Engageli on May 11 reported it had raised a Series A funding round worth $33 million. While the online instruction platform has not announced any clients or institutional deployments, it has been piloted for months and the company says it will be used to teach higher education students more broadly as soon as this coming fall semester.

A common refrain in education circles points out that videoconferencing services like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, which many continue to use to teach online courses, were never designed for instruction. Engageli aims to correct that. Its online instruction platform contains dozens, if not hundreds, of features that were crafted specifically for educators to educate and for learners to learn.

“Basically, the biggest arguments we have engaged in is what features not to put in,” said Engageli CEO Dan Avida over videoconference on the Engageli platform. “We’re all good at coming up with different features. But we also designed it to be clear, to-the-point, and easy to adopt.”

The Series A comes on the heels of a $14.5 million seed round raised last October, bringing the company’s total financing to over $47 million. The round was co-led by Maveron and Corner Ventures. It was joined by Educapital and Good Friends—each of which participated in Engageli’s seed round—along with numerous unnamed angel investors.

https://twitter.com/ProfManagement/status/1327281357379211264

Engageli’s founding team is something along the lines of The Avengers in the edtech sector. Avida founded numerous startups along with the VC firm Opus Capital, which he continues to lead. He is joined by his wife, Stanford professor, and Coursera Co-Founder Daphne Koller. Serge Plotkin, another co-founder, is serving as Engageli’s CTO and VP of engineering. Plotkin founded Decru and Opus Capital with Avida. Jamie Nacht Farrell, a former executive at 2U and Trilogy, also was part of the founding team but has since left the company.

Most recently, Engageli has hired Adam Spivak, Giovanni Dubois, and Talia Kolodny as senior vice presidents of partnerships for various regions. This group has collective experience working at Coursera, Trilogy, 2U, and General Assembly.

The Engageli Platform

Engageli gave its first public demonstration of its platform at CES 2021 in January. It has been piloting its use with higher ed institutions since last fall.

The system is asymmetrical for teachers and learners. Students access the platform via their web browser. Teachers, meanwhile, use a separate app.

The platform allows educators to organize students into ‘tables’ for group work. They can also create ‘stations’ in which learners must complete a short activity or assignment. Inside each, students can talk or message privately amongst themselves. Instructors can drop in to these groups to observe, or can step out and wait until someone needs help.

To get the attention of teachers, students can ‘raise their hands,’ or click a button that alerts teachers that they need help. Learners can use the platform to work collectively. They can also annotate and save lecture material.

Teachers, meanwhile, can organize the entire class together in gallery view (as Zoom and Teams currently do) to deliver a collective lecture. With a function that uses QR codes to create buttons, they can also design quizzes and interactive activities. In addition, they can stream video from the web.

The Engageli platform also allows for synchronous and asynchronous learning. Teachers can record each lecture and save it to their learning management system for learners to view later.

It is also designed to accommodate hybrid learning environments. In-person students engage in class both face-to-face and online via laptop or mobile device. The class then progresses in real-time and lets remote students participate with the entire group.

The Pedagogical Background

Discussing inspirations for the pedagogical design of Engageli, Avida cites the tradition of Talmudic studies and a Stanford experiment on tutored video instruction conducted in the ‘70s. The former, Avida says, emphasizes group work and a space that allows for dissenting opinions.

The latter, though conducted before the era of online learning, draws important conclusions for multimodal education. In 1971, the soon-to-be dean of the Stanford School of Engineering Jim Gibbons wanted to investigate the effectiveness of televised lectures. Over more than 360 different experiments, Gibbons compared groups of students that learned via traditional lecture, pre-recorded video, and the combination of video and in-person tutor.

Learners using the final modality, which allowed them to pause the video and ask questions of their tutor, achieved the highest grades of the three groups.

Engageli seeks to allow for this instruction that Gibbons pioneered.

“It’s like a watch party,” Avida said. “We actually came up with the concept before Disney. Or maybe in parallel. But we started working on it about nine months ago. The idea is that, if one of the students rewinds, it rewinds for everybody else. If one of the students pauses, it pause for everybody else, and they can have a conversation. A TA can go between tables, helping students out as they need, no problem.”

Selling a New Platform Amid Budget Shortfalls

While the Engageli platform speaks for itself, it also faces headwinds. The coronavirus pandemic was not kind to higher education budgets in general. In addition, overall enrollment is expected to contract steadily over the coming decade. But most concerning of all, enrollment declines have accelerated since the beginning of the pandemic.

In April, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center released preliminary data for overall enrollment. It believes that undergraduate enrollment is down 5.9% since the spring semester of 2020. In addition, declines accelerated after drops last fall. While graduate enrollment is up, it doesn’t make up for the overall loses.

While institutional funding has remained steady on average thanks to the CARES Act stimulus, many schools are not in a position to shop around for new products and services.

Avida, however, contends that, with the systems that Engageli replaces, it can be a cost-saving measure.

“We’re very sympathetic to the situation universities find themselves in,” Avida said. “We’re long-term thinkers, we view this as a long-term partnership with institutions. We can replace things like videoconferencing, polling, and lecture capture. It’s all inclusive.”

“We’re very excited about the future,” Avida continued. “We really think that the world is going multimodal, hybrid, both asynchronous and synchronous. We’re building a platform that supports it with all these capabilities.”

Media courtesy of Engageli.

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At CES this year, the Japanese device manufacturer Wacom announced its digital pen tablet had gained full compatibility with Google OS and Chromebooks. With existing compatibility with Windows and Mac OS, the company says its product has a role to play in online learning just at the moment when students en masse are leaving handwriting behind in favor of keyboards.

The company sent eLearning Inside a One by Wacom tablet to try out. In addition, we got in touch with Stacey Roshan, who is the author of Tech with Heart and works as an edtech consultant for Wacom and others. Roshan is also a former math teacher and current technology coach at Bullis School in Potomac, Maryland.

The Wacom Digital Pen Tablet

Wacom’s digital pen can serve as a means to both navigate a learning device and write as if one were doing so by hand with pencil or ink. Some describe this as ‘digital inking.’ A tablet connects via USB port and sits flat on one’s desk. It senses the end of a stylus that the user holds above its surface. One can also tap it to recreate the right or left click of a mouse.

“I started out by flipping my classroom and made Khan Academy-style videos,” Roshan said about her adoption of edtech as a math teacher. “But I needed to be able to write by hand. From the instructional standpoint, I need to allow students to see me write and talk at the same time. And then on the students’ side, a digital pen helps me see their thinking process. That’s a really hard thing to understand as a teacher. I’m always wondering, ‘How are each of my students thinking through their problem? Where are they getting stuck?’”

That’s where Roshan says the Wacom digital pen is indispensable. She taught both online and in-person classes before COVID-19 closed schools last year. She made use of the digital pen tablet in both modalities as a means to bring a form of handwriting back to learning that was increasingly occurring in all-digital environments.

Besides the compatibility with Google OS, Wacom has also created an education-focused library for teachers to show them some basic ways to use the technology and what is possible.

The Demise—or At Least the Decline—of Analog Handwriting

The coronavirus pandemic will leave countless indelible marks on education systems around the world. In the U.S., the rapid shift to remote learning escalated the country-wide effort to expand access to devices and broadband internet. Futuresource Consulting estimated that the K-12 education-facing laptop sales were up 18% in 2020, accounting for roughly 36 million units in total. As more and more students grow accustomed to learning on a device with a screen and a keyboard, what role will handwriting play in the future of online learning? And what consequences will that have across education?

It isn’t easy to measure just how much students are handwriting versus typing in school. But it is probably safe to assume that they are doing it less and less. At Christmas time, some report that kids from families that observe the holiday are commonly choosing to email their letters to Santa instead of mailing them. Surveys of adults have found rates of handwriting have decreased significantly.

A significant body of research has concluded that handwriting has numerous cognitive benefits regarding early literacy, memory retention, learning new information, and other metacognitive processes.

But the vast majority of this research has focused on adults. And it is not entirely conclusive. Researchers Simon Horbury and Caroline Edmonds, in their 2020 study, write that existing literature comparing handwritten to typed note-taking “shows somewhat conflicting findings about [students’] factual recall and conceptual understanding.”

How to Move Forward in the Digital Age of Education

There are many things to consider besides the results of education research when determining how to use technology to teach.

The debate between handwriting versus typing can take on the form of a conflict that pits iconoclasm against nostalgic whimsy. Handwriting expert and former professor of rhetoric at Oberlin College Anne Trubek drew strong, occasionally toxic, criticism with her 2009 article “Handwriting Is History.” In the article (and her subsequent book The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting), she provides a more measured view of handwriting.

Handwriting Just Doesn’t Matter https://t.co/Sb0Addulq6

— Anne Trubek (@atrubek) August 20, 2016

Trubek stresses that writing and typing are learned—not natural—actions. Until roughly 200 years ago, most who learned to read did not also learn to write. Handwriting, furthermore, opens the door for bias in the classroom. Researchers have found evidence of the ‘handwriting effect’: teachers, standardized test scorers, and others tend to judge students with better handwriting more favorably. As such, Trubek argues that “typing in school has a democratizing effect.” She also acknowledges that it will be a very long time before handwriting dies out completely.

Stacey Roshan takes a generally agnostic view, which she extends to technology in the classroom in general.

“It all comes down to priorities for the school,” Roshan said. “My hope is that, moving forward, everybody—teachers and administrators— has an opportunity to reflect on what things we want to keep, and what things we’re ready to discard. We can’t keep everything. Teachers are juggling way too much.

“A year ago, people were ‘firehose’ exposed to everything and needed to change everything on the spot. That’s not how we normally do things. We normally are very intentional. We design backwards. We think about which tools we need and why we need them. Technology can’t be too prescriptive. It needs to augment what teachers are already doing well.”

Featured image courtesy of Wacom.

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For decades, there has been strong overlap between video gaming and computer science. While eSports have exploded in popularity, hacking and cybersecurity skills competitions have also attracted massive interest. The online hacking competition known as picoCTF, administered by the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, stakes a claim as the largest event of its kind. It was created for middle and high school competitors.

Capture the flag (CTF) competitions like Insomni’hack, Google CTF, DEFCON (part of the annual hacking conference in Las Vegas) have grown rapidly over the past decades. Carnegie Mellon is home to the Plaid Parliament of Pwning (PPP), one of the preeminent hacking teams in the world. PPP both competes in the top CTF competitions around the world and hosts its own, including picoCTF and the high-level Plaid CTF.

picoCTF is free to join and open to everyone. But only middle school and high school students are eligible to compete for the $5,000 top prize. You can participate on your own or as a team. Last year’s competition attracted over 40,000 participants.

picoCTF 2021 and Capture the Flag Formats

First launched in 2013, the competition begins this year on March 16 and will conclude in two weeks on March 30.

picoCTF follows a capture-the-flag (CTF) format. There are two main forms of CTF hacking events: attack-defense and jeopardy. In the former, one team must defend a ‘flag’—often a piece of code, a sensitive file, or some other digital item that must be kept secret—from an attacking team that is trying to break past defenses to secure it.

Jeopardy CTF competitions, meanwhile, pose a series of questions to participants. These questions and their correct responses systematically reveal clues that guide teams solving an ultimate challenge. picoCTF is a jeopardy style competition.

To learn more about picoCTF 2021, eLearning Inside got in touch with Dr. Hanan Hibshi, who serves as the competition’s CMU faculty sponsor, to learn more.

https://twitter.com/picoctf/status/1369674901293043716

eLearning Inside: Dr. Hanan Hibshi, I understand your own research focuses on investigating top cybersecurity experts themselves and how they gained their skills. With that in mind, what role do you see hacking and CTF competitions playing in that talent development process?

Dr. Hanan Hibshi: Hacking and CTF participation provide real, hands-on experiences. Learning about vulnerabilities, threats, and mitigations remains theoretical until practiced hands-on. picoCTF provides the hands-on learning environment. The challenges start at an easy level, and they increase in difficulty, mimicking security situations that we may encounter in real systems.

With regards to experts, cybersecurity experts are rare in general, but the number of experts becomes even smaller if we distinguish those who possess hands-on experience with deeper understanding of complex systems.

I think I understand the ‘CTF’ aspect of the competition. What does ‘pico’ refer to?

Pico means small or tiny (in the metric system it means one trillionth, 1012). picoCTF is a name that represents a CTF that is designed to be for individuals with tiny knowledge about CTFs (like middle and high school students) so they can grow their skills. Back then, the team did not envision that the game would grow to the scale that we see today!

I was previously unaware of the extent to which CTF hacking tournaments are established competitions. How did these develop? What are some benefits of organizing the competition in this manner?

The first ever CTF competition was introduced in DEFCON at Las Vegas. DEFCON is one of the largest and well-recognized security conferences that takes place in U.S. These competitions received a growing interest from industry and research. For example, CMU is recognized for its Plaid Parliament of Pwning team (PPP). It competes every year at DEFCON and has won first place five times. Researchers, educators, and industry practitioners recognized the educational benefit of these competitions. We started seeing more CTF-style competitions organized at different universities or organizations. CTFs are highly beneficial for skill-building and to apply cybersecurity skills to real systems. With the growth of the internet, CTFs became more popular as they became borderless. Many CTF events are now international and host teams from around the world.

CTFs can be attack-defend where teams attack systems of other teams, or jeopardy-style similar to the television game show. picoCTF is designed jeopardy style with a scoreboard and different categories such as web exploits, binary exploits, reverse engineering, and forensics.

It is clear that there is a significant gap between open jobs in computer science and talent that can fill them in the U.S. That gap includes cybersecurity positions. At the same time, international cyber warfare has escalated rapidly in the past few years. Russian interference in the 2016 elections mainly involved email spear phishing. That seems decidedly bush league compared to the SolarWinds breach and even more so compared to the most recent Microsoft hack linked to China. Are we mistaken in characterizing the CS skills gap as an economic issue? Would it not be more appropriate to consider it to be a national security concern? Is it an exaggeration to say that cybersecurity competitions like picoCTF are seeking to address this predicament?

Absolutely. The skills gap in CS and specifically in cybersecurity is alarming. Cybersecurity is one of the fastest-growing fields in technology. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects we will see 56% growth in demand for security analysts by 2026. In 2018, NIST’s report to the President of the United States titled “Supporting the Growth and Sustainment of the Nation’s Cybersecurity Workforce” states that the global shortage in cybersecurity workforce is projected at 1.8 million by 2022. Even for people who do not specialize in cybersecurity, obtaining cybersecurity knowledge is essential due to the heavy reliance on digital tools in modern societies.

Addressing the national and international cybersecurity shortage is one of the major goals that picoCTF is trying to achieve. We hope to raise awareness and interest in cybersecurity at an early age by attracting young players. We also aim to attract adult players who might consider switching careers to cybersecurity.

Let’s approach this topic from the other side of the coin: It’s no secret that picoCTF received startup funding from the National Security Agency (NSA). The CMU CS undergraduate program (among others) is a primary recruiting department for various branches of the Department of Defense (DoD). Professor David Brumley remains the faculty coach of the PPP, oversees picoCTF, and also enjoys DoD security clearance related to his cybersecurity company. In the interest of generating some transparency: to what extent is picoCTF a DoD recruiting function? And should parents and teachers be concerned about that involvement?

Department of Defense and many other government agencies fund many research projects in universities around the United States. Let’s not forget that the internet that we enjoy today started as a DARPA project funded by the DoD. This project, like many other research projects, has a global benefit and a goal to increase cybersecurity workforce. Any entity, whether public or private, government or industry, is welcome to participate and become a sponsor to help fund this project that has a public benefit.

There should not be any concerns about involvement of the DoD or any other entity with the picoCTF educational project. There is no direct involvement from any sponsor with picoCTF participants. Any sponsorship that we receive is to help us maintain this platform, improve it, and run the competitions year-after-year. I want to emphasize that we do not share any of the players private data with third parties.

Featured Image by Dllu, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

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Just under a year after its Series A, the language tutoring platform Preply has raised another funding round. It announced its $35 million Series B on March 9, bringing the company’s total funding raised to just over $50 million. Preply says that, during 2020, it saw its gross revenue increase by 400%.

Two VCs—Owl Ventures and Full In Partners—co-led the round. Previous investors Hoxton Ventures and Point Nine Capital also joined. The round also saw participation from a number of angel investors, including Przemyslaw Gacek (Grupa Pracuj co-founder), David Helgason (Unity Technologies co-founder), Arthur Kosten (Booking.com co-founder), and Niklas Ostberg (Delivery Hero co-founder and CEO).

Preply operates by providing a marketplace and platform through which language learners can connect with tutors and native speakers. Learners go to the platform to study a new language for a variety of reasons—school, pleasure, business, and among other motivations, connecting with their roots. Tutors, in turn, curate their profile, set their own hourly rate, and market themselves. Preply takes a commission of each lesson taught.

Preply Announces $35 Million Series B, Sees Massive Growth in the American Market

The company first launched in Kyiv in 2013, serving a largely European market. But today, its largest market is the U.S. American learners account for nearly 30% of the company’s revenue. Americans also make up a large portion of its tutors.

Just 20% of American adults are fluent in a second language. But Preply CMO Filippo Gallignani says that this broad average obscures the country’s diversity.

https://twitter.com/Adi___Singh/status/1368330602676621312

“In the U.S., you have lots of different people with different motivations for learning a second language,” he said. “A good chunk have recently relocated to the country. They’re coming from different cultural backgrounds and they need to improve their English for a number of different reasons. But we’re also seeing that a lot of people who were born in the U.S. want to connect back and learn the language of their ancestors. In Europe, language learning is much more professionally driven.”

The company says that niche languages–like Catalan, Tibetan, and Lithuanian–form a good part of its recent growth.

The Company Plans to Use the Funds to Refine Its Services and Expand Offerings

Preply has plans typical of other companies following funding rounds. It will open new offices in other countries (the company maintains primary offices in Kyiv and Barcelona, but has a presence in numerous other locations as well). Its team is currently 250 strong, and the company plans to double this number in the short-term.

Gallignani also stresses that a significant priority for the company remains ensuring the quality of its services. “Just matching a student with the right tutor is, in itself, a feature that requires a lot of love and attention,” he said.

More than 40,000 tutors currently teach via Preply. The company uses an ever-evolving machine learning system to make sure that new students can pick from the right selection of tutors. Availability, cost, and previous success are important factors. “But then, on top of that, there is also the user experience,” Gallignani said. “If I’m a native English speaker and want to learn Lithuanian, I need to be able to connect with a Lithuanian tutor who also speaks English.”

The company also plans to invest greater resources in curriculum development. It will also begin expanding its enterprise offerings.

Gallignani, who joined Preply from Delivery Hero last fall, says that businesses are seeing increasing value in remote education because it can continue despite other disruptions. “I was living in Germany and learning German,” he said. “When the pandemic started, everything stopped when it came to language learning. Having a platform like Preply could prevent that from happening. It also gives professionals greater flexibility with their schedule. We see a lot of opportunity there.”

Featured Image: Dylan Ferreira, Unsplash.

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Roughly one year ago, the language learning app Babbel was working to revamp its offerings and features. The company was planning to add games, podcasts, and other multimedia content. It was also building out live class capabilities.

“I remember thinking, ‘Do people really want to get on a Zoom call for a class?’” said CRO Julie Hansen via videoconference. “Well, here we are.”

These capabilities went live in February. And they were extensive. The company not only built an in-app podcast player, it also created a library of podcasts. To stand up the live classes, they added videoconferencing capabilities and began to hire a team of tutors. Babbel Live classes are capped at six learners.

Widely Used and Long-Profitable, Babbel Is Still Making Inroads in the U.S.

Before the launch of these new, Babbel was already a leader in the language learning market. It stakes a claim as the highest-grossing language learning app. Last September, it sold its 10 millionth subscription. In recent weeks, the company has been among the most prolific radio and podcast advertisers in the country. And yet many Americans remain unaware of its existence.

“The #1 opportunity that we have for the U.S. team is to move the needle on brand recognition,” said Hansen.

While the scope of some language learning software is broad, Babbel’s is deep. It offers instruction in 14 different languages (by comparison, Duolingo offers 37). But the company has invested a huge amount in learning design. For example, the modules for a given language are built based on the learners’ native tongue. The way a native English speaker learns Spanish with the app differs drastically from the way a native Russian speaker does. It is designed to get any learner speaking a new language almost immediately.

Originally known as Lesson Nine, Babbel launched in Berlin in 2008. It offered its language learning software via web platform on a subscription basis. Following strong growth in the early 2010s, it acquired the San Francisco startup PlaySay in 2013 to expand to the U.S. market.

https://twitter.com/BabbelUSA/status/1359381588417671171

Hansen, who formerly served as President and COO of the media outlet Business Insider, was hired as the U.S. CEO in 2017. (Hansen was recently promoted to CRO.) When she came on board, company research revealed that only 20% of Americans could correctly identify the brand when shown an image of its logo.

“A lot of people thought we were Babel Fish,” Hansen said, referring to the translation software acquired by Yahoo! “But today, more than half of the people we survey know who we are.”

Babbel identifies two main American competitors. One offers its service for free and the other first sold its software via CD-ROM.

“Duolingo is well-known, especially among the younger crowd,” Hansen said. “But Rosetta Stone has even higher brand recognition according to our research. That’s what we’re up against: free gamification and a 27-year-old brand. We each have very different methodologies. It’s surprising. But, you know, welcome to America, where we love good old-fashioned competition.”

The needle did begin to move throughout 2020. Babbel saw its American users double, and daily active usage increased by as much as 160% in May compared to the previous year. “That’s been one of the silver linings of Covid-19,” Hansen said. “People are taking the time to do something good for themselves.”

A Degree of Gamification

Babbel’s focus has been on learning design and successful pedagogy. While it adopts some features of gamification—like push notifications and achievements—it’s main goal is to get learners speaking their new language. This remains the case with the games the company began offering in February.

“We are about a million miles away from that,” Hansen said, referring to the more aggressive gamification techniques employed by some education apps. “Some days, I wish we’d go a little closer, I think it might make my job easier. Our games are definitely the supporting players in the learning process.”

A Subscription Service From the Get-Go

There’s another reason Babbel doesn’t have the awareness of other language learning apps. From the beginning, it has eschewed the freemium model that has proven successful for many throughout the 2010s. Learners can only access the app’s learning features by paying for a subscription. That decision has paid off.

“We think about making more of our content and services free all the time,” Hansen said. “It’s all about quality. It’s expensive to make quality education content. We hire trained linguists. Many members of our team have PhDs. But also, to some extent, it separates the more dedicated learners from the people who are just dabbling. Maybe that’s a good thing.”

Learning Beyond an App

Hansen sees huge potential in the growth of Babbel’s new live classes. Some language learning services focus less on learning design and curriculum and place more emphasis on connecting learners with native speakers. Hansen believes there will be strong growth in this feature in the near-term.

There is broad consensus in the language learning field that the best way to learn a new language is to interact with it in an organic way as much as possible. That has been the driving factor in creating live classes and adding podcasts and games.

“An app is very often the starting point for many people,” Hansen said. “But if you really want to achieve fluency, you have to go beyond that. You need to consume media in your target language, you need to go there, you need to practice extensively, all of those things. People know to start with Babbel, but then many don’t know how to layer on more learning methodologies. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

Media courtesy of Babbel.

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The online learn-to-code platform Codecademy announced on February 23 it had signed a Series D funding round worth $40 million. The company says it plans to use the funds to scale its consumer- and business-facing operations overall. It also plans to expand its presence in India and other growing markets.

The round was led by Owl Ventures, a venture fund that maintains a focus on edtech. The Series D brings the company’s total funding to just under $100 million, according to Crunchbase. Two previous investors also joined the round: Prosus and Union Square Ventures. The former led Codecademy’s $30 million Series C, while the former led the company’s $2.5 million Series A.

Codecademy Announces Series D Following a Strong 2020 and a Period of Sustained Growth

The company says it has been picky in terms of investors it is willing to work with following its last round in 2016.

“We have ambitious goals to help hundreds of millions of people access our learning platform and unlock the skills they need to lead better lives,” said Zach Sims, CEO and co-founder of Codecademy, in a statement. “While we have seen tremendous success on our own, we are excited to accelerate our growth even further by partnering with Owl Ventures, whose unparalleled experience and expertise in edtech will help us surpass our goals and make Codecademy the premier technical learning platform for consumers and businesses globally.”

The Company Plans to Use the Funds to Scale Its Services and Expand Into Emerging Markets

The latest funding arrives following a period of sustained growth at the company. It has reported positive cash flow for the past two years. 2020, however, marked a record year for the company. During that twelve-month period, it gained 5 million new users, 150,000 individual Codecademy Pro subscribers, and 600 business clients.

Following the outbreak of Covid-19, the company offered over 200,000 scholarship subscriptions to students and recently laid off or furloughed workers.

“Codecademy has been on our radar for a long time, as one of the early, long-standing leaders in online learning,” said Amit Patel, managing director of Owl Ventures. “We could not be more excited to help the team continue its impressive growth trajectory and deliver its mission to empower the world with technical skills.”

Featured Image: “Zach Sims, Co-Founder, Codecademy & Bobbie Johnson, European Correspondent, GigaOM @ LeWeb London 2012 Central Hall Westminster-0672” by LeWeb14 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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The Bozeman School District in Montana is worried about losing learners to private charter schools. The Kingsway Regional School District in New Jersey has recognized how certain students are thriving during hybrid learning. And educators at the Eden Prairie School District in Minnesota say they want to capitalize on the pedagogies they have developed over the past year. For a variety of reasons, public primary and secondary schools around the country are developing long-term, permanent remote learning capabilities to offer their learners going forward.

While districts across the U.S. are leaning on remote learning due to severe winter storms, some are looking further into the future. Many see other virtues in ongoing and permanent remote learning besides disaster response.

For a Variety of Reasons, Schools Are Planning to Offer Permanent Remote Learning Going Forward

In Bozeman, Montana, educators plan to launch district-connected virtual schools for K-8 and high school. As Co-Superintendent Casey Bertram told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, “If we don’t provide more flexible options, we’re a bit worried a private charter (school) would.”

This Fall, @dallasschools will offer a new school where hybrid learning (in person/remote) will be part of the permanent daily schedule for 4th-6th grade students https://t.co/78J4rrGdi5

— Sean Gill (@seanrobertgill) February 12, 2021

The district stood up the Bozeman Online School for full-time instruction for grades K-8 beginning last August. It has begun the early stages of transforming that into what would become the Bozeman Online Charter School. The district is currently seeking input from community members to assess interest.

Interest and enrollment at virtual charter schools surged this summer. Many expect that interest to remain after the risks posed by the coronavirus pandemic subside.

Some Students Thrive in Online or Hybrid Environments

Meanwhile, the Kingsway Regional School District in New Jersey has identified another reason to maintain permanent online learning. Some students are performing better academically.

“We have students who are really thriving in this environment,” said Superintendent Jim Lavender, according to NJ.com. “This virtual instruction is not going to go away and it will certainly have an impact on teaching and learning in the future and we’re positioning our district to capitalize on it.”

This phenomenon has so far been related anecdotally. It has also been projected by researchers. In a working paper published last May, researchers who track K-12 student performance projected that, on average, students would only realize roughly two thirds of the learning gains they would see on a given year in reading and just 37% to 50% of gains in math. In the same paper, the team led by NWEA (a non-profit that creates the widely used MAP student assessments) researcher Megan Kuhfeld wrote that the top third of students might make potential gains in reading.

Evidence has yet to confirm this reality in detail. This fall, NWEA published preliminary findings from the tests students had taken during COVID-19 in math and reading for grades 3-8. The median scores in reading were largely unchanged from previous years, but math scores were five to ten percentile points lower than the previous year.

Those median scores do hide the fact that many communities of learners are falling further behind than others. The data is also very preliminary.

On the ground, however, districts like Kingsway in New Jersey are seeing enough evidence of this fact to make online and hybrid learning a possibility into the future. The program being developed by the school will only be available to top performers. Learners who do maintain a hybrid or online schedule will have to also keep their grades above a certain level. The program will be made available to roughly 100 seniors and juniors of Kingsway Regional High School’s 800 total students.

A Range of Factors

In Minnesota, all of these reasons and more are at work behind the push from dozens of schools to build out their permanent remote learning capabilities and develop district virtual charter schools.

According to the Minnesota-based Star Tribune, there are currently 38 online primary and secondary programs authorized by the state. Jeff Plaman, the state’s Department of Education digital learning specialist, says it’s typical to get four applications a year to launch a new online program. But the department is currently reviewing 15 and expects to receive 25 more in the near term.

Some see this as a way to make high quality instruction available to a larger population of students.

As Raymond Diaz, the online program director at Eden Prairie Schools, told the Star Tribune, “Our goal is to give an opportunity for every student in the state of Minnesota to experience Eden Prairie schools and our amazing teachers and to inspire those students as well.”

Featured Image: Kelly Sikkema, Unsplash.

The post Schools Are Building Permanent Remote Learning Capabilities, Even as Vaccines Roll Out appeared first on eLearningInside News.

For the average student, college represents a bureaucratic challenge on a scale that many have yet to encounter. That is a problem that chatbot developers like AdmitHub seek to address. On February 16, the Boston-based company announced it had raised a Series B funding round worth $14 million.

Update 2/18/21: After this story was published, AdmitHub announced that the funding round had been raised by participating parties to $16 million.

In a statement, AdmitHub said it planned to use the funds to “tap emerging technologies that address the most critical challenges faced by students and institutions.”

AdmitHub Secures $14 MM Series B to ‘Tap Emerging Technologies’

The round was led by previous investor Rethink Education and was joined by ECMC Group and the Kresge Foundation.

According to Crunchbase, the latest round brings AdmitHub to a total funding of roughly $30 million. Its previous Series A took in $7.5 million after late support from Salesforce Ventures and Google’s Assistant Investment Program, the latter of which supports companies that incorporate Google’s voice technology into their offerings. The original Series A was led by University Ventures and joined by Reach Capital, Relay Ventures, and Rethink.

Don’t know how to communicate with your #GenZ students? AdmitHub has found a way to Support Students With #AIChatbots.

Learn more about how to do this with our guide https://t.co/NzNt6eJo6E#highered #aiuniversity #studentsuccess

— AdmitHub (@AdmitHub) February 10, 2021

AdmitHub seeks to provide students with an easy and scalable means to seek information. Its services can also send students ‘nudges’—or reminders—about upcoming deadlines. AdmitHub’s machine learning system has also been designed to learn as it goes. It begins to naturally tailor its responses to each respective student body it serves.

Eliminating ‘Summer Melt’ With Nudges

The company partnered with Georgia State University (GSU) in 2016 to put its chatbot to work. According to a study conducted by independent academic researchers, AdmitHub’s chatbot significantly reduced ‘summer melt.’ This term refers to students who are accepted and indicate they intend to matriculate, but fail to show up for their first day of class. At GSU, this phenomenon was reduced by roughly 30% after implementing AdmitHub.

“AdmitHub’s technology and approach exemplify the thoughtful application of AI to solve the most pressing challenges in education,” said Matt Greenfield, Managing Partner at Rethink Education, in a statement. “Even amidst the turmoil of the past year, artificial intelligence has played a transformative role in institutions’ efforts to communicate quickly and effectively, in ways that improve access and retention at scale.”

Since launching in 2014, the company says it has served over 3 million students. It has contracted with other institutions like Wayne State University, West Texas A&M, and Allegheny College.

“The past year has reinforced the reality that new challenges will always be around the corner for colleges and universities,” said Drew Magliozzi, Co-Founder and CEO of AdmitHub, in a statement. “Partnering in close collaboration with schools around the country, we’re building an empathy engine for higher education that will enable institutions and their students to navigate even the biggest and most unexpected obstacles.”

AdmitHub has announced it will change its name to Mainstay at an undisclosed time in the future.

Correction 2/16/21: A previous version of this article incorrectly named Texas A&M as a partner of AdmitHub. It should have read West Texas A&M.

Featured Image: David Kennedy, Unsplash.

The post AdmitHub Secures $16 MM Series B to Scale AI Chatbot appeared first on eLearningInside News.

At the end of last month, study platform Chegg weathered a hit from the media. The Forbes feature “This $12 Billion Company Is Getting Rich Off Students Cheating Their Way Through Covid” was not favorable. There is a good deal of gray area and nuance when it comes to the question of whether Chegg is helping students cheat. But one point is unambiguous: Chegg is getting rich. The company earned a record $644.3 million last year and raised its guidance for 2021 to $780 million+.

Though thorough, Adams’ reporting does contain blind spots. For example, it makes no mention of Quizlet, another company getting rich enough off student studying to achieve unicorn status. It also ignores the profile of the Chegg user-base and the challenges these students face. According to the company, a full third of its users are first-generation students. Roughly one-third report a family income of under $25,000. 33% work part-time, 11% work full-time, and 28% are over 25.

Stress brought by remote learning has led to a rise in cheating with resources such as #Chegg and #GroupMe, prompting the UC Santa Barbara Office of Student Conduct to respond in a campus-wide email.

— The Bottom Line UCSB (@tblucsb) February 6, 2021

As education consultant Michael Feldstein writes in analysis of the Forbes coverage, “the fact is that students go to Chegg seeking help. They pay for that help, which they believe they need and are not getting from their academic institution. We can choose to be cynical about the companies, and even about the students. Or we can improve academic practices and challenge [CEO Dan] Rosensweig to make his money by providing services that actually help students to learn.”

Chegg Reports a Record 2020 and Raises 2021 Guidance to $780 Million or More

During the company’s Q4 investor call on February 8, Chegg officers announced a record quarter and year. “By any measure, 2020 was our best year as a company,” said CFO Andy Brown. Annual revenue totaled $644.3 million, representing 57% growth compared to 2019. Chegg brought in $205.7 million in Q4 alone—more than the company made in all of 2016.

The vast majority of growth came from Chegg Study, the service that is helping students cheat. The company says it maintained 6.6 million paying subscribers last year.

As a result, Chegg has raised its outlook for 2021. It now expects to earn between $780 million and $790 million this year.

Accusations the Company Is Helping Students Cheat

These reports make Adams’ reporting in Forbes all the more troubling. Her story describes the widespread practice of ‘chegging,’ or using Chegg Study (a $14.95 per month service) to supply answers to homework, assignments, quizzes, or more. For its article, Forbes interviewed over 50 students. All but four of them admitted that Chegg was helping students cheat.

As one University of Florida finance major told Forbes, “If I don’t want to learn the material, I use Chegg to get the answers.”

Another student at the University of Portland said, “I use Chegg to blatantly cheat.”

It needs to be mentioned that Forbes’ article is not scientific or representative of the American student body. To remain anonymous, no student went on the record using their full name.

Who Supplies the Answers?

According to Adams’ characterization, Chegg outsources its Study service to workers in India. Learners can ask a team of 70,000 freelance teachers and academics (according to Forbes) questions. They, in turn, provide students with custom study resources, including step-by-step answers to questions.

this is why I don't even like talking about cheating.
cheating is NOT the problem.
cheating is just a SYMPTOM of the problem.
for analysis of Chegg etc. and how it comes back to lack of institutional support for teachers/teaching, see @mfeldstein67's post: https://t.co/vhc0UPBiZY https://t.co/CxqLhsSJDc pic.twitter.com/nVKwEeSUNk

— Dr. Laura Gibbs (@OnlineCrsLady) February 8, 2021

But as Michael Feldstein points out, this isn’t the only source. Based on dealings with textbook publishers, Feldstein contends that a large body of questions are supplied by the publishers themselves.

“Multiple sources at multiple textbook publishers have told me that their companies licensed the instructor’s edition homework problem answers to Chegg,” Feldstein writes. “My sourcing is not comprehensive enough to assert that all the major publishers did this. But I know for a fact that many of them did. It’s an open secret in the textbook publisher world.”

Cause or Symptom?

In her article, Adams acknowledges that Chegg alone is not to blame for academic dishonesty. To conclude the article, she writes, “It’s unreasonable to lay all the blame for cheating at the feet of Chegg, of course. Human nature is at fault, especially when studying from home makes it much harder to get caught. Constant social media exposure to political leaders who make a virtue out of dishonesty doesn’t help either. But Chegg has weaponized the temptation and is cashing in on students’ worst instincts. Our arsenal of digital tools and global connectivity should be deployed to transform education for the better. Instead, Chegg is using them to outsource cheating to India. That is a tragedy.”

This conclusion ignores the fact that the six-year graduation rate in the U.S. was 62% for the cohort that began learning 2012 (the latest data available). By comparison, roughly one-third of first-generation students drop out after their first three years.

Chegg is reaching these learners. The company may be helping students cheat. But the real tragedy is that, every year, millions of Americans striving for a better life take on debt to enter college, only to leave without a degree.

Featured Image: Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig at Fortune Global Forum 2018. Credit: Fortune Global Forum

Correction 2/9/20: A previous version of this article stated, “Based on dealings with textbook publishers, Feldstein contends that a large body of answers are supplied by the authors themselves.” Textbook publishers–not authors–supply their questions to Chegg.

The post Chegg, Accused of Helping Students Cheat, Reports ‘Best Year’ and Raises 2021 Guidance appeared first on eLearningInside News.

The Chicago startup Upkey announced on Febuary 2 that it had secured a seed funding round worth $2.6 million. The company contracts with companies and institutions to provide their members with career development resources and training. Along with the funding news, Upkey also took the opportunity to say it had signed three significant clients: Purdue University, Southern New Hampshire University, and The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America.

Upkey has demonstrated its ability to do what many other career development providers cannot: gain usage among first-generation learners and students of color. The company also attracted attention last year with recognition as one of LinkedIn’s top startups.

In addition to the funding and new clients, Upkey also unveiled a new user dashboard today that allows learners to track their career progress.

Upkey Provides a Range of Career Development Resources, Training, and Opportunities, Delivered Remotely

The funding round was led by S3 Ventures and joined by Bronze Valley, Lofty Ventures, Tensility Venture Partners. Angel investor and Offers.com founder Steve Schaffer also contributed.

As part of the deal, S3 Ventures partner Charlie Plauche will join Upkey’s board of directors. “There has never been an effective and remote professional development service focused on assisting students from underrepresented communities and schools. The product’s viral growth in such a short time has highlighted a significant gap in the market. We are excited to partner with Upkey to fuel their next stage of growth,” Plauche said in a statement.

https://twitter.com/Hello_Upkey/status/1308415758519742466

Upkey has designed its platform and services to be used by anyone from high school students to young professionals just starting their careers. The startup contracts with companies and institutions to offer its services at no cost to members themselves. Resources include modules to help young professionals build their resumes and prepare for interviews.

More recently, the company has begun to offer a virtual summer internship program. It is comprised of an eight-week course in which learners gain access to professionals to learn more about the work they do and complete projects that can count toward college credit.

Including those announced today, Upkey now counts 62 institutional partners.

Recent Growth and Strong Buy-In from First-Generation Learners

The company says that an incredible 70% of its users are both first generation and ‘minority’ students. Upkey has also demonstrated strong growth. In April of last year, the company announced it had served 15,000 learners in the previous six months.

In the current announcement, CEO and founder Amir Badr comments, “Over the past year, nearly 100,000 students have benefited from Upkey career preparation tools. Our mission is to level the playing field so that every student has the opportunity for support and training to reach their goals while giving organizations access to qualified candidates ready to take on new and varied challenges.”

Upkey says it plans to use the funding to scale services and open a second office in Austin, Texas.

Featured Image: Fineas Anton, Unsplash.

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