Osmo, a startup that connects physical games with an iPad experience, has raised a $12 million Series A led by Accel Partners with participation of Upfront Ventures and K9 Ventures. Accel Partners' Rich Wong will join Osmo’s board of directors. Founded in 2013 by former Googlers Pramod Sharma and Jérôme Scholler, Osmo has received over $2 million in pre-orders including those from over 2000 schools. Osmo aims to get children back into playing with physical toys while extending the experience through interacting with an iPad app that delivers the background for the different games. Using its proprietary Reflective Artificial Intelligence technology, Osmo expands the playing field and engages creative thinking and social interaction, allowing any object to interact with the digital device. "Osmo is a natural fit for parents and teachers because it adds a small but powerful layer of technology on top of a platform (the iPad) that children already know and love." states Rich Wong in the press release. Accel Partner has been a leading investor in education technology startups such as Lynda.com, Educreations and Wyzant. Video Links playosmo.com | Twitter

In July 2011, Blackboard announced the release of Blackboard Collaborate™ 11 web conferencing, the first product that combined the best of both Elluminate Live! and Wimba Classroom. Drawing from the best elements of these two long-competing products, it boasted a new, modern interface that represented a tremendous leap forward. However, it also meant that schools using Wimba Classroom faced an upgrade process that was more significant than any upgrade before. Wimba Classroom customers not only had to learn the new user interface, they also had to learn a new administrative system as well. In this presentation at 2012 SLATE Conference, learn how the technology team at Northern Illinois University balanced other technology upgrade initiatives and staffing requirements in order to ensure a smooth-yet-quick upgrade to Blackboard Collaborate, and ultimately, enjoyed a much easier upgrade experience than they anticipated.

One month after participating in Udacity’s $35 million Series C, German media company Bertelsmann takes another step to strengthen its e-learning portfolio as it announced the acquisition of Relias Learning from private equity firm Vista Equity Partners for an amount in the mid-hundreds of millions USD. Created in 2012 through a merger of Essential Learning and Silverchair Learning Systems, Relias Learning offers SaaS solutions for the senior care and health services market. The company has over 4.000 institutional clients with 2 million learners who can chose from a library of over 2.500 online courses. The current CEO Jim Triandiflou will continue to manage the business following the acquisition. The deal is Bertelsmann’s biggest purchase in the U.S. since the acquisition of publisher Random House in 1998 and comes just shortly after the media company acquired the full ownership of Europe’s largest printing and publishing firm Gruner + Jahr earlier this month. Video Links reliaslearning.com

This infographic gives a nice introduction to learning analytics and how they may be used to impact education in the future. An Infographic by Open Colleges

Chinese online English school 51Talk has raised a $55 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital with participation of existing investors Shunwei Capital and DCM. The round brings the total funding raised by 51Talk to over $70 million including a $12 million Series B in December of last year. Founded in 2011, 51Talk has currently 50.000 paid users who are taught by over 2.500 English teachers who are mostly home-based in the Philippines. The company plans to ramp up its staff to over 8.000 teachers by the end of 2015 according to 51Talk’s co-founder and COO Shu Ting. He also estimates that there are between 20 to 30 million people interested in learning English in China alone. Based on the Series C 51Talk will focus on growth and not profit for the next three years according to its other co-founder Huang Jiajia. The funding will be used to upgrade the technology platform, IT infrastructure as well as the core curriculum. Currently 51Talk is targeting adult learners but an expansion into English courses for children and its international expansion are planned among the next steps. The English language learning space in China has heated up significantly over the past couple of months. Besides several sizeable rounds for smaller startups in the space TutorGroup, a direct competitor of 51Talk in the Chinese ESL space, raised more than $100 million in February and March. Links 51talk.com

Skype is now accepting applications for previews of its upcoming Translator feature. Demoed at re/code’s Code conference in May, Skype Translator lets people communicate via VoIP even if they speak different languages. The feature is based on the work of the Microsoft Research team and includes speech-recognition, automatic-translation, and machine-learning technologies. Microsoft acquired Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion. With Skype Translator speech is translated in real time and displayed as scrolling text at the bottom of the call window. During the test period Skype will be supporting translations for Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. People interested in testing the new feature can register via Skype’s website. The feature will only work on PCs, laptops and tablets that run Windows 8.1 for the time being. Video

Amazon.com made a major play for the textbook market with the introduction of Whispercast for Kindle," which could give schools and businesses a simple, scalable online tool for deploying Kindle devices and Kindle content. The technology, from the world’s largest retailer, is designed to provide a single access point to allow users to easily purchase and distribute Kindle books and documents. This would include purposes of education of course, but could also be used for marketing and employee incentive programs. The program isn’t just limited to Kindle ereaders, as it is software-based and could be used with the Apple iPad and iPhone, as well as Android devices, PCs and Macs. More info about Whispercast is at whispercast.amazon.com What are your thoughts about the new Whispercast service? Is it something your school, university, or business will explore? Will this kind of service provide the impetus for "bring your own device" initiatives to become more mainstream in K-12?

As cross-dressing sensation Conchita Wurst belted out her Eurovision Song Contest-winning tune across a room filled with Europe’s hottest tech start-ups, I knew it could only mean one thing: the Europas annual awards evening had officially begun.  From Berlin came Babbel, who have become one of the world’s leading language learning platforms. Used in 190 countries, with over 25 million app downloads to date, they swept to victory in the education category in exuberant style. However Busuu, Babbel’s nearest rival both in market and geography, reached a staggering 50m users this year, proving that Europe has truly emerged as the home of social language learning. Their success certainly paints a sharp contrast to their most notable competitor Livemocha, who faced an arguably disappointing conclusion to their start-up story early last year which despite its 16m users and their $19m in funding, sold for just $8.5m to Rosetta Stone.  Yet Livemocha had been falling behind for a while, and as Busuu and Babbel’s traffic and user base grew strongly, Livemocha’s seemed to stagnate.  In the social language learning market, managing customer acquisition cost is particularly important as it is an especially low margin (CPA to CLTV) model.  Generating viral growth and identifying low cost acquisition channels is therefore key. Mobile had become a key channel in which to do so and while Busuu and Babbel were quick to launch their (good) apps, Livemocha missed this trend. A discounted valuation was inevitable. But acquisition isn’t the only issue social language learning companies have to face.  On a standalone basis, Livemocha seemed to have failed to convert is substantial traffic and user base into revenue and profit, and within this lies a fundamental flaw in social language learning business models - they don’t attract serious language learners. Hobbyist language learners have always actively consumed language learning products, whether to achieve that ever illusive dream of comfortably conversing on a Spanish Holiday with the waiter or perhaps a nostalgic dream of reading Sartre in his native tongue.  These consumers were monetised often the same way; you sell them the dream, then they pay for it upfront, and then the product (historically a book or CD), languishes in the book case after just a few short sessions.  The majority of this consumer group isn’t sufficiently incentivised, or motivated enough to actually engage with the product, hence any company who builds its business model around monetising engagement is going to face an uphill struggle. In emerging markets, learning English is a route to success rather than a hobby. If a taxi driver in Rio ferrying about tourists during the Olympics and the World Cup - has rudimentary English, he will earn more.  Factor in the emergence of the Brazilian middle class, plus rising internet penetration rates, and these markets not only look attractive, but ripe for disruption.  The caveat is, however, that these consumers need insurance.  If they are going to invest both their time and their money, they need a concrete learning outcome which is often still perceived to be only achieved through structured courses in bricks and mortar institutions. Unfortunately, social language learning is broad (all subjects), global (all regions), and free, giving the perception (whether justified or not) of low quality.  Without strong evidence-based product efficacy or brand awareness, they are struggling to win the patronage of these specific users who have a high willingness to pay.  Perhaps investing into adaptive learning and personalising user journeys to improve learning outcomes will help in the future.  Either way, it will be a while before the wider populous is up to speed on these benefits. Two companies however who have managed to successfully engage such users are OpenEnglish in LATAM, and TutorGroup in China. It’s true that both these markets have proved fertile. In China, roughly half of the world’s 1bn language learners will be worth an estimated $21 billion by 2015, whereas in Brazil, the market is thought to already be worth in excess of $2bn. However, these companies have distinctively similar characteristics: they’re both focussed purely on one region, on one subject, and on one high stake user need - to gain competency in English in order to gain a better job and, invariably, a better life.  Both have comparatively inexpensive long term structured courses, focussed on annual subscriptions and the promise of fluency.  Having both raised over $115m, they are putting this money to work differentiating themselves against their offline competitors. And as these new sites start stealing market share, the dominant offline schools are taking the threat seriously.  For instance, Grupo Multi, an offline ELL chain of schools in Brazil (acquired by Pearson early this year for $721m), has actively snapped up several assets to help them compete in the digital ELL market. One such acquisition is EzLearn, who are digitalizing educational content from Wizard (their legacy ELL business) in order to help them compete in the online learning space. What is next for these two players in the English language learning world then?  Securing domestic market share looks most likely.  With an estimated ELL market size of $2bn in Brazil alone and strong competition from EnglishTown, EnglishUp (a Digital Education portfolio company) and Voxy, it is highly likely they will have a domestic battle on their hands first.  With China and LATAM heating up, who will emerge as the European champion awaits to be seen, but the probability of it being Busuu and Babbel is minimal. Their global imperialistic strategy spreads them much too thin in such a large and competitive market. And now with countries such as Turkey and Poland displaying similar characteristics sitting right on our doorstep, I couldn’t help but look round the room, and wonder who here was going to seize this opportunity that was so ripe for the taking. Disclosure: Digital Education is a supporter of EDUKWEST and EDUKWEST Europe. Picture License  Some rights reserved by batintherain

Learn how to use the Whiteboard feature within Blackboard Collaborate to present content in a visual and engaging way during an online Web conferencing session. During this online session I led 10/19/2012 we explored the options within a Blackboard Collaborate session for sharing and annotating content on the Whiteboard, including loading content on the Whiteboard, enabling access for students, drawing and writing, adding images and screen shots, and saving content from the Whiteboard for access offline. For links to archives of other online workshops offered by NIU Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center, visit www.niu.edu/facdev/programs/archives

This week Skype opened up registrations for its upcoming Skype Translator feature which translates speech in real time and displays the translation as captions on the video call. Skype itself markets the feature as a replacement for language learning, albeit as a former language coach I am actually pretty excited about the technology’s potential for language teaching. Back in the days I always made the point that Skype is all you need as a language instructor. Forget virtual classrooms, interactive whiteboards and all that often unreliable software. Using Skype forces both student and teacher to focus on the essentials and its still best-in-class voice quality makes it perfect for language instruction. Along with the mentioned voice quality the chat function plays a major role when teaching a language. As a tutor you are using it (or should be using it) constantly as a note book, providing links, explaining vocabulary and giving written translations in addition to the pronunciation. With Skype Translator language tutors will now be able to even go a step further and offer total immersion, a form of language teaching I personally was never a huge fan of. The idea of total immersion is to teach a student in the target language from day one by only speaking with him or her in let’s say English. With Skype Translator, this concept would make more sense as the student will get a translation right away. Now I know, people shouldn’t use subtitles to learn a language when watching movies but I believe this form of teaching will prove to become hugely popular. The question being of course whether Microsoft is going to licence its technology one day or if language learning startups will be forced to use Skype as their VoIP client. And one doesn’t have to be a visionary to predict that Google will eventually come up with a similar offering for Google Hangouts as they have the technology to integrate in the form of Instant Translate already. Skype Translator will also mean that students will have an even broader choice of global teachers to choose from. Today it is necessary that the instructor also speaks the native language of the student, at least in the lower levels. With instant speech translation and transcription this won’t necessarily be the case anymore, opening up a far bigger pool of teachers (and students) to choose from. Picture License  Some rights reserved by dweekly