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Teachable books $4 million to turn everybody into educators online
Education tech startup Teachable (formerly known as Fedora) has raised $4 million in a Series A round of funding according to CEO and founder Ankur Nagpal. The company provides a platform that’s like a Shopify or a SquareSpace for tutors or teachers. Its platform allows subject matter experts to quickly construct online courses and sell or give them away to their followers, setting their… Read More
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Oohlala aims to school the university-specific app space with a $4M Series A
There’s an app for everything these days, including attending college, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good app. Oohlala has changed that for hundreds of schools so far with its custom university-specific apps for students, and it’s looking to expand with a $4 million Series A round it announced today. Read More
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Microsoft launches Intune for Education to counter Google’s Chromebooks in schools
Microsoft today announced Intune for Education, a new tier of its existing enterprise application and device management service that’s specifically meant for school. In addition, the company announced that a number of its partners will soon start shipping a wider variety of affordable Windows 10 PCs. This move comes shortly after Google announced yet another push for its Chromebooks… Read More
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Hanson Robotics built a Professor Einstein toy to teach kids science with a familiar face
Hanson Robotics is making its first foray into the consumer electronics market with an educational toy called Professor Einstein. The device is a pint-sized, shuffling Albert Einstein that uses natural language processing, and other artificial intelligence capabilities, to comprehend and answer kids’ questions about science. The Einstein toy robot works as a standalone or in conjunction… Read More
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Tandem is a messaging app where language learners chat
Shortly after downloading the Tandem app I’m trying to explain the finer points of using the English auxiliary verb ‘will’ in a messaging chat with Juan, 35, from the Dominican Republic… Read More
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Kubo, the robot that teaches kids to code, is now available for preorder
We saw tons of new stuff at CES this year. But one thing that particularly caught our eye was Kubo, the robot that teaches kids how to code. Kubo is a pretty simple robot – it’s about the size of a can of soda and has two wheels that allow it to roll around a desk or table. But what it lacks in advanced physical ability it makes up for in brains. Kubo comes with its own… Read More
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MOOC enrollment drops at HarvardX and MITx after free certifications disappear
An internal study of the massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered by Harvard and MIT shows a serious decline in the number of students choosing to enroll and certify via these internet-accessible classrooms. 2016 only saw around half the participants as the previous year — likely due to the programs’ discontinuance of free certification. Read More
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Lingo Live raises $5.2 million to help employees become truly fluent
Tech startups have tried to make language learning possible without human tutors since way back in the 90s when CD-ROMs and Rosetta Stone were state-of-the-art. The rise of social media and smartphones inspired a new wave of language learning apps like Duolingo, OKPanda, or Lingua.ly, to name a few. But the CEO of Lingo Live, Tyler Muse, asserts it’s not possible to become fluent at… Read More
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Google’s Toontastic storytelling app for kids goes 3D
Two years ago, Google bought Launchpad Toys, the company behind the popular Toontastic kids app for iOS that allows you — whether you are a kid or not — to easily tell your stories through animations. Today, Google is launching the first major new version of Toontastic for Android and iOS since it acquired the company. With this update, Toontastic is going 3D, though not in… Read More
Latest Crunch Report
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AWS moves into IT training and job placement with re:Start, a UK cloud skills program
Amazon’s cloud storage business AWS has been gradually expanding into a range of cloud services for people not to simply host their business or app with AWS, but to use the platform for productivity and their own work purposes, too. Today came the latest development on that theme: AWS launched re:Start, a new program for IT skills training, specifically in cloud computing, and job… Read More
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Uber’s David Plouffe will run politics for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
If you want to cure all disease and educate everyone, you’re going to need the government’s help, even if you’re as rich as Mark Zuckerberg. Today, he and his wife Priscilla’s philanthropic vehicle the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced it’s hired away Uber’s chief advisor and former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to lead its policy and advocacy team. Read More
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GM partners with Girls Who Code with $250K grant for after-school activities
GM is teaming up with Girls Who Code (GWC), the national no-profit seeking to help close the gender gap in STEM education and professional fields. The partnership will see GM provide a $250,000 grant to help grow GWC’s Clubs, an after-school program that provides free activities for students in community centers and academic institutions to help boost computing and other technical skills… Read More
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Crunch Network
The real political divide is education
The two main political parties in this country are about to face a challenge that will create a complete realignment as politicians are forced to choose between robots and people. The real question, as the parties realign themselves, is who will be for the robots and who will be for the workers. Read More
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Duolingo gets social
Duolingo, the popular language learning app, has long made learning a new language accessible to anybody with a computer or smartphone. Unlike being in a traditional class environment, though, using Duolingo was always a rather lonely experience. The company, whose app has now been used by over 150 million people, realized as much and today, with the launch of Duolingo Language Clubs… Read More
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Crunch Network
The broken edtech ecosystem investors once avoided is changing
Previously considered risky investments, it’s true that many edtech startups — commonly founded by “teacherpreneurs” hell bent on mending education through tech innovation — either tank or fail to achieve true scale. Why is this the case, when basic reasoning leads us to believe there is no other professional better placed to address the issues facing education… Read More
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Facebook’s secretive hardware team signs rapid collaboration deal with 17 universities
Facebook’s shadowy Building 8 research team needs help from academia to invent futuristic hardware. But today’s pace of innovation doesn’t allow for the standard 9-12 month turnaround time it takes universities to strike one-off research partnerships with private companies. Enter SARA, aka Facebook’s “Sponsored Academic Research Agreement.” It’s a… Read More
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Google.org donates $30 million to help nonprofits buy the tech they need
Google.org is donating $30 million to non-profits this holiday so that they can buy any tech and related services that they need including hardware, software, training and IT maintenance or repair services. Earlier this month, reports leaked that Google had donated money earmarked for employees’ Christmas gifts to charity instead this year. It’s true that the company made… Read More
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Crunch Network
What the coming educational VR revolution teaches us about the tech’s future
By importing VR/AR into the classroom, students can explore the anatomy and organs of an animal without harming it, and build and test circuits or set up experiments that test Newton’s laws. For students who have been inundated by tech in almost every other domain of their lives, this form of learning comes naturally. Read More
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LingoZING is trying to teach new languages through comics pages
I’m willing to try pretty much anything at this point, when it comes to learning another language. I took years worth of language classes, downloaded all the latest apps and even bought a Muzzy tape or two off of eBay – all to no avail. That last one in particular didn’t go great. LingoZING is, at its fairly silly name implies, an attempt to find some common ground… Read More
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Udacity adds 14 hiring partners as AI, VR and self-driving talent wars heat up
Udacity is positioned perfectly to benefit from the rush on talent in a number of growing areas of interest among tech companies and startups. The online education platform has added 14 new hiring partners across its Artificial Intelligence Engineer, Self-Driving Car Engineer and Virtual Reality Developer Nanodegree programs, as well as in its Predictive Analytics Nanodegree, including… Read More
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