Learning Innovation

Phil Hill, commenting on Desire2Learn's $80 million first-time venture round over at e-Literate, asks: "What does it take to get the attention of the higher education press? Given the significant size of this funding for educational technology, I was surprised to find zero coverage from Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle yesterday."

Apple is now the most valuable company on the planet. It has a market capitalization of $632 billion dollars. A share of Apple stock, bought today, will cost you $675. What follows are some risks are I see for Apple. I think that these risks for Apple have been under-reported, and I offer them not as an argument to sell your Apple stock but perhaps as a counterweight to all the Apple hype.

Basing your tech investment decisions on media coverage is a sure recipe for losing money. By the time the forces that determine whether a tech company thrives or dives make it into the press the smart money has already arrived or left.

According to the Twenty Million Mind Foundation, an organization devoted to the "creation, sharing, and proliferation of more effective and affordable educational content by leveraging disruptive technologies, open educational resources, and new models for collaboration," the increasing cost of textbooks is an important factor in both rising student debt and high dropout rates.

EdSurge announced this week that it closed a $400,000 seed funding round led by the Washington Post Co (owners of Kaplan University) and NewSchools Venture Fund.

E-book textbook rentals sound like an amazing idea. Neither the textbook rental market or the digital textbook concept have brought the price of quality textbooks down as fast as we'd like. But combine digital with rental, and perhaps we've achieved some real disruption.

Have you checked out Boundless yet? The idea is either brilliant or criminal, depending on your perspective.

On Monday August 20th Instructure's cloud based learning management system (LMS) Canvas experienced "slow loads or timeouts on certain pages".