Kortrijk (BE)/ Seattle (WA), February 2020 - Barco, a leading technology company that specializes in visualization and collaboration technology, and Panopto, a leading enterprise video platform provider, have announced a partnership to improve virtual learning and training experiences by connected Barco’s weConnect platform with Panopto’s video platform.

Davos (CH), February 2020 – George Soros has announced that he is creating a new university network to better prepare students for current and future global challenges. He is endowing the network with one billion dollars and asking other philanthropists to contribute. The network, which will operate throughout the world, is named the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and will integrate teaching and research across higher education institutions worldwide. 

Karlsruhe (GER), December 2019 - The TOPORAZ project has achieved success in the renowned Leibniz competition, with the Leibniz Association’s Senate granting its approval of the effort. The world’s cultural heritage that cannot be recreated in reality is to be made available to a broad public on a sustainable basis.

Hannover (GER), October 2019 – Whether single visualisations, videos, podcasts, lecture notes, course material, or entire courses, open educational resources (OER) refers to a highly diverse range of learning tools that meet certain requirements. OER can be lesson materials of any kind, in any medium, published under an open license. They can be shared, modified, reused, adapted to specific teaching and study contexts, and expanded collaboratively, making it a lot easier for learners to gain access to high-quality educational resources and open learning. 

Jeddah (SA), September 2019 - Blackboard has announced that Batterjee Medical College (BMC), the largest specialised private medical college in Saudi Arabia, has selected Blackboard Learn Ultra as the new learning management System (LMS) for more than 2,000 students.

Würzburg (GER), August 2019 - Würzburg students of teacher training who like to try something new can look forward to the coming semesters. They will have the chance to try out ViLeArn, a recently developed social-VR platform targeting virtual embodied teaching, during one of their seminars. ViLeArn allows students to dive into fully equipped virtual teaching environments of flexible layouts that give ample room for various teaching scenarios to try out novel teaching approaches together. The topic of the seminar itself is a perfect fit: It promotes competences in digital media.

St. Louis, MO (USA), May 2019 - Recent findings have provided strong evidence that retrieval based learning is an effective strategy for enhancing knowledge retention and long-term meaningful learning, but it is not a preferred learning strategy for the majority of students. The present research analyzes the application of learning gamification principles in online, open book, multiple choice tests in order to motivate students to engage in repeated retrieval based learning activities.

Mountain View, CA (USA), May 2019 - Coursera, an online learning platform, has announced closing a $103 million investment in a Series E equity round. SEEK Group, a global leader in investing, scaling, and operating online employment and education businesses, led the round, while existing investors Future Fund and NEA also participated in the funding.

Coventry (UK), April 2019 - Coventry University has partnered with Marshall E-Learning, a specialist consultancy for diversity and equality learning, to provide a new online module on Student Bystander Training for higher education institutions across the UK.

Tübingen (GER), April 2019 - Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems develop algorithms that optimize the well- known spaced repetition method used for memorizing educational material. By using optimal spacing time, the learning process becomes as efficient as possible. Their findings were published in the prestigious journal PNAS.