Updates over Media, Marketing en Publishing
Should college-age students be given more attention by Presidential candidates or are their votes already locked away? Research from UCLA in 2011 showed that 27.6% of surveyed incoming freshmen described themselves as liberal, 20.7% described themselves as conservative, and a full 47.4% identified themselves as ‘middle of the road.’ Does this matter? Yes, because many […]
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Launched in 2010, Austin-based MyEdu set out to help students reduce the cost of earning a college diploma and remove the friction from every aspect of the higher education process, from deciding on the right school to finding post-graduate employment. Since then, the startup has been methodically collecting data from students as well as official academic data from universities to identify patterns that lead to higher costs (and lower retention rates).
Today, MyEdu offers students the ability to view ratings of both professors and courses to help them choose the right fit, along with providing a single place to access to course descriptions, evaluations, schedule planners and degree roadmap and progress dashboard, which allow students to build an academic plan and keep tabs as they advance towards a degree.
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When it comes to conducting research for papers, homework assignments, etc., students primarily turn to the Web for information despite its inherent academic dangers. Naturally, with the diversity of content out there, keeping track of pertinent links and bibliographical data is difficult when jumping from source to source. Citelighter launched in the fall of 2011 to address this problem by creating an academic research platform that helps students save, organize and automatically cite both online and offline content. An Evernote for Education.
Yet, to truly become an indispensable resource, Citelighter wants to move beyond simply being a time-saving feature to become a platform that provides students with easy access to a wealth of credible academic information. So, today, the startup is launching a new product that, thanks to a new partnership with Cengage, brings an archive of millions of academic articles from more than 6,500 sources to students for $10 per month in an effort to make online research a little less painful.
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Studyhall, which launches at TechCrunch Disrupt SF today, is a peer-to-peer platform and network that is built specifically for students. Sorry, teachers, it’s not for you. Yet.
A number of startups have emerged in the last year looking to dethrone the old guards of higher education technology, like Blackboard. Yet, while many educational platforms are limited in what they offer students, focusing instead on building tools for educators and teachers, one startup is taking an alternative (or, in its own words, “populist”) approach.
The startup believes that it can do just as much to benefit the learning process and boost student retention and performance by focusing its efforts on providing them with an educational platform that offers live, interactive studying and sharing.
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With social networking having permeated the way we look for jobs, share photos and music, and discover news, a startup named Lore is on a mission to do the same for higher education, and potentially re-shape the way teachers and students communicate. Formerly known as CourseKit, the Thiel and Founder’s Fund-backed startup is doing that with a platform that is part Facebook and part Blackboard — for courses. In other words, Lore aims to act as a replacement for the infamous course management system with a gradebook, calendar and document uploading (for class assignments), while giving students a social network-style newsfeed for classroom conversations.
However, until now, Lore has been primarily focused on creating functional communities around courses, and students could only join Lore if a teacher invited them. While courses are remaining the central axis of the network, the startup has launched “Lore For Students,” which now lets students join themselves and create academic profiles, follow classmates and professors and join groups (like study sessions or clubs).
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Microsoft is officially launching So.cl, the social networking service it teased back in July. And it turns out, it’s not meant to be Microsoft’s version of Facebook, but a social networking service for students built on top of Facebook. The service is launching out of Microsoft Research’s FUSE Labs division, and is still being dubbed “experimental.”
Today, students at the the University of Washington, Syracuse University, and New York University are being allowed to use the service, with other schools being added in the future.
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