In part one of this mini-series, we looked at online learning in ELT as one of the 5 key EdTech trend identified by Edudemic. In part 2, we look at what are described in the US education system as ‘alternative credentialing platforms’, and see if they have any relevance to ELT.
What the hell is an alternative credentialing platform?
Edudemic recently identified The 5 Biggest Education Technology Trends To Know About.
The 5 trends are:
That’s great, but the angle is very much focussed on US higher education and K-12. So, in this mini-series, let’s have a look at what they mean in the world of ELT.
Online language school Open English has been getting big publicity over the last week following the news that the business has just raised $65m in funding to expand its operation further in its home base of Latin America and also, for the first time, beyond the Americas. This latest round of funding brings total investment to $120m. That’s one of the highest figures in the history of EdTech – and it’s an ELT product aiming to compete head-on with bricks and mortar English language schools and ELT publishers.
The App Annie market index, released today, has tons of interesting stats on the iOS and Google Play app markets: the two platforms are now neck and neck when it comes to downloads, but iOS still dominates in revenue; China is now the second biggest app market; the biggest category by far is still Games; … Read more
A new report from ABI Research predicts that over a million smartwatches will be sold in 2013. Forget (for now) that apart from the Kickstarter phenomenon, Pebble, there aren’t really any available yet. What would really change the landscape would be if Apple’s rumoured iWatch does actually make an appearance. You never know, but it … Read more
Tribal Nova, based in Montreal, create apps and online learning – probably best known for their iLearnWith apps for primary age children. Houghton Mifflin are fully integrating Tribal Nova into their own business as a short-cut to developing digital-first product development expertise, as well as adding a successful product range to their portfolio.
In the week that Livemocha was swallowed up, Busuu has announced that it has now reached 30m users, with a growth rate of 40,000 a day. It’s not clear how of those are active users, though. Their main growth is coming from countries like Brazil, Turkey and Russia – the same group of countries that most ELT publishers see as the source of their own growth.
Beijing local government has invested $500k to trial the introduction of tablets in primary schools, with one device per child. The aim is to replace books with what they are describing as an ‘e-bag’. The first schools have started trailing this Spring. In one school where the tablets are being used for Maths, Chinese and … Read more
Google have launched Course Builder, an open source tool for creating online courses. Course Builder uses the platform Google put together in order to deliver their own course Power Searching With Google – a course which attracted over 150,000 subscribers. It’s pretty rough around the edges, and requires some basic programming skill in order to … Read more
Well, that was quick. Following hot on the heels of the news about their acquisition of Livemocha, Rosetta Stone has just announced that it’s closing all of its remaining kiosks in the US, shedding jobs, and moving to focus purely on online courses and digital downloads. The future is purely digital for them now, as … Read more
A report from IDC shows that sales of ‘smart connected devices’ (PCs, smartphones and tablets) broke through the 1bn barrier in 2012, with Apple and Samsung each taking about 20% of the market. Tablets represented 128m of those devices. This is expected to rise to 190m in 2013, while PC sales are flatlining. The big … Read more
Rosetta Stone has bought Livemocha for $8.5m dollars.
Livemocha has been making waves in the last couple of years with its language learning platform for crowd-sourced and publisher content. Initially providing free online courses to individual students, it’s recently been moving into b2b and the provision of ‘professional’ content sourced through licencing deals with publishers. As such, it represented an intriguing new player in the language learning market, and a rising competitor to established players.
We’ll see what Rosetta Stone does with its new toy.
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