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. >>>

Families: Nurture Entrepreneurs

Of late, graduating from college has been a source of anxiety rather than excitement for many families. Youth unemployment is at 17%. Parents are concerned about their children’s future. Here’s one way parents and families can help: support their children’s entrepreneurial ambitions. >>>

DeVry And Apollo Struggling, With A Few Bright Spots

According to research by Ambient Insight, the global market for online education at schools and businesses is projected to grow from $32.1 billion in 2010 to $50 billion by 2015. Despite rosy projections, tighter government regulations have slowed new student registrations at many for-profit companies. The government restrictions aim to control some of the ways in which for-profit educators have gotten students to sign up for courses. For-profit courses can be very expensive, and some have failed to deliver on their promise of better employment opportunities. Further, student loan default rates are an estimated three times higher for for-profit school loans compared with loans taken by students enrolling in nonprofit schools.

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As Enrollment Declines, Apollo Group And DeVry Look For Expansion Strategies

Driven by the tighter government regulations, declining student enrollments in the for-profit education sector continued to be a cause for concern. A quarter since the gainful employment regulation came into being, new student enrollment has fallen by more than 15% over the year. To help drive growth, the industry’s players are looking out to acquisitions.

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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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Competition In Learning Management Heats Up

In my most recent post on the talent management sector, I said that talent management companies were increasingly leaning toward learning systems. Taleo (NASDAQ:TLEO) acquired Learn.com and another talent management vendor, SumTotal Systems, acquired Learn.com’s rival, GeoLearning. All these acquisitions in the learning space had left SuccessFactors (NASDAQ:SFSF) with no learning partner and forced the company to make its own acquisition in the space. Let’s take a closer look.

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1M/1M: Video Message Based On Recent Talks

I have been giving a lot of talks lately, and interacting with hundreds of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship development leaders around the world. Here is an YouTube video synthesizing some of the core points of these discussions on bootstrapping, positioning, and lean startups:

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.