Startup Teaches Kids How To Write, Invites Teachers and Students To Join

Most kids use technology for games and music. What about using technology to learn to write, an essential skill to master early in life?

With Cubert’s Cube, entrepreneur Melanie Kusmik is attempting to do just that – teaching kids how to write by harnessing the power of the social web. Years of experience in software development and product management at companies like Quantum, 3Com, Nortel Networks has helped Melanie learn to transform a concept into a business. >>>

Small Companies Storm the Edutech Market; Teachers and Parents Needed To Accelerate Innovation

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: Monarch Media, Santa Cruz, California

Online education and training continue to grow in popularity. It costs less for students to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees online. Employers, too, save money by arranging for employees to take training courses online and on their own time.

Monarch Media has provided e-learning solutions, including online and mobile courses, educational software development, learning management systems, and instructional design for more than 13 years. The Santa Cruz–based company serves a client base across both the private and public sectors. The top target segments are educational publishers, universities, government agencies, nonprofits and corporate training departments, and the company follows a traditional business-to-business approach. Within the educational publishing market, Monarch Media focuses on serving large and mid-sized companies ranging from the largest in the industry, such as Cengage Learning, Elsevier and the National Institutes of Health to specialty publishers like ETR Associates, a provider of specialized public health training materials. Monarch Media also plans to launch new product lines of skills training courses for mobile delivery.

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1M/1M: Online Education Module Of The Curriculum Is Ready

Readers, we have just released the online education module of the 1M/1M premium curriculum. In it, you will find a synthesis of the various trends and opportunities that I see at this point, along with case studies and video lectures. The opportunity is clearly huge in multiple dimensions, and I am convinced that many businesses can and will be built in this segment over this decade.

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: Latitude Learning, Saline, Michigan

Latitude Learning is an open source, performance-driven software as a service (SaaS) learning management system (LMS) designed to assist training firms, middle-market companies, Fortune 1000 enterprises, and non-profit organizations.  >>>

Havoc In The For-Profit University Sector

For-profit educational institutions are under tighter scrutiny with Senate and House committees examining their admission process, which seems to mislead applicants, targets veterans and registers student default rates at least double those of traditional universities. According to a Congressional report released earlier this month, for-profit colleges have high dropout rates, poor results, and high loan default rates. At four of the five for-profit colleges studied by the report, 24% of students defaulted on their loans, compared with the national rate of 7% of students defaulting on government loans in 2008. Another equally disturbing report was released by the Education Trust, which cites statistics detailing poor education scores of for-profit institutions. According to the report, a mere 22% of students earn their degrees in six years in a for-profit college compared with 55% of students in public and 65% in private nonprofit colleges and universities. Apollo Group’s University of Phoenix fared the worst with a mere 9% six-year graduation rate. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Reed Sheard, CIO Of Westmont College (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: What about higher education–specific vendors?

RS: I would put Apple in there. Apple would count as an education-specific vendor.

SM: How so? Do they have specific offerings for higher education?

RS: Every other year, Apple organizes a conference for CIOs in higher education. They have account executives who are focused only on higher education. Apple also has pricing models that are beneficial to the higher education sector. These are some of the things they do, and our Apple user base in higher education in general qualifies them as a vendor. This is a pretty significant shift to the Apple platform across higher education that has created an interesting and creative dynamic. This is an interesting dialogue happening among colleges and universities. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Reed Sheard, CIO Of Westmont College (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: I think when you talk in terms of e-mail or CRM, the basic e-mail or CRM, these are horizontal functionalities. You would definitely have an advantage if you use somebody else’s solution that has been built, tested, and scaled, and something that is scalable on this level has the right kind of support. There is no reason to reinvent that wheel for higher education specific solutions if there is such horizontal functionality available today. >>>