If subjects like “XORing Elephants: Novel Erasure Codes for Big Data” get you all worked up, you’ll dig the “Research Publications At Facebook” site, which collects scientific papers written by Facebook employees and researchers. Ranging from hardcore engineering to the sociology of social networks, the library puts Facebook’s open-sourced knowledge all in one place.

Now, for a site designed to show how smart Mark Zuckerberg’s crew is, I’m dumbfounded that it only offers each research paper in downloadable PDF. Perhaps it wanted to preserve the sanctity of the information. And by that I mean leave the documents in their eye-straining JSTOR academic journal format. Facebook could improve the little library by offering the abstracts upfront so you know what you’re getting into like research.google.com, and highlighting different articles like research.microsoft.com.

Still, between categories like Data Science, Databases and Machine Learning, there is plenty to read. While Facebook can sometimes be a bit aggressive protecting its social graph from both spammers and competitors, it’s quite generous with its tech advancements. It’s given away green data center schematics and energy-efficient server designs through its Open Compute Project.

As for this archive, a few articles I’m excited to dig into include:

Gesundheit! Modeling Contagion through Facebook News Feed

Social network activity and social well-being

The HipHop compiler for PHP – even though I know it’s not going to be about A Tribe Called Quest.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google I/O, the company’s sixth annual developer conference, got officially underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, and it was an eventful day. It took the company every minute of its epic three-hour keynote to unfurl a laundry list of announcements and updates, seemingly across every product category in its arsenal — from Android, Chrome and Search to Maps, Google+ and Hangouts — each with a fresh coat of paint. We even saw the arrival of Google’s very own subscription music service, today, which is already being touted as a potential Spotify killer.

Amidst Larry Page’s triumphant return to the stage (after addressing his much-discussed vocal issues yesterday), Google’s soaring stock price and sexy smartphone demos, it was easy to miss an important announcement concerning Google’s foray into a considerably less sexy market: Education. (And K-12 education, no less.)

Android Engineering Director Chris Yerga took the stage to introduce Google Play for Education, through which Google hopes to extend Play — its application and content marketplace for Android — into the classroom. The new store, which is scheduled to launch this fall, aims to simplify the content discovery process for schools, giving teachers and students access to the same tools that are now native to the Google Play experience.

Teachers will now be able to search for and recommend learning content by category, grade level, and a variety of other criteria, and will have the opportunity to discover content recommended by other educators, for example. What’s more, every piece of content served within its curated portal is pre-approved by educators before being posted, so that teachers can rest easy knowing the recommended content is quality and school-appropriate.

Google has already begun to recruit content partners, with NASA and PBS among those that have already signed on to make their content available to users when the store goes live this fall. Yerga said that the team plans to begin accepting content submissions from developers at some point this summer.

Today, Apple is far and away the de facto leader in the education space, but with its new educational app marketplace, Google is clearly positioning itself such that it can begin to make a real play at challenging that dominance. To that point, the real key to Google’s new product is the fact that it enables administrators to distribute applications to their entire team. If a teacher wants to shoot content to a couple hundred Android devices, they simply have to type in their group’s name and voila, Google will push that sucker out to everyone on the list.

Another important perk for cash-strapped teachers is that the marketplace doesn’t require them to use credit cards to purchase content. Instead, educators have the option to buy apps and content in bulk and charge those purchases to their account. These are important features for educational users, removing a great deal of the friction around acquiring learning content.

Not only that, but, while schools and educators are eager to bring apps and other digital learning tools into their classrooms, it’s critical for them to be able to manage and to bring some oversight to the content distribution process. Plus, the Android Marketplace, er, Google Play, has had a long-standing malware problem, so that extra layer of teacher control can help get schools over the hump.

While the penetration of Apple’s mobile devices into education is significant, when it comes to other hardware, IT departments don’t want to deal with the hassle of networking iDevices. Plus, Apple products are expensive — and especially for bulk orders, schools will want to turn elsewhere.

Where Google can have a real advantage over Apple is in its ability to combine Google Play for Education with Google Appls for Ed. Small businesses have been adopting Google’s productivity software in droves, and the interest has started to grow among school boards who want to introduce tablets into their classrooms and use Google Apps as the standard.

Together these two products can work hand in hand in the classroom, with each becoming more powerful as a result. In turn this could help create the incentive or leverage that it needs to begin attracting new users.

The biggest takeaway: If it weren’t already abundantly clear, Google is no longer just a search company. The company has been exerting tremendous effort to achieve a unification among its products, not only in terms of design, but in the way its products interact with each other. That is best demonstrated by the fact that Google products now touch just about everyone. In a sense, Google is becoming a utility provider — for both consumers and developers — and, in turn, a data company.

While Apple has long been focused most of its attention on design over the years, Google’s focus on utility has allowed it to build a massive infrastructure, collecting data from across a broad range of software products at a nearly unprecedented scale. For me, there’s no better testament to the utility and wide application of Google’s infrastructure than Education.

Naturally, in juxtaposition with sexy new smartphones and mobile technology, streaming music services and re-imagined social networks, Google’s work in Education tends to end up in the backseat. But, for this reason, Google has quietly (and quickly) gained noticeable traction in Education, thanks to the adaptation of its utilities and gadgets, like Google Apps and Chromebooks, to the learning market.

For example, in February, Google announced in February that Chromebooks are now in over 2,000 schools across the U.S. For awhile now, Apple has grabbed most of the attention in the education space thanks to the rapid adoption of iPads among schools and teachers. Furthermore, when we talk about Google having positioned itself as a provider of essential utilities, there’s probably no better than the company’s recent announcement that the entire country of Malaysia — that’s 10 million students, teachers and parents — will use Google Apps for Education as part of the country’s effort to improve its education system.

Through its Google Apps products, Google allows students and teachers to collaborate in realtime through Web apps, while using already-familiar tools like Google search and Gmail. The other part of this is, Google’s cloud, its infrastructure, allows it to operate its software products at scale without the traditionally high costs. For that reason, the company can make its educational products accessible to cash-strapped IT departments, for example.

With infrastructure that allows it to run its software at scale from the cloud, Google’s products become more flexible. That foundation behind it, with Google Apps having found penetration among small businesses, it adapted the suite to address similar productivity and collaboration inefficiencies in education.

Apply that to Google Play and pair it with Google Apps, and you can start to see why EdTech entrepreneurs and investors, when asked what the biggest trends are in education (that no one’s talking about yet), more than a few have said “start paying attention to Google.”

And with the impending arrival of Google Play for Education, if Google can start to get Android tablets into the hands of kids, it looks like they might just be onto something…

Google Developer page here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Parents of preschoolers can finally let go of “iPad guilt” – the term that refers to that terrible feeling you get when you use the iPad as babysitter. Today, a company called Kidaptive is launching one of the most comprehensive feedback systems for parents to date, allowing them to get a hand of their child’s learning and development by simply handing over the iPad and letting their child play.

It’s a shame that despite the wide variety of educational apps out there, too many parents still treat the iPad as a toy, letting kids rot their minds with time-wasting games and goofs, instead of using screen time to learn. But as any kid will tell you, learning is just sooooo boring. That’s why Kidaptive has so much promise – it merges the lean-back experience of watching TV with mini games kids actually think are fun.

The company first launched its “edu-tainment” iPad application called “Leo’s Pad” back in fall 2012. The app was designed by a team that includes CEO P.J. Gunsagar, who also co-founded and served as president of Prana Studios, a 3D visual effects studio with 1,000 employees in L.A. and Mumbai, India; “Chief Learning Officer” Dylan Arena, whose background is in cognitive science, philosophy and statistics, with multiple degrees in all three from Stanford; and Creative Director Dan Danko, who has written for a number of children’s TV shows including “Rugrats,” “Fresh Beat Band,” and PBS’ “Word World.”

The combination of skill sets has paid off. The resulting creation has been a huge hit (well, in our household at least), as well as with over 200,000 parents who have downloaded Leo’s Pad for their children.

Leo’s Pad features the adventures of a young Leonardo da Vinci, his pet dragon, and friends Galileo and Marie, and has children doing puzzles (to build telescopes and rocket ships, e.g.), flying through clouds, identifying colors and shapes, drawing, finding letters in the stars, and much more. The games appear amid high-quality animation that rivals what you would find on TV. Even better, kids don’t seem to realize that they’re learning as they play – as far as they know, they’re just having fun.

Speaking as a parent myself, that’s a combination that’s tougher to find than you might think.

But the iPad babysitter scenario often means that parents don’t know exactly what a child is learning or where they stand. Today, Kidaptive changes that with the debut of what it’s calling “Parent’s Pad,” an in-app, parents-only area that shows their child’s progress in reading comprehension and math skills, as well as in cognitive, emotional and social functions, meaning things like “being patient” or “taking turns,” for example.

In Parent’s Pad, you can see what “appisodes” (as these TV-like apps and games are called) the child has started watching, and what activities they’ve performed so far.

“We took our curriculum framework which is comprehensive – that is to say, it covers everything a child needs to be ready for kindergarten and prepared for learning – and it’s a hierarchy,” explains Arena. ”The structure of the curriculum is that there are high-level categories, and there are children of those categories, all the way down to the dimensions we actually measure,” he says. These learning dimensions are explained and measured in the Parent’s Pad section.

Today Leo’s Pad has released just two of these appisodes that it can measure, but the long-term plan is to release 25 appisodes in total, creating a year’s worth of curriculum with over 80 dimensions of learning. The plan is to have at least 10 more appisodes out this year, with all 25 completed by 2014.

The goal is to not only inform parents of a child’s progress using an easy-to-read, color-coded framework detailing their activities, but also to offer suggestions and tips as to how to help a child in an area where they’re struggling.

For instance, the app might offer a tip to parents whose child doesn’t yet know his or her colors, to begin referring to colors in a specific way when speaking. (e.g. “the chair is blue” instead of “the blue chair,” which research has shown to help a child acquiring color words.)

Longer term, the company might start offering “offline” activities – like a telescope you assemble in real life to accompany the one the child puts together in the app – as an additional revenue stream.

As the child plays the Leo’s Pad apps for longer, their profile becomes more filled out in Kidaptive’s assessment framework, and eventually that sort of thing could be shared with teachers upon the child entering the classroom. Over time, the same framework could be adapted to work with other apps – like those focused on older kids.

Kidaptive isn’t the first company to think of how parents can track a child’s progress in apps. Fingerprint’s “mom-comm” system lets parent and child communicate upon the completion of levels or other achievements in its own “edu-tainment” suite of apps, and other apps like iLearnWith, Stickery, and many more, do something similar.

However, Kidaptive is the most comprehensive system, based on curriculum, which we’ve come across to date. For that reason, it’s enough to assuage a parent’s “iPad guilt”…well, as least temporarily. At some point, you’ll still want to yank that thing from their hands and shout “go play outside.”

But at least the child will have learned something in the meantime.

Kidaptive is seed funded by Menlo Ventures, CrunchFund (disclosure: TechCrunch’s founder Michael Arrington runs CrunchFund), Veddis Ventures, S-Cubed Capital, Krantz Holdings, VKRM Ventures, iCamp, and Prana Holdings, which is also Kidaptive’s animation partner.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Desire2Learn is a 10-plus year old Canadian company that makes learning software — a learning management system to be precise — and here’s why, in spite of that description, it shouldn’t bore you to sleep. In a space that’s traditionally been controlled by bigs like Blackboard and Moodle, Desire2Learn has quietly managed to carve out its own growing share of the market.

Last September, the Waterloo-based company raised a sizable $80 million round from NEA and others, and today has over 700 clients and more than 10 million people across higher education, K-12, healthcare and beyond are using its learning software.

Although the company doesn’t disclose financial information, we’ve heard that its institutional contracts are now translating into millions in revenue, which along with its raise, has allowed it to expand its staff from 600 to over 750 over the last year. In turn, the company has been ramping up its focus on acquiring EdTech talent and is rumored to be planning an IPO in the U.S. at some point down the road.

While Desire2Learn has established a solid base, it’s strategic M&A that can help lead the way forward, fighting off a flattening growth curve and leading to better products. The company has been acquiring with more frequency of late, including two back-to-back in January and March.

Desire2Learn acquired course recommendation engine, Degree Compass in March and is already putting its tech to use to continue expanding its learning platform. This week, the company announced what it called “the biggest update to its Learning Suite to date” — an update in which Degree Compass’ tech plays a central role, not only by expanding its toolset but by potentially changing the way students navigate their academic career.

To do this, Desire2Learn wants to bring predictive analytics into play in education. But why? Well, first and foremost because, today, if students want to figure out whether a course is right for them — or how well they might perform in that course — they’re hard pressed to find a good answer. They can ask fellow students, check websites that rank faculty based on nebulous criteria or try to find surveys, but none of these options are ideal.

With its new analytics engine, Desire2Learn aims to change that by giving students the ability to predict their success in a particular course based on what they’ve studied in the past and how they performed in those classes. The new, so-called “Student Success System,” was built (in part) from the technology it acquired from Degree Compass; however, while Degree Compass used predictive analytics to help students optimize their course selection, the new product aims to help both sides of the learning equation: Students and teachers.

On the teacher side, Desire2Learn’s new analytics engine allows them to view predictive data visualizations that compare student performance against their peers so that they can identify at-risk students, for example, and monitor a student’s progress over time.

The idea is to give teachers access to important insight on stuff like class dynamics and learning trends, which they can then combine with assessment data, to improve their instruction or adapt to the way individual students learn. In theory, this leads not only to higher engagement, but also better outcomes.

For students, they use Desire2Learn as they normally would, using it to view course materials, take quizzes, submit homework and chat with their peers. The platform then collects and analyzes each student’s personal data and, by drawing from a wider set of inputs, the engine can more accurately predict which classes students will perform best in and what their grades will be.

The system is currently operating at about 90 percent accuracy when it comes to predicting performance by letter grades, CEO John Baker tells us — a number which should improve as the engine accumulates more data, he says.

In addition to its predictive analytics, Desire2Learn is also making some significant updates to its mobile app, including new integrations with Dropbox and SkyDrive to allow students to engage with learning resources in the same way they do outside the classroom. What’s more, Desire2Learn is moving into Patbrite’s territory through ePortfolio and its new tool which allows students to build portfolios based on their in-school projects, grades and achievements in a way that’s applicable to life after school and finding a job.

Essentially, the tool allows students to move their academic resume to the cloud so they can take it with them after they graduate, which the company is incentivizing by offering 2GB of free storage.

Basically, what we’ve come to realize, the Desire2Learn CEO tells me, is that the company’s initial approach to business (or academic) intelligence was off track. “Students and teachers don’t necessarily want more data, they want more insight and they want that data broken out in a way that they can understand and helps them more quickly visualize the learning map,” he says.

When I asked if building and adding more and more tools and features would dilute the experience and result in feature overload, Baker said that the company doesn’t want to build a million different tools. Instead, it wants to become a platform that supports a million tools and allows third-parties that specialize in particular areas of education to help develop better products.

Through open-sourcing its APIs, Desire2Learn along with Edmodo and an increasing number of education startups are beginning to tap into the potential inherent to the creation of a real ecosystem. Adding predictive analytics tools gives Desire2Learn another carrot with which they hope to be able to draw both teachers, students and development partners into its ecosystem.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google has become the king of maps because of the technology that it has developed over the past eight years. One competitor, OpenStreetMap, has developed its own tools and built a community of map enthusiasts that now powers services like Hipmunk, Evernote and Foursquare. Today, as promised, the company has released a brand new map editor, code-named “iD,” which was built from the ground up by MapBox.

The editor will allow its community, and those who have never edited a map before, to plot out roads, landmarks and everything in between. I’ve had a chance to play with the editor over the past few weeks, and it’s amazing. Google has its own community tool, dubbed Map Maker, which helps the company get into the nooks and crannies of the world that it hasn’t gotten to yet.

Now that OpenStreetMap has its own set of tools which makes map editing easy, I expect the service to ramp up the quality of its maps, making it a real alternative for apps and services looking for a service provider. Here’s what OpenStreetMap US Foundation Secretary, Alex Barth, had to say about the release of the editor:

Starting today 1 million community mappers gain access to this new editor. It radically flattens the learning curve for existing users and for the two thousand new ones OpenStreetMap adds every day. Investing in core infrastructure like this is a game changer for OpenStreetMap and legacy proprietary data companies won’t be able to keep up with the combination of top notch editing experience and openly licensed database. In short, we will get more people adding more data, faster.

Adding and changing roads in an existing map is as simple as dragging and dropping, using iD:

The editor itself is open source and built in pure JavaScript with the d3 visualization library. As MapBox has been building the tool, its had involvement from coders around the world already:

The editing tool below, which has been what OpenStreetMap has had for its community to use, was not so easy to get the hang of:

MapBox CEO, Eric Gunderson, thinks that that the iD editor will kickstart the community, which will lead to more content: “This editor is so easy to use, anyone can start mapping in minutes. This is going to increase both data quality and quantity in OpenStreetMap and that means MapBox is going to have the best map in the world.”

The “best map in the world” would mean that it surpasses both the quality and breadth of Google’s offering. That’s no small feat, but we’ve seen open source products in the past reach millions…just ask WordPress.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The team at Siminars has developed what they call an “online platform with all the tools you need to build, publish and distribute highly effective courses.”

It means that rather than just using a written text to teach a concept, Siminars’ web platform lets a teacher of a subject tie together many different media types into one unified experience that steps a user through the learning process in an organized fashion.

The subject could be anything from an academic concept or a training procedure. The platform allows the teacher to create a series of steps to teach the concept that includes everything from reading text, to watching videos, to completing projects away from the computer and more.

To be clear, Siminars doesn’t seem to deliver anything that couldn’t be accomplished with multiple tools like Powerpoint, and various web quizes, but the concept here is that they bring it all into one platform so it is easy to use to teach and learn. It’s a one-stop-shop, so to speak.

Recently the startup inked a deal with Deepak Chopra (who happens to be a relative of one of the founders) to republish one of his books in this new learning format.

In terms of monetization, Siminars has three different models: Open, Retail and Private. The Open model is totally free. Anyone who wants to teach something for free can do so with the platform.

However, if a teacher decides they want to comercialize their content, then they can sign up for the Retail program where Siminars takes 20 percent of each content purchase. The private model is yet another model where a company may want to offer internal training to small teams or to an entire enterprise. It’s a tiered model based on the number of users.

In general, this seems to be a valid approach and holistic way to streamline teaching subject matter. I could see how there could be appeal for businesses and educational institutions. The only hang-up I could see in the primary/secondary educational route would be maintenence of a pricing scheme that fits in with tight educational budgets.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While some institutions of higher learning have grown skeptical of the MOOC phenomenon spreading through its ranks (and the startups responsible), you have to give Coursera credit for keeping its foot on the gas. In less than six months, the MOOC startup has taken meaningful steps towards monetization and toward becoming a legitimate MOOC university, adding career services, verified certificates for a fee, courses for credit, along with teh addition of 29 new institutions (to bring its total to 62).

With how quickly the MOOC universe is expanding, Coursera is now positioning itself to be the first to bring the MOOC model into K-12 market. It had to figure it was only a matter of time. But, rather than bring online courses directly to kids, Coursera is starting with teachers and filling a gap in its curricular coverage in doing so. Today, the Stanford-born startup announced that, beginning this summer, it will make teacher development courses available for free on its platform.

To do so, Coursera is partnering with another set of institutions, but this time it’s focusing on those with established professional development programs, like University of Washington’s College of Education, the Curry School of Education at UVA, Johns Hopkins University School; of Education, Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development, and the Relay Graduate School of Education, to name a few.

Alongside its seven new educational partners, it’s also teaming up with more recreational institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Exploratorium, the American Museum of Natural History and New Teacher Center. In other words, not only is Coursera expanding its course catalog to include the fundamentals of teacher up training and development, but it will also be allowing teachers to dive into more specific instructional topics, like “Integrating Engineering Into Your Science Classroom.”

As one can see from its new course list, the platform now allows teachers to explore a wider variety of EdTech-related topics, to learn how to better incorporate technology, engineering and the humanities into their classrooms.

EdSurge also reports that the new training and development content are expected to be made available to teachers and institutions at a lower cost than what its general ed partners are paying, which usually run from $10K to $50K.

What’s more Coursera, reportedly plans to offer certificates of accomplishment for instructors who complete the courses. EdSurge speculates that the reason for the difference in cost is likely due to the fact that the courses will be offered in shorter durations (three to four weeks) than its traditional content.

As mentioned, this partnership represents Coursera’s first foray into early childhood and K-12 education (and one of the first among the most popular MOOC players) and the first time it has partnered with non-degree-bearing institutions to help make their content available across the globe.

Like its current model, the new courses will feature video lectures, supplemental materials, peer forums and a few other interactive features. But, perhaps most important to the big picture, is that it opens up the potential for schools and districts to integrate this content into their own professional training and development programs, blended learning-style.

While Coursera says that it doesn’t have anything in the works, the new professional development program seems to set the table for its future expansion into the world of K-12. It wouldn’t be a huge stretch for the platform to begin partnering with top high school and grade schools around the country to bring its MOOC education to younger generations. Especially considering that many high school students already use its content to prepare for college.

Given its rapid expansion, this affords Coursera the opportunity to sit back and survey the space, and make that move when and if it becomes necessary or advantageous to do so. It’s easy to take the view that Coursera is over-extending itself by operating in so many different capacities at once, but putting itself within striking distance without taking the plunge seems like a smart play.

Find Coursera’s announcement here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Matygo emerged out of Vancouver’s GrowLab accelerator in late 2011 to take advantage of the growing popularity of the “flipped classroom” philosophy in education, which, as Knewton describes it, seeks to invert traditional methods of teaching by delivering instruction online (through videos, etc.) outside of class, while moving homework into the classroom. Khan Academy is one of many examples of how startups are applying the flipped classroom model to improve the learning process.

Initially, the startup focused on developing a cloud-based learning management system (LMS), along with providing free, online courses to let anyone learn how to code, for example, along with classroom collaboration tools. However, as it goes in the burgeoning EdTech space, the startup’s learning platform never quite hit its stride, struggling to reach scale and profitability amidst slim margins.

Instead, after pulling back and delving into months of research, the startup identified three areas in which EdTech businesses are finding success: They help get internal teams up to speed, create customer evangelists, and they improve partner channel revenue through sales and product training. In November, Matygo rebranded as Learndot, focusing instead on bringing universities to businesses and the enterprise.

In other words, Learndot is building a training and certification platform for businesses that enables anyone within an organization to build courses, certify customers, educate partners and get employees up to speed, from the cloud. Learndot launched its new platform in beta in November, and were quickly overwhelmed by the response, receiving hundreds of trial requests within the first few months.

The startup wasn’t ready for the response, Learndot founder Paul Roland Lambert tells us, and they had to turn people away, as it initially took the startup nearly a week to set up a single trial manually. Now, with customers like Get Satisfaction, Clio and Zirtual on board, Learndot is officially coming out of restricted beta and opening its platform to the public.

In its newest form, Learndot is focused on providing enterprise clients with a results-centric education platform, in an attempt to improve training outcomes and to streamline the learning process, while allowing organizations to emphasize great content rather than simply prioritizing compliance.

Traditionally, business leaders and organizations have looked at training as a checkmark they need for compliance, which has led to corporate education taking a backseat on a company’s list of priorities. Recently, however, this mindset has begun to change as organizations realize that education can be used to deliver long-term results and give them a competitive advantage.

“We believe all organizations will benefit by nurturing a culture of learning, but people-powered businesses of all sizes see the greatest impact,” Lambert told Cantech this month. “This includes most service-based businesses, retailers, sales teams, or any industry where employee retention is a key metric.”

So, in essence Learndot is combining a course-creation tool a la Udemy with a platform for delivery, quizzing and analytics. Together, it allows anyone to create learning content and makes it easy to start small, test ideas with a few people, iterate and add as they go.

The idea is to offer a product that doesn’t require you to be an expert on workplace learning or training to build an awesome course. And, by providing easy access to analytics and data on employee performance within these courses, Learndot wants to make it easy for businesses to customize learning content, resulting in courses that are both more effective and aren’t excruciatingly boring.

This week, as part of exiting private beta, Learndot is launching Web signup so that anyone can sign up to use its SaaS tools mentioned above, beginning with a 14-day free trial. In addition, Learndot is adding a “forever free” plan, which provides access for up to five learners at no charge, in an effort to allow teams that want to test and evaluate Learndot do so without worrying about an expiration date. For organizations with up to 50 employees, Learndot offers a “Team” package that starts at $250, and a business plan for up to 150 employees at $500.

Through its new pricing scheme and re-organization, Learndot hopes to significantly lower the friction around testing out its product, while allowing small teams to use the platform for free. Startups helpin’ startups.

For more, find Learndot at home here or sign up here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’ve spent the last two days playing a lot of Battlefield 3. With my feet. For science.

The Stinky controller is an aptly named PC peripheral that’s currently looking for funds through Kickstarter. Simply put, it emulates a number pad. It’s like a giant controller for your feet. And after rewiring my brain, I’m pleased to report this thing could change PC gaming. It works well as long as you can get past the learning curve.

I’ve played a few minutes of a first person shooter nearly every day for the last 15 years. That sad fact has resulted in a lot of muscle memory. My brain has effectively mapped my fingers to the appropriate keys. It knows to move my pinkie down to the control button to make my guy crouch. The pointer finger moves to the R key for reloading. And so. The Stinky controller attempts to free up your fingers.

Your foot rests on the large 4-way controller. Each direction is a key press. Use one foot or two. Right now, while my brain is still trying to get used to the thing, I’m only using my left foot for two buttons. Toes down results in throwing a grenade and heel down for crouching.

Like previously stated, there’s a learning curve. It takes some time for these motions to become natural enough to be efficient. I went through several keybindings before I settled on these two actions.

Think about it: Your feet are just resting there, nearly useless as your fingers do all the work. The Stinky controller is not attempting to do everything, just a couple of common actions. I found it usefully in first person shooters and I imagine it would be helpful in other genres as well.

The controller does not have ramping actions, though. It’s an on-or-off situation. Sorry, flight simulator fans. This won’t work well as a flight pedal controller.

Part of the beauty is also a downfall. The controller doesn’t have a Windows application. It just emulates a number pad. This makes it really easy to map the actions in games since it doesn’t require syncing with a separate program, but you can’t easily program macros for use outside of a game.

The company behind the Stinky controller is looking for $75,000 of pre-orders through Kickstarter. As of this post’s writing, the project has 15 days left with $46,000 pledged. An $89 pledge buys a game controller. Or, if you want it quicker, give the project $129 for expedited production and shipping.

The Stinky is potentially just a novelty. I’m not sure if it has earned a permanent spot under my desk. However, I’m integrated enough to keep using it and even take it to my next LAN party if for nothing other than shits and giggles. The other side is that it could be a gamechanger for some gamers. Either someone with disabilities or the person looking for something new. If nothing else the Stinky is a clever take on gaming.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Props are owed to companies like Blackboard and Moodle for being early movers in the educational software space, particularly in helping catalyze innovation in learning management systems (LMS). The problem is, of course, they began over a decade ago and there haven’t exactly been a flurry of raving reviews since. The Salt Lake City-based Instructure launched Canvas in 2011 to give colleges and universities an alternative.

Like Moodle, Instructure designed Canvas to be open source to let third-parties contribute to create more rapid development and bug fixes, while going one step further by avoiding Flash, offering a mobile product, APIs and scalable hosting. But the problem is that EdTech has yet to become an ecosystem, CEO Josh Coates says, and integrations and APIs are few and far between.

Meanwhile, schools want to know what learning tools are out there, but they don’t want to do the work themselves. So, Instructure is today announcing Canvas App Center — an app library build into its LMS that allows teachers, administrators and students to install third-party apps with one click. Instructure’s independent open apps site is available today, and offers 100 apps, including WordPress, Khan Academy, Dropbox and Evernote. But the company will release the final product — an app center that is actually built into Canvas — in June.

The apps are free to install, though some may require a subscription with the publisher or vendor, but Instructure won’t be brokering that relationship in any way — or taking a commission, Coates says. The company designed its new App Center to help teachers and students personalize the learning experience, providing an easy way to find, install, rate and review apps. The other nifty feature of the App Center is that includes an algorithm that recommends apps based on user preference, the institution and their previous activity.

Today, more than five million teachers and students at over 350 institutions use Canvas as their LMS, which immediately provides scale to the App Center and gives those third-parties a whole new distribution system and potential audience. They also have to be compelled by the fact that Instructure won’t be taking commissions on App Center installs — as will schools. The less teachers and schools have to worry about pricing and cost, the less friction there is, the more installs.

Business-wise, it may not seem like the best strategy, but Coates says that Instructure is focused on building an educational platform — not a one-dimensional product, but a service that includes integrations, APIs, a community and an ecosystem. That’s why the company has made its open library LTI extensions available to the public — now any third-party can add apps to the open resource which should work in most learning management systems.

How many other educational software providers can say that? Not many. InBloom is trying to do this for educational data, but they’re a non-profit, almost a consortium of public/private/startup interests. Not only is it unusual to see a for-profit company take the high road like this (a wink to Google), I think most would agree that it’s the right move for education — in that it helps the sytem take steps toward becoming an ecosystem. That is, if all parties involved in education could ever make a decision collectively, beyond “we need more money and teachers and maybe technology” or “you need to help my child.”

A perfect example: Here’s open educational data initiative InBloom. Here’s a description of people/parents not even being able to agree on InBloom. Yes, startups, someone in education will fight you and the medicine you’re trying to put down its throat. Smile and do it anyway.

“We want to tear down the walled garden that has plagued the LMS market,” Instructure co-founder and CPO Brian Whitmer said. “Third party integrations have existed, but they’ve required the IT
department to make them work. With Canvas App Center, we want to let anyone install an app with one click and begin personalizing their learning experience with these tools.”

I’m sure someone will find a reason to object, though. Because, hey, no good deed goes unpunished. Especially in education.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch