutor. They include:

• Real-time messaging so a student can chat with a tutor before scheduling a lesson (this makes it easy to connect with a tutor who is currently online);
• “Smart messages” for students who need to be matched with a tutor that can help with an advanced or niche subject;
• Tutor reviews which are displayed publicly so students can browse tutor profiles.

Instaedu has raised just over $1 million in seed funding from the SocialxCapital Partnership.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Is Udacity the future of education? Andreessen Horowitz seems to think so.

The venture capital firm is giving $15 million to the online education site, which says it plans to democratize higher learning.

When I spoke to Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun on Wednesday,  he said the company was built around fixing one of online education’s biggest problems: It doesn’t fully take advantage of the strengths of technology and the Internet.

A vital component of fixing that is making learning more interactive. ”We want students to find their own paths. You can’t lose weight by watching exercise videos,” he quipped.

With the funding, Udacity aims to build out its course offerings, much of which focus on science, math, and programming.

Thrun says computer science in particular works extremely well for online education — perhaps for obvious reasons: It’s interactive, highly relevant, and has a special way of drawing students in.

“We need to make education so much fun that students can’t help but learn,” he said.

But enabling learning is one half of Udacity’s mission. The other half is more, well, practical. The company actively courts employers to hire students who take its classes. This, Thrun says, makes the experience of learning a lot more worthwhile.

“We don’t just give you an education; we make the education meaningful by making it more relevant for employers,” he said.

Founded in 2011, Udacity has raised $21.1 million to date. Along with today’s funding announcement, Andreessen Horowitz announced that partner Peter Levine is joining the Udacity board.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Grockit has made a name for itself when it comes to social learning for online test preparation, but with Learnist the company is looking beyond just helping you with the SATs: Now you can learn almost anything with lessons prepared by teachers and experts using online media.

After launching Learnist on the web back in May for beta testers, today Grockit is releasing free Learnist iPhone and iPad apps, which will make the social learning service just about anywhere.

“I’ve been thinking in the past 12 months or so that everything you wanted to learn is online now,” Grockit founder and chief product officer Farbood Nivi told VentureBeat in an interview last week. “The problem now is how do you make sense of the endless amount of video content online.”

He’s aiming to solve that problem with Learnist, which at first glance looks a lot like like a Pinterest for online learning. The Learnist website shares Pinterest’s square image board design, but instead of a collection of your favorite LOLcats, you’re presented with an array of lessons across topics like technology, food and drinks, and education. About 50 percent of the site’s content is education (including all of Grockit’s test prep curriculum), while the other half consists of more informal how-to guides.

“Almost every single one of our boards is better and more engaging than any textbook out there,” Nivi said. While textbooks can only devote a few pages to a particular lesson, Learnist lessons have no page limit, and they can include just about any piece of media floating around the web.

Learnist is fun to explore on the web, but it’s even more engrossing on the iPad and iPhone. Much like Wikipedia, it’s easier to sit back, relax, and fall down a rabbit hole of lessons. In addition to just viewing lessons, the apps let you build your own and share lessons with others.

Nivi says Learnist is solving five problems of social learning: It’s curating content, so it’s far easier to find lessons than just searching on Google; since most lessons are created by experts and teachers, they know how to sequence content to make learning easier; it lets you create a learning map, which helps to coordinate exactly how you approach a topic; it offers assessments, to make sure you truly understand the material; and the site lets you social around any piece of information.

Since launching in May, Learnist has around 1,000 people who can create content, and they’ve added more than 20,000 different learning objects to the site. Nivi says a “small army” of teachers also created learning boards for all 7th to 12th grade core subjects. It’ll be interesting to see if teachers actually start recommending Learnist to their students for studying (and perhaps even having students create lesson boards of their own).

“Learnist is so much more the vision I had for social learning than test prep was,” Nivi said. “When we started [Grockit], it wasn’t possible to do Learnist … the tech wasn’t there, the content, computing power, net speed … none of those things were there. It’s only been in the past year that we’ve seen more [of those capabilities].”

San Francisco-based Grockit has raised around $25 million in funding so far from Atlas Venture, Benchmark Capital, Integral Capital Partners, and others.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

StormWind isn’t just a 1984 single by Swedish heavy metal outfit Europe. Nor is it merely a human kingdom in the MMORPG World of Warcraft. It’s also an online IT and bespoke-training company that’s just closed a $4 million funding round.

The round was led by GSV Capital, a firm that also has a stake in huge companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Zynga. Also participating in the round is Tim Crown, Insight.com co-founder.

Training employees in information technology is a long, costly, and deadly dull proposition. StormWind says it cuts both the time and price of such trainings in half. Also, it promises to engage learners with “movie-quality” instruction in two-hour sessions and hands-on labs.

For standard topics like Cisco and VMWare, companies can sign their employees up for existing classes. StormWind also creates custom courses for companies that need more specific types of instruction.

“E-learning 1.0 has been a complete and utter failure. It’s boring and painful to take,” said co-founder Tom Graunke in a statement this morning.

“Our one simple goal is to bring back the one-on-one engagement of great classroom learning with the cost effective pricing of e-learning.”

The startup will use the funding to further develop its technology, expand its course offerings, and hire 150 new employees over the next year and a half.

“StormWind has more potential to dominate the stodgy and boring training industry than I’ve seen in the last 15 years,” said Crown of the startup. “I was drawn to StormWind because I think they have something every enterprise is desperate for in this economy… a faster, more effective training alternative that produces better results for significantly less cost.”

The Phoenix, Ariz.-based startup was founded in 2009 by a corporate training specialist and an IT veteran, both of whom thought most corporate training programs lacked any semblance of real engagement (read: they were really, really boring).

So far, StormWind’s clients include the U.S. Navy, Budweiser, Sony, PF Chang’s, and Cisco. Together, these companies bring more than 40,000 employee-students to the StormWind platform.

Image courtesy of holbox, Shutterstock

During my sophomore year of college, I was a campus ambassador for an online distance-learning startup that hoped to capitalize on the highly lucrative Korean private education market. They were “going to change the way the world learns” with untested technology. After hemorrhaging money, the startup—and its education revolution—fizzled. So will Knewton pass or fail?

The round of financing, Knewton’s second, is premised on explosive growth in the online test-prep space.  Founded by test-prep veteran Jose Ferreira and backed by some of venture capital’s savviest investors, Knewton is hoping to “fundamentally transform the test-prep industry and then the broader education market with its industry-first adaptive learning engine.”

Knewton’s strategy is simple: Apply more cutting-edge Web techniques to leapfrog slower-moving industry pioneers such as Kaplan and The Princeton Review.  Still, extending adaptive learning beyond test prep and proving its effectiveness in the classroom remains Knewton’s biggest challenge.

I recently spoke with the cofounder of one of the world’s largest test-prep outfits, who’s no longer active with his company, to get his opinion of Knewton’s obstacles.  In an email, he wrote:

The entire premise of adaptive learning is a simple extension of the idea of adaptive testing (which, like Knewton, began with its first large-scale application with the GMAT)…. Apart from the fact that the entire concept of levels of learning that build on each other is enormously problematic, it would take five to ten years of hard thinking and iterative experimentation for each subject to establish what the proper sequence of topics is – and mind you, that sequence might vary from person to person.

Knewton’s first problem, then, is analyzing why Little Johnny isn’t acing long division. Did he misunderstand the phrasing of the question? Did he consistently make a careless error? Or was he just watching Justin Bieber? My source continued:

The notion of sequencing learning into “bits” is, not surprisingly, confined currently to mathematics, where the sequence of building blocks is relatively simple.  Kumon learning centers have been around for over half a century, founded on the premise of teaching math exactly that way…  [The problems] grow exponentially when you move from the comparative ‘simplicity’ of a linear subject like math to the fuzziness of other subjects like history, or literature, or how to write an essay…”

The SATs, GMATs, and LSATs, with their limited universe of topics covered, may be able to be inculcated as a simple series of rules, methods, and strategies, but learning is more than simply the sum of tactics memorized.   It is an arduous process of critical thought, challenge, and reassessment.  Successful teachers do not simply adapt their teaching methods to student answers, but to their questions as well.

If Knewton truly has created a revolutionary technology to address these concerns, then we can all look forward to smarter education for all.  Until then, Knewton will simply be another well-funded test prep company veiled in creative marketing.

David Haber is a recent graduate of Harvard College living in New York City.  Find more of his thoughts on technology, finance and the future of business at SupplyDemanded.com or follow him on Twitter: @dhaber.