Mark November 2013 as the first crack of the current 2011-2013 EdTech Hype Bubble.  In the same 30 day span that saw Chegg chip away at its eggshell with an amended S-1 filing in its eventual emergence as a public company, Chegg’s co-founder Osman Rashid was dismissed from his follow-up act Kno as its financial investors turned it over to strategic investor Intel for “pennies on the dollar”.  This now brings to three the number of casualties amongst the current, over-hyped Silicon Valley EdTech Darlings. 
Regular correspondents of Educated Ventures will be familiar with my highlighting of the “Seven Sisters” of EdTech (originally just “Five Horseman” before the addition of two MOOCs), but for new readers, there are seven start-ups which have each raised capital from at least two of the top decile returning venture funds: Grockit (Benchmark / Atlas); Knewton (Accel / Bessemer); 2U (Bessemer / Highland / Redpoint); Edmodo (Benchmark / Greylock / NEA); Altius Education (Charles River Ventures / Spark); Coursera (KPCB / NEA); and Udacity (CRV / Andressen). More...

By Lauren Hepler. If an online course doesn't get you college credit, why watch video lectures and complete Web assignments? 
Perhaps showing off to potential employers could create that incentive. A new partnership between LinkedIn and some of the most-hyped companies in education technology suggests that providers of Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, are seeking to establish online courses as valid professional credentials that people can tout on their LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn announced the new "Direct-to-Profile Certifications" pilot program in a blog post today. Organizations participating in the program include: MOOC startups Coursera, Udacity and Udemy; Harvard and MIT-backed nonprofit MOOC provider edX; publishing giant Pearson; e-learning companies Lynda.com and Skillsoft. More...

The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas [es], with the support of Google [es], will be offering a free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in Spanish for journalists and student interested in learning about creating new online projects and generating audiences and revenue.

Have you considered running a Massive Open Online Course or as it’s commonly called, a MOOC? I’ve been involved in MOOCs since 2007.  I started with Muvenation, an 18-month MOOC for educators on how to create courses in Second Life. I then went on to join George Siemens and Stephen Downes for the Connectivism & Connective Knowledge or CCK08, the first official MOOC in the world. 
I started organizing my own MOOCs in 2013 with the first Moodle MOOC in the world in June 2013 on WizIQ and the second one in October 2013. I also helped facilitate the first ELT Vocabulary MOOC led by Jason R. Levine with Sylvia Guinan on WizIQ.  MOOCs are now organized by universities worldwide. The platforms may vary, but MOOCs are open to anyone who wants to learn for free. More...

By Michal Clements. MOOCs have emerged as a disruptive force in  ‘traditional’ higher education.  A MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course allowing unlimited student enrollment through the internet. Coursera is one leading provider, encouraging participants to, “Take the world’s best courses, online, for free.” 
In a meetup held at Northwestern University on October 17th, four of the major functions of universities were identified: education, credentialing, socialization and research. The conversation touched on how MOOCs may be unbundling some of these roles by offering education and credentialing, while clearly not addressing others, i.e., research and socialization. More...