Keeping its pace of edtech acquisitions, Blackboard announced that the company has acquired Nivel Siete, a Moodle provider based in Colombia. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Founded in 2002, Nivel Siete has over 200 customers reaching over 400.000 learners in Latin America. The company will continue to operate under the Nivel Siete brand. Interestingly, as EDUKWEST reported in July, Blackboard itself might be up for sale for up to $3 billion. WASHINGTON, Aug. 13, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Blackboard today announced the acquisition of Nivel Siete, a leading Moodle provider operating in Latin America. By joining their forces, the two companies will be able to offer more services and solutions to organizations that leverage Moodle, one of the most widely used learning management systems (LMS) in the world, and support a greater number of learners to achieve their educational goals. Nivel Siete offers a variety of learning solutions, hosting, support and consulting services that help organizations succeed in their teaching and learning initiatives, especially those that focus on the use of e-learning for talent management and training. Headquartered in Colombia, the company serves over 200 customers in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. "The addition of Nivel Siete to the Blackboard family testifies to our commitment to open source," said Matthew Small, senior vice president and managing director, international at Blackboard. "We are seeing strong momentum for our open source solutions and in particular for Moodlerooms, with the addition of more than 80 new customers around the world in the last few months and a significant growth in Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Brazil. Our open source solutions play an integral part in our strategy and we will continue to support their growth. I am thrilled to work together with the team at Nivel Siete and improve the educational experience for learners in Latin America." "We are excited to join forces with Blackboard and help learners and organizations be successful," said José Diáz, CEO at Nivel Siete. "By working together with Blackboard we will be able to enhance the range of solutions and services we provide to institutions and businesses across Latin America. The local Moodle community will benefit from this acquisition, as it will open up new opportunities to share knowledge and best practices." Today's announcement marks the latest investment made by Blackboard in open source after the recent acquisitions of Remote-Learner UK and X-Ray Analytics technology. Since officially joining the open source community in 2012, Blackboard has been contributing to Moodle with code, quality assurance, platform integrations and bug fixes. It has also supported many community gatherings across the world. For more information about Blackboard, please visit www.blackboard.com or follow @Blackboard on Twitter. About Blackboard Inc. Blackboard is the world's leading education technology company. We challenge conventional thinking and advance new models of learning in order to reimagine education and make it more accessible, engaging and relevant to the modern day learner and the institutions that serve them. In partnership with our customers and partners in higher education and K-12 as well as corporations and government agencies around the world, our mission is to help every learner achieve their full potential by inspiring a passion for lifelong learning. For more information about Blackboard, follow us on Twitter @Blackboard. Any statements in this press release about future expectations, plans and prospects for Blackboard represent the Company's views as of the date of this press release. Actual results may differ materially as a result of various important factors. The Company anticipates that subsequent events and developments will cause the Company's views to change. However, while the Company may elect to update these statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. SOURCE Blackboard Inc. RELATED LINKS http://www.blackboard.com

Ellucian announced that private equity firms TPG Capital and Leonard Green Partners acquired a majority stake in the higher education SaaS provider from its current owners Hellman & Friedman LLC and JMI Equity. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but sources told Reuters that the deal could value Ellucian around $3.5 billion. The deal is expected to close by the end of this year. Ellucian is based on the assets of Datatel and SunGuard. H&P and JMI acquired Datatel in 2009 for $570 million. In 2012 Datatel acquired SunGuard’s higher education assets for $1.8 billion, renaming the company to Ellucian. Ellucian currently serves 2.400 institutions in 40 countries. Last month the company announced that it will create 50 new jobs in Dublin. Both TPG and H&P have been active in the education technology space in the past months. TPG led lynda.com’s $186 million Series B in January and sold Wikispaces to TSL Education last year. H&P acquired Renaissance Learning for $1.1 billion in March 2014. Further Reading TPG Capital and Leonard Green Partners Agree to Acquire Majority Stake in Ellucian | Press Release Exclusive: TPG close to $3.5 billion deal to buy Ellucian - sources | Reuters

MOOC platform Coursera announced that it has closed part of a Series C round. The first closing totalled $49.5 million led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and joined by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), International Finance Corporation (IFC), and Times Internet (TIL). Coursera expects to add on an additional $10.1 million from GSV Asset Management and Learn Capital, others in a second closing later this fall. With the new investment Coursera will be focusing on international expansion and sees potential growth markets in emerging economies in Latin America, China, and India. Already today three-quarters of platform users come from outside the U.S with China being the largest market with over 1 million registered learners. Beside being a new investor in the platform, Times Internet will also provide marketing, advertising, and strategic support to build awareness for Coursera’s offering in India. Coursera is set to focus on lifelong learners as well as helping learners to advance in their careers and acquire the skills necessary in today’s workforce. According to Coursera it currently offers 1,100 courses, has nearly 15 million learners, half of whom seek to improve their career or livelihood. As a consequence, Coursera intends to more than double its Specialization offerings this fall. Further Reading Coursera Secures $49.5M in Series C Funding to Expand Access to Job-Relevant Learning Opportunities From the World's Best Universities | Marketwired

Blended Learning 2015 Summit Sydney, Australia - Learn how to better utilize existing technology to improve student achievement. Register by end-of-day this Friday August 21, to save $1,100* on your Blended Learning 2015 registration with the Super Early discount. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

A key part of the Seek > Sense > Share framework for PKM is to find new ways to explain things, or add value to existing information. Metaphors help us understand new concepts, as do visuals. When the folks at Venngage asked if they could create an infographic on PKM I saw it as another... Read more »

A look into the world of solar energy shows that small solar panels are becoming very popular in the market. They can be seen everywhere, research on these panels are increasing day by day, and more people are making inquiries about them. So why they are becoming highly sought? The following are the explanations for ...

Brett Spencer, assistant professor and a reference librarian at the Thun Library at Penn State Berks writes, "Many faculty seek to make creative use of films in their teaching, whether in traditional class screenings or through flipped classrooms."Photo: Faculty FocusHowever, there are many obstacles to teaching with videos: the costs and constraints of DVD as a technology; limited DVD collections at some libraries; time involved in creating videos for one’s own classes; the popularized, questionable nature of many videos found on YouTube; the lack of institutional subscriptions to mainstream streaming services; and copyright concerns. Fortunately, in recent years, most campus libraries have subscribed to copyright-licensed and academically oriented streaming video collections such as Kanopy, NBC Learn, Films on Demand, PBS Video Collection, and Swank’s Digital Campus. These "Netflix" of academia offer fantastic functionalities and curated content designed with pedagogy in mind. Here are seven specific ways that library streaming services can enliven traditional teaching with videos, support film projects that you might already be assigning, and make new types of learning experiences possible for your students.1. Link to customized segments while teaching.We have all had the frustrating experience of trying to show specific film segments to a class by fast-forwarding and rewinding back and forth through a whole DVD to find the segments. Today, most library streaming databases offer "create a clip" or "custom segment" features that allow us to select our own segments from a video, embed links to those segments on presentation slides, and jump directly to those segments while teaching. You can even mix and match clips from several different videos about the same controversial topic, like the death penalty, in order to expose students to multiple perspectives and spark debates.Read more... Additional resources  The Teaching ProfessorThe Teaching Professor is the lively, highly informative newsletter with a singular purpose: to provide ideas and insight to educators who are passionate about teaching. A source of cutting-edge information and inspiration for more than 10,000 educators at universities and colleges worldwide.Source: Faculty Focus

Photo: Rob Spahr"There are students who spend their summers on the Jersey Shore doing things that would make Snooki and The Situation proud. But there are also others who spend their free time doing work that could make everyone else proud." reports Rob Spahr, supervising reporter for NJ Advance Media.A baseball statistic simulator was one of the research projects worked on during Monmouth University's School of Science Summer Research Program in 2015. (Rob Spahr | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)Monmouth University culminated its School of Science Summer Research Program on Thursday, with a symposium that showcased the research projects of 96 students from throughout New Jersey, and beyond.The students were chosen from more than 250 applicants from across the country for the 12-week program, during which students work on collaborative research projects under the supervision of Monmouth University faculty. The projects were formulated by faculty members and spanned various disciplines, including biology, chemistry, computer science and software engineering, mathematics, and marine science.Photo: John Tiedemann"What you see here in the diversity of the projects reflects the area of research interests of the faculty in the Monmouth University School of Science," faculty mentor and interim School of Science Dean John Tiedemann said. "These are research projects that they formulated for the summer specifically or as a continuation of their faculty research that is conducted throughout the year."The students, however, are the ones who take it upon themselves to apply for the program every year, Tiedemann said...One of the research projects that you didn't have to be a science enthusiast to find interesting was a computer program that tried to predict the outcome of baseball games.The statistical simulator - which was worked on by the group of Reid Cooper, Philip DiMarco, Mary Menges, Nicholas-Jason Roache, Chengi Zhu, Swethana Gopisetti - used actual batting, pitching and fielding Major League Baseball statistics from the 2014 season to simulate the outcome of games"In order to make everything work you need to use randomness. However, that randomness also has to be weighted based on each player's statistics. Since no two games are going to be alike, we allow the user view previously run simulations so they can go back and see what the are results were," said Cooper, of Medford. "I wouldn't want to see anyone use this right now for gambling, but you could use this for gambling once more mathematics were involved."Read more... Source: NJ.com

Follow on Twitter as @niveknosdunk"How mathematics can lead to better medical imaging." according to Kevin Knudson, professor of mathematics at the University of Florida and writes about mathematics and its applications. Photo: ForbesCT Scans are so common these days that practically everyone has heard of them and has either had one or knows someone who has.  The high resolution images the machine produces are truly remarkable and allow physicians to spot tumors, hemorrhages, and bone trauma, among other maladies.  But I suspect most people don’t know what "CT" stands for (computed tomography), or, if they do, they don’t know what it means.Old-fashioned X-ray images provide useful, but coarse, information about our insides.  The problem is that the rays pass through the body onto the film in such a way that each point on the image is the aggregate of the points in the body lying above it.  Thus, more dense areas of the body appear lighter on the output image.  Sometimes this is good enough-a large light area might correspond to a growth of some kind (a tumor, perhaps).  X-ray images are also great for spotting broken bones.But if your physician wants more detailed information, a CT scan might be warranted.  Tomography is the imaging of an object by cross-sections.  The basic procedure for medical tomography is to shoot X-rays through a thin cross-section of the body.  The machine then computes the amount of energy that comes out the other side along each straight line.  Mathematically, this means that if f(x,y) is the density of the body at the point (x,y) in the cross-section, and if L is the line the X-ray moves along, then the machine is gathering the various line integrals (here, z is the arc length parameter)This is what an X-ray does, too, but instead of a computer gathering the integral data it is a piece of film catching the intensity of the X-ray that reaches it.  What’s more, the lines L make some angle with the horizontal; by varying the angle, we get a collection of such data for each one.  The end result is a function Rf, called the Radon transform of the density function f.  It is a function of two variables, the distance s of L from the origin and the angle α that L makes with the horizontal.Radon_transform.png ‎So what?  Well, the remarkable thing is that the Radon transform can be inverted; that is, if we know the function Rf, we can recover the function f !  This falls into the general area of inverse problems.  The computer attached to the CT machine does this inversion, and the resulting images are then assembled together to give a remarkably accurate representation of the interior of the body.Wow!  Math can save lives.Read more...Source: Forbes

Recently our Sales Director, Richard Cassidy, had the pleasure of presenting at Learning Technologies Summer Forum, which was held at the Olympia, London. This free event is an extension of the very popular Learning Technologies exhibition and conference, which was held in January this year, and gives attendees the chance... Read More