Christopher Dawson

As education startups are private companies and therefore don’t have to disclose their revenue publicly like companies that are traded at the stock exchange, it is often hard to estimate how well they are actually doing.

Usually you get a press release stating the startup has hit a major milestone by making it to break even or you get a revenue in the six or seven digit space. Therefore it is always great if someone shares some real numbers we can chew on and that’s what Udemy did today.

And though Udemy isn’t telling us exactly how much revenue the platform is making at a whole, it got their top 10 performing instructors to share what they earned with their courses. And it’s actually pretty impressive, I have to say.

The top 10 instructors earned a combined $5 million with their courses on Udemy, ranging from $44k to a pretty nice $450k. Most of those courses were launched in July 2011, the latest to make it in the top 10 in July 2012.

These are some telling numbers in several ways.

First of all, these numbers show that people are willing to pay for Internet based on demand video courses. Probably not that much of an eye-opener as Lynda.com has proven this for years, already. Of course, Udemy tends to make clear that their business model is totally different, they offer a better share for content creators and that Udemy therefore has the better content. Hard for me to tell, that is basically how the PR game goes.

Secondly, it once again underlines my point that platforms like Udemy or Skillshare are growing in a very homogenous environment, usually big cities and within those more specifically the community of well connected and tech savvy Gen-Yers. They are all urban education platforms. If you take a look at the topics of the top 10 earners it gets pretty clear.

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

Udemy is born in the Bay Area and Gagan Biyani and the early marketing team did a great job to make the startup known among other startup people. The courses clearly show the trend of lifelong learners who invest in their career by adding new skills for their tech based jobs. Of course, health is also a big topic which shows the entrance of a Yoga course in 9th place.

This again leaves open the question if Udemy and others will be able to grow in other verticals as fast as they did in the tech and skills verticals. Or does this show that people are simply not willing to pay for courses outside of these topics because there are cheaper / free alternatives like Duolingo in the language learning space.

Picture License Some rights reserved by Thomas Hawk

Back in October we already reported on the Brazilian MOOC platform Veduca after it had raised a seed round. In February, this round was then followed by an investment from Macmillan Digital Education (disclosure: Macmillan Digital Education supports EDUKWEST at the publication of this post).

Back then I wondered

“… why no startup in the LatAm education space is creating something similar based on the universities in the region instead of relying on the free material that US based campuses are uploading on the Internet. Same is true for Europe, of course. I think there is some big potential in recording lectures of renown professors in South America.”

As so often in our fast moving space, things change quickly. The German MOOC platform iversity which aims to take the lead in Europe just announced the winners of its MOOC Production Fellowship. And today Veduca launched its own first two MOOCs in partnership with the university of São Paulo, (USP).

The interesting part is that similar to courses at edX students are going to receive a certification from the University after they successfully completing their MOOC. Students can choose between Basic Physics and Probability & Statistics.

There is also a clear focus on quality from the university’s side. Vanderlei Salvador Bagnato, author of the Basic Physics course is quoted in the press release that

“Classes available in Veduca have exactly the same content for our past students of USP in the classroom. When students take the final test, we will evaluate students who have studied via Veduca with the same rigor.”

Along with the launch of the two MOOCs by USP Veduca introduced a couple of new features to the site which aim to facilitate and enhance the online learning experience. The new features include

• Tests and quizzes during the classes: at the end of a topic, the video is paused automatically and exercises are given to the student. The student can answer the questions or skip to continue watching the video;
• Virtual notebook with notes referenced during the video: there’s no need to pause the video or leave the page, as the student can take notes on a virtual notebook. The annotations are referenced in the video at the time they’re written. When reviewing your notes, users are able to find out what time in the class something was written down and can watch the passage again;
• Search in teacher talk: it is now possible to search words in the teacher talk while watching the video. The results are highlighted in the timeline of the class, and students can click on each result to play the video from the speech researched;
• Related materials for download: teachers now have an area to provide extra materials for download, such as lists of exercises, supplementary readings, tables etc.
• Online forum: one of the main tools of the MOOC, it allows everyone attending the same course to exchange information and assist each other when studying. You can also add tags to identify the content of the topics discussed and facilitate research in the time to study;
• Related news: using the algorithm ContentSense ®, developed by Veduca, stories related to the theme of lessons are combined with the videos. It is the same mechanism already available in the online version of the newspaper O Estado de S. Paul and portal Free Ratchet, which are suggested Veduca classes that help explain the concepts covered in the news.

Going back to my post in October, the ContentSense algorithm is something that sets Veduca apart from its international competitors and probably made the platform attractive to early investors as this is patented IP.

Come the time one of the competitors thinks about acquiring its way to the top, the ContentSense algorithm could be a deal maker. Of course, it could also become a strategic advantage, enabling Veduca to create better online learning experiences and therefore attract more learners and therefore revenue in the years to come.

Today Veduca offers over 5500 classes and since its launch in March 2012 the portal has had about 1.7 million subscribers, with 900,000 unique visitors. The platform has 42,000 registered users.

Today iversity and Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft announced the ten winners of the MOOC Production Fellowship contest.

Each Fellow will receive €25.000 to implement the concepts they presented during the public voting phase of the contest. The ten winners were judged by a jury of experts based on public votes, an innovative teaching concept, smart usage of technology solutions or the integration into an existing institutional structure. Besides the grant, winners also receive ongoing support during and after the creation of their MOOCs through the production and marketing phase.

The grant can be used freely but the Fellows need to assure that the course is being produced based on the criteria and the timetable between July 2013 and July 2014. During that time period the MOOCs cannot be commercialized and are hosted on iversity, exclusively. After that period the MOOC creators are free to do whatever they like with their courses including monetization.

The ten winning MOOCs cover a wide variety of subject matters ranging from DNA to the future of storytelling. You can find the complete list of winners with detailed descriptions of the respective MOOCs and the possibility to enroll on the MOOC Production Fellowship website or on iversity.

Ever wondered who the top performing e-learning companies in Europe are? Edxus Group and IBIS Capital created EdTech 20, a list of twenty innovative and fast growing companies across Europe. The top three of the list are going to be announced next week at the Edtech Europe Summit, a one day event in London which we are going to cover here on EDUKWEST.

The EdTech 20 was judged by a panel of industry experts in terms of innovation, scale, market impact and revenue growth over the past year and includes familiar startups like Languagelab.com, Sofatutor and Mendeley which we have covered here on EDUKWEST over the past couple of years. The complete EdTech 20 list is available on the Edxus Group news section.

Interestingly, babbel.com and busuu, two very fast growing startups in terms of user adoption, are missing though as far as I understand you had to apply in order to be judged. Also, we are very aware of the fact that some startups and also more established e-learning companies are fairly reserved when it comes to sharing data and are willing to share growth data in order to be part of a top 20 list.

Edxus Group is planning to spend between $64 to $77 million over the next 18 months to acquire e-learning companies across Europe in order to create a “European education champion” that can compete with US based players in the market like Pearson, Blackboard, Macmillan, Kaplan and McGraw-Hill. Early stage startups are probably not on the radar as Edxus Group is looking at “companies with €2m to €10m turnover and with an established presence in the market” according to TechCrunch.

I am going to have a call with Benjamin Vedrenne-Cloquet, founder & CEO of Edxus Group and Charles McIntyre, founder & CEO IBIS Capital Ltd on Tuesday to talk about the EdTech 20 and Edxus Groups’ strategy for the coming months.

All in all, a pretty interesting development for the European e-learning market and I am already pretty curious what companies Edxus Group is going to acquire to build their European champion.

Comments: Leave us a comment on Facebook and share your thoughts. You can also send us a Tweet.

Instructure, makers of the Canvas LMS which targets established players like Blackboard and the Canvas Network which is Instructure’s answer to the MOOC craze, announced a $30 million Series D funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation of existing investors. This latest round brings the total funding raised to $50 million.

The funds will be used to accelerate Instructure Canvas adoption in K-12 schools, colleges and universities according to the press release.

Josh Coates, CEO of Instructure, also shares that the company is not headed for an exit of being acquired by one of its competitors like Blackboard. Instead, they are heading for an IPO sooner or later.

“We’re building the foundation of a company that will one day access the public markets. We have a long-term vision for education, and we’re committed to making it a reality.”

This is of course important for potential clients who think about switching their LMS provider. As we often see in the social media space where acquisitions of smaller platforms happen all the time, particularly at the moment, many people who switched from let’s say Facebook often find themselves back at the same place when services like Instagram get acquired.

If a school or college decides to switch from Blackboard they certainly do it for a good reason. Hence, they want to be sure that the service is going to exist at least five to ten years down the road and not being acquired by the service provider they had left.

Instructure’s business model seems to be solid. Since its launch, Instructure has attracted more than 6 million teachers and students from 425 institutions and booked more than $90 million in contracts according to the press release.

Instructure Canvas Network, the company’s answer to MOOC platforms like Coursera, Udacity or edX, has delivered more than 40 online courses by partner universities since its launch in November 2012. Other than MOOC platforms like Udacity or Coursera, Canvas Network allows institutions to define the structure of their courses and how to teach these themselves which has resulted in various different formats ranging from a smaller online course format with more interaction to really massive video lecture based courses.

Back then I had the pleasure to talk with Brian Whitmer, co-founder and CPO of Instructure. We talked about the Canvas Network and the future of online delivered higher education.

Comments: Leave us a comment on Facebook and share your thoughts. You can also send us a Tweet.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on Today’s Campus.

What makes a website stand out as superior? There are some key qualities we all subconsciously look for when we scout a new site, but they are too often forgotten when it comes time to build or revise our own.

Visit your site. Yes, now. Take a few minutes to evaluate it with the following 3 questions and engage the actionable advice into your plans to make some measurable improvements.

Is your site easy and intuitive to navigate?

This sounds incredibly basic, and to some extent it is. Yet, time and again I visit businesses’ websites to get one specific piece of information, and it’s nowhere to be found – yes, I’m talking about the open hours. The fact is, if a competitor has their hours posted right at the top of their home page, I’m heading there instead. Don’t think it’s incredibly different when it comes to student applicants.

If prospective students or their parents are looking for your registrar’s office contact info, only a small percentage will find the page they need if it’s buried 20-clicks into your site somewhere. No one wants it that badly.

The first step is to know exactly what your visitors want to accomplish when they visit your site. You can learn this in a variety of ways, but the best ways measure what your visitors are actually doing – versus what they tell you they’re doing. Taking analytics on high-traffic funnels (i.e. home page > Prospective Students > Apply Now > Register) will give you much more accurate information than a survey sent to new applicants on the route they took through your site, or even one on what they found useful.

Once you know how your visitors are using your site, you’ll be able to balance your expectations and desires to with their needs. If you want a larger applicant pool, why not put a big red “Apply” button right on your homepage? By making the things that are most important to your visitors easily accessible you’re telling them that you know their needs and respect their time. Speaking of time…

Is your site clearly and concisely worded?

Examine everything from your news feed to the call-to-action buttons, so visitors don’t waste time reading fluff or clicking around trying to find the right page. When I want to create an account on a site, hitting “Login” to access both the login and registration pages just doesn’t make sense. Even if it directs to the same page, have both a “Login” and “Register” button on the home page. Don’t expect your audience to know you’ve combined similar pages like that just because it makes sense to you.

The content-heavy areas of your site should receive most of your attention in planning. You don’t need to flood visitors with every last detail about you or your school. Don’t be afraid to leave information off your site if it falls in the category “mildly interesting” or below. Better to put only the most excellent parts and nothing mediocre.

Think of it being all based on percentages – if you have less content but it’s 100% impressive, people will literally think “wow.” If you put filler just to make your site appear full, but it’s only 50% impressive, people will think something to the effect of “meh.” Being succinct ensures you don’t overwhelm them and gives someone the opportunity to inquire for more info – which is exactly what you want. Your goal is to lower any and all barriers to the tasks you want your visitors to complete. While you’re making it short, also make it sweet.

Is your site content provoking and relevant?

If not, no one will care enough to read it. Like I said – impress me 100%. Things that impress me provoke me to action, and this is true for your audience.

List your school’s accomplishments, or if it’s your about page, list yours! Pay close attention to not only what you’re saying, but how you’re saying it. Use punchy, meaningful verbs like increased, leveraged, engineered, and more. Saying your institution has a beautiful campus is hokey. Highlighting that Travel and Leisure designated it as one of the top 30 most beautiful college campuses in America is something that will stick in a prospect’s mind and may very well sway a few students in your favor.

Most importantly, never forget to talk to your audience’s fears and build their hope. This will motivate them to action and start channeling them into a growing loyalty to you and your institution. This is as simple as acknowledging potential problems and telling how you will avert them before they’re even encountered.

When you’re surfing the web, keep an eye out for excellent sites that are intuitive to navigate, simple to understand, and populated with relevant content. Get inspired and use that inspiration on your site.

Comments: Leave Lida a comment on Facebook and share your thoughts. You can also send Lida a Tweet.

Picture License Some rights reserved by chris.corwin

Editor’s note: This article was first published on Fahad Hassan’s personal blog.

In Sal Khan’s book, One World School House, he talks about testing generally as a bad and incomplete concept. I don’t entirely agree with his premises that testing doesn’t tell us as much as we might want to know about a particular student. Let me give an example of his synthesis and what went through my mind as I read one particular paragraph:

“Testing tells us little or nothing about the why of right or wrong answers. In a given instance, does a mistake suggest an important concept missed or only a moment’s carelessness? If a student fails to finish an exam, did she give up in frustration or simply run out of time? Given the time she needed, how well might she have done? On the other hand, what does a correct answer tell us about a student’s quality of reasoning? Was the correct answer the result of deep understanding, a brilliant intuition, rote memorization, or a lucky guess? Usually it’s impossible to tell. (page 92, The One World School House)”

Although I agree that one test can’t give you an entire picture of how a student performs, it does help teachers gage where a student currently is in their mastery curve (something he points out). Yes, looking at an incorrect answer as Sal contends doesn’t necessarily tell you if the student ran out of time, took a bad guess, or simply doesn’t know the concept, but the more I talk to teachers the more I realize they usually have a deeper understanding of their kids that gets lost in our nations conversations on student testing. Most teachers will know based on other study materials leading up to a test such as homework assignments, quizzes, projects, and other items why a student may or may not of gotten a question incorrect. Let’s not forget a test isn’t randomly given to a group of students. Usually it’s an entire month or unit of work that contains a myriad of information for the teacher leading up to that test. If the teacher is effectively left guessing as to why a student missed a question on a test after weeks of other supplemental work leading up to that test — the test isn’t the problem at that point.

I would even go so far as to contend that the best teachers usually know exactly why a student missed a particular question or bombed a concept within that test. It’s closed minded to assume we can derive everything on a student from a correct or incorrect answer on a test — but it’s also close minded to only assume that test is the single measuring stick in a given unit of instruction for a child’s progress. There is nothing wrong with giving tests to measure student progress as long as it’s not the only measuring stick.

I don’t think Sal is entirely against testing or believes it is the root of all evil. In fact, he believes it needs reform and can aid in the learning process, but in this one particular example he gave I felt like his analysis was incomplete.

Comments: Leave Fahad a comment on Facebook and share your thoughts. You can also send Fahad a Tweet.

Picture License Some rights reserved by cactusbones

Wall Street Journal Deutschland added some more details to the $20 million Series C ResearchGate funding round in early May. According to “a person familiar to the matter” one of the investors in this latest round is Bill Gates.

ResearchGate now connects over 2.5 million researchers worldwide and enables them to share and compare data and collaborate on research projects. The platform is especially popular among biologists and medical scientists.

Therefore, we can assume that ResearchGate is going to play a bigger role in the scientific efforts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from now on. Given the strong focus on fighting diseases across the globe, a global network of scientists who share their experiences and data with each other and the Gates Foundation seems to be a good strategic fit.

Ijad Madisch, co-founder of ResearchGate who holds a doctoral degree in medicine, told the Wall Street Journal in February that there is already enough data available for most diseases and therapies. The problem is that there is not enough interconnectedness which is the problem ResearchGate is trying to solve.

ResearchGate planned to officially announce the funding round on June 6th at a press conference in Berlin. Due to the leak of the SEC filing it seems as if the event has been cancelled, though. Neither ResearchGate nor Bill Gates wanted to comment.

via Wall Street Journal Deutschland

Just at the start of a heated national debate about the proposal to hold lectures in English at French universities, Agence Clé invited teachers, parents and experts to talk about English in the French school system.

The event started with a presentation by Divya Brochier about the state of ESL across the globe, highlighting interesting projects and political decisions in Asia, Africa and LatAm.

I had the pleasure to moderate a pitch session of five French startups in the ESL space, some of whom you might already be familiar with from EDUKWEST, followed by an expert panel.

Pre-event I had enough time to reflect on the picture I have ofthe French and their relationship with the English language. As you will probably know by now, I have been living in France for about seven years now so I had my fair share of experiences, especially as I had started as a language coach for both English and German.

To make it short, I was usually not impressed by what the French school system was capable of. There is simply too much focus on theory and not enough on real use of the language.

As part of the roundtable discussion Isabelle Mazarguil, founder of NosJuniors.com presented a survey among parents that basically came to the same conclusion. 61% of the parents surveyed think that the school does not prepare the children for the use of English in the collège (ages 11 to 14) and 81% of parents feel that the collège does not prepare them to properly speak English later on.

But there is hope nonetheless. What the event showed is that there is passion about the issue and to my surprise the most progressive person of the expert panel (maybe the event) was Rémi Danquin from the French Education Ministry. He asked questions like why in a multicultural country like France we don’t teach Arabic or Turkish. He also pointed out that other countries like Germany or the northern countries in the EU work on their accent whereas the French tend to speak English with a very heavy accent and even look down on others who work on theirs as snobs.

Just as informative and insightful to my mind was Gaël Le Dreau’s presentation of the primelangues project on the pedagogical and cognitive benefits of teaching scientific subjects in a foreign language, i.e. teaching math in Russian and his perseverance that it’s not all about English but rather about multilingualism. This aligns with a proposal by the European Commission that every EU citizen should have two foreign languages at her disposal.

Another great example of grassroots in the education system was Marie-Hélène Fasquel who presented how she is teaching English hands on with her students using social media and new technologies on the Internet.

All in all we had some pretty passionate discussions going on and the event could have been much longer as we only hit the tip of the iceberg. I am pretty sure this won’t be the last time we met in Paris to discuss this hot topic.

The team at Agence Clé did a great job with hosting the event and putting together such a diverse group of people so that I am already looking forward to the next one. Below you find a playlist of the different presentations and pitches, in French of course.

After more than three years of edublogging, vlogging and interviewing I’m happy to share that EDUKWEST made it to its 100th episode!

It’s without a doubt an achievement for the site itself as you, the audience, see the value in our work. I will admit that I am also a little proud of myself that I have had the endurance to continue doing the interview series when it’s definitely a challenge to figure out how to make it viable for the team but to keep it ad free and free of charge for our users.

You will have noticed by now that EDUKWEST gets some (philanthropic) support from Macmillan Digital Education and if you know someone who would like to do the same, please put them in touch with me. If someone would like to buy one of us an occasional cup of coffee whilst editing video and audio we are happy to receive your donations as well.

Long story short, for my special episode I invited my esteemed colleague Audrey Watters who has been writing for Hack Education almost as long as I have been doing EDUKWEST.

Although we certainly come from different backgrounds, Audrey looks at the stories from the writer’s perspective whereas I like to evaluate the market and business perspective of things, we often talk about the same stories and movements just from different angles.
I have seen so many people start a blog or podcast in EdTech and for one or the other reason abandoning these projects relatively quickly, that it’s a pleasure when you talk with someone like Audrey who is a constant in the online education space besides the obvious quality of her writing which is almost needless to mention.

As you can imagine we had a bunch of stories and concepts to discuss. To mention just a few: we take you on a (fun) ride through the inevitable but huge MOOCs. We feel that the big three, namely Coursera, udacity and edX concentrate more on their business models or how to make money off of their MOOC platforms (a contradiction in itself?), rather than intensifying their efforts in how to make the learning and teaching experience better or to lower dropout rates for instance.

We also discuss the issues with e-textbooks. DRM, why do prices still won’t come down and whether students really want to use digital textbooks anyway.

Then of course we need to give to thought to question if there is real innovation happening in the EdTech vertical or whether there are lots of startups working on small ideas with the idea in mind to get acquired by one of the big traditional companies in education like Pearson, Blackboard, Rosetta Stone etc.

This would eventually lead to the same old players prevail, the exact ones they had taken on to disrupt which geared them a lot of attention from the media.

I think another important topic during our talk was what I call insular thinking, e.g. building closed systems rather than open one, but also the lack of collaboration of academia with startups. Something I have noticed and regret since 2010. I think both sides would benefit from more collaboration. The startups learn how good academic research is done and can also learn how to evaluate data and academia could liberate herself from being labeled as elitist, living in the ivory tower and unwilling to connect with the other stakeholders in education.

All in all, an episode for connoisseurs.

How did you like this interview? Leave us a comment on Facebook and tell us what you think. You should also send Audrey a Tweet and thank her for this great interview.

Additional Links:

Picture License Some rights reserved by @Photo.

Treat Reddit with Love and Reddit will Love you

Reddit is a powerful community and news sharing network, which can be utilized to drive traffic to your website, blog, or online course. It is also a really fun way to learn about the world.… Read the rest

The founder and CEO of WizIQ, Harman Singh, is on a tour to the United States of America. The purpose of the visit is to personally meet and interact with the educators (that’s you!) who have been a part of the WizIQ family.… Read the rest

Moodle MOOC on WizIQ
The fist Moodle MOOC in the world started on June 1st on WizIQ. I would describe Moodle MOOC as a cMOOC or as Massive Open Online Learning or MOOL. It has set learning environments like you would in a ground campus or conference area with its many buildings and rooms.… Read the rest