Home › Partnerships & Acquisitions, July 5, 2019
Partnerships & Acquisitions, July 5, 2019
Cambridge University Press and Cambridge Assessment English (UK), which together provide official preparation materials for Cambridge English Qualifications and International English Language Testing System (high-stakes English language test for higher education admissions and global migration) in June partnered with educational services provider Kaplan Test Prep (New York) to deliver livestreamed and online preparation courses for IELTS. Using official Cambridge IELTS content from Cambridge Assessment English - the producer of the test - the courses provide comprehensive preparation at a time and pace that suits the learner. The livestreamed course begins in July, while the online IELTS preparation course will launch in August. Both are available for enrollment now.
Higher education learning platform provider Top Hat (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) in June partnered with textbook publisher Fountainhead Press (Southlake, TX) to offer high-quality, affordable course materials.
Beginning this fall, Fountainhead Press content will be digitized and include interactive elements and will be delivered on Top Hat's platform. Top Hat is making available access to its in-class engagement solutions, including ability to take attendance, launch polls and discussions, and get real-time feedback on class progress by leveraging students' personal devices.
Plagiarism tools provider Turnitin (Oakland, CA) in recent months has formalized relationships with two open-source providers. Turnitin in June partnered with eThink Education (Baltimore), a provider of fully-managed e-learning solutions including for open-source LMSs like Moodle and Totara, to bring integrated e-learning solutions to academic institutions. With this partnership, Turnitin's similarity checking and feedback tools, are easier to access and incorporate directly into eThink clients' existing LMS workflows. In May, Turnitin partnered with CORE, a service provided by research and development lab The Knowledge Media Institute, a multidisciplinary research and development lab based at The Open University (UK). Using CORE's FastSync service, Turnitin's proprietary web crawler searches through CORE's global database of open access content and metadata—135 million metadata records from over 3,700 data providers and counting—to check for text similarity and help prevent misuse.
Quality Matters (Annapolis, MD), which provides quality assurance in online learning, in June formed a partnership with learning management platform provider Instructure (Salt Lake City). Instructure's Canvas will become the main LMS platform for delivering QM professional development and Instructure will become a member of QM, beginning in 2020.
Two national nonprofit organizations—JFF (Cincinnati), which works to transform the American workforce and education systems, and KnowledgeWorks (Boston), which focuses on personalized learning in the K-12 sector, made a strategic adjustment to their longtime partnership with the transition of the Student-Centered Learning Research Collaborative, a startup initiative incubated by JFF, to KnowledgeWorks, where it is joining the new Impact and Improvement Division focused on building evidence for the practices, supports, and services that provide the most equitable and highest quality personalized education for all students. The transition, begun in April allows the collaborative to focus on learning beyond K-12. JFF associate vice president Rebecca Wolfe and senior research director Eric Toshalis joined KnowledgeWorks as vice president and senior director, respectively, to continue to lead the Research Collaborative work.
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