Australia based e-learning startup OpenLearning has garnered AU$1.7 million in funding. The new funding will help to fuel the development and implementation of new MOOC-based business models, and stimulate growth in Malaysia, where OpenLearning has been appointed the official MOOC platform for higher education institutions.

Having invested $1 million, entrepreneur Clive Mayhew led the round while contributions were also made by ASX-listed ICS Global, Robin and Susan Yandle, and Hideaki Fukutake, the director of Japanese education company Benesse Holdings.

Mayhew praised how the platform is responsible for the evolution of the education industry and how students learn : “OpenLearning represents a massive opportunity to provide high-quality, accessible, and collaborative education to students around the world,” he said. “The platform is changing the way teachers provide education and the way students learn.”

Founded by Adam Brimo, Richard Buckland and David Collien in 2012, OpenLearning is a free platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs) and other online course providers.

It is reported that the fresh funding will also help develop the its engineering and instructional design teams, while design and implementation of new MOOC-based business models for commercial customers will also take place.

In a growing industry, that online education is OpenLearning can expect fertile ground ahead. A report published by cloud based e-learning platform, Decebo, the industry will cross $51.5 billion by 2016, with an annual worldwide growth rate over 2012-16 of 7.9 percent.

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On the surface, E-learning is simple enough to understand. A broad umbrella term that is used to refer to using technology in a learning, educational environment, E-learning could be a number of things; touch-responsive, interactive technological systems in a young classroom, online testing systems, web-based courses, online databases; they all qualify as e-learning systems.

The past few years have seen a markedly increasing use of e-learning methods, especially in two sectors: online courses/teaching or VLEs (virtual learning environments), and online, open-source information databases. Universities worldwide [my alma mater included] employ the use of Moodle, a learning platform that provides personalised learning environments to students. An open-source platform, students, educators and faculty can access personally, systematically tailored learning environments to access information related to reading material, courses, grading and notifications, with easy, simplified intra and inter-departmental communication streamlined by the interface. An extremely useful tool, it significantly simplifies the learning experience.

For Users: (Via Examining the Khan Academy Model)

With internet access increasingly permeating fields where resources are typically scarce (such as highly advanced or specialised qualification), e-learning tools can greatly help with practice, tutoring, honing specific skill sets or even teaching new ones altogether.

The popular Khan Academy, set up by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Salman Khan in 2006, provided micro-lectures via YouTube videos, exercises and educator tools to those who needed them, entirely free of cost.
The interface has since expanded, with the gamification of the website; a previously video-only set of tutorials is now interactive, with medals awarded to users during the learning process. This has both modernised the online learning experience and made it more of an open, fun experience for younger learners, while still providing necessary skills.

Videos by the Khan Academy, which initially focussed solely on Mathematics, now span a range of topics across the sciences, such as biology, cosmology, health and medicine.

For Coders and Developers- SCORM vs. xAPI

A lot of software used by the Khan Academy (and other e-learning portals) tends to be open source, which is extremely convenient for developers to build on.

The existing technical standard for e-learning software products, SCORM, is in place to indicate to programmers the degree to which their code can interact with e-learning software. ExperienceAPI (also known as xAPI and Tin Can API), a new e-learning standard designed to replace SCORM, is an e-learning software specification that allows learning content and learning systems to speak to each other in a manner that records and tracks all types of learning experiences.

More analytics-rich than its predecessor SCORM, xAPI means that e-learning is now available across wider platforms that are not as restricted. Performance tracking, already a feature in some e-learning databases, is now not restricted to browsers, finding support in desktop and native mobile applications.

Platform transition, working on an e-learning set via a certain platform (via browser) and being able to continue it via a native application, is another feature xAPI allows. xAPI is also much more specific than SCORM, allowing more granular tracking by developers, coders and users, resulting in a more analytical, data-rich experience across the board.

Ultimately, this benefits both user and developer, with each community able to effectively track progress, effectiveness and interaction via a single, open source software specification.

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Writer and communications professional by day, musician by night, Anuradha Santhanam is a former social scientist at the LSE. Her writing focuses on human rights, socioeconomics, technology, innovation and space, world politics and culture. A programmer herself, Anuradha has spent the past year studying and researching, among other things, data and technological governance. An amateur astronomer, she is also passionate about motorsport.
More of her writing is available here and she can be found on Twitter at @anumccartney.

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Online learning management system Desire2Learn Inc. recently scored $85 million in its second round of funding. With the new funding, Desire2Learn intends to expand international outreach and invest in the development of its cloud-based learning software.

“Unlike advertising and e-commerce, education is an industry that has just begun to use big data analytics,” notes Jon Sakoda, partner at New Enterprise Associates which took part in the new financing round. “Ultimately, Desire2Learn is helping educators deliver personalized learning the way that Amazon.com delivered a personalized shopping experience.”

Brightspace is D2L’s main platform that enables teachers deliver content to students in the classroom and at home via the Web and mobile devices, while tracking their learning progress regularly instead of just once a semester, at the time of a final exam or standardized testing.
The cloud-based software can be used by an individual teacher for free or can be used with more sophisticated analytics, content and other tools, by an entire school, school district or national education department.

Presently, 1,000 schools and more than 15 million students are using the cloud based software. New Zealand has adopted the Brightspace platform for its public K-12 schools, Chief Executive John Baker, as have several U.S. states, cities and districts. Approximately, 10% of D2L’s earnings is through helping corporations train their employees. The new funding will help the company grow that piece of its business.

According to Baker, the technology functions like a “Netflix for education,” recommending courses based on their skills, interests and aptitude which helps convert users to students with a complete degree within four years and decreases dropout rates.

Read more here.

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