Edtech

A free online service that automatically rates and assesses English learners' writing skills without the need for a teacher has been launched at the English Australia conference.

OpenClassrooms, a France-based online learning platform, has secured €6m in funding and has announced plans to expand into the UK and Spain.

The online learning platform has received a $60m investment from Cape Town-based Naspers to fuel its ongoing international expansion and product development.

China-based VIPKID, which connects Chinese children with English teachers for language lessons, has raised $100m in a Series C round of financing.

The Indian government has announced R120bn ($1.8bn) in funding to train 10 million people to meet global skills standards by 2020 through online training at international skills centres.

Infrastructure, teacher training gaps and even irrelevant technology are hindering real expansion of technological solutions to some of education's biggest challenges globally, voiced ed tech leaders at EdTechXEurope this month.

Online language academy, ABA English, has announced a $12m haul of growth capital in a round led by equity company Kennet Partners.

MOOC platform, FutureLearn, which is owned by The Open University, will be offering programmes, compiled of a series of courses, which will count towards academic and professional qualifications, it has announced.

A concern over education agencies selling language school courses "based on what makes us the same, not what makes us different", was a standpoint pitched against a process of standardisation in the Big Debate at the IALC Workshop last week in Leeds and York.

The impact of technological developments on learning environments, skills training and access to education was discussed at the StudyPortals Student of the Future conference this week.

Coursera will offer a Master of Computer Science in Data Science by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from this summer.

Career development continues to be a large motivation for students to enrol in MOOCs, meaning demand for credit certification is growing. In response, a number of providers have introduced fees for a handful of course certifications and assessment services.

The University of the People, the non-profit, tuition-free online university, has received a $1m donation from Fondation Hoffmann that will help it to provide scholarships for Syrian refugees.

Leading MOOC platform Coursera has announced it will begin charging students to submit assignments for grading in certain courses, in its latest move to generate revenue from the thousands of free online courses supported by the platform and created by 120 top universities.

Six universities around the world are developing a MOOC credit transfer system that would enable students to gain credit towards their degrees from online courses at other institutions. The aim of the project is to enable students to gain credit for MOOCs taken at any of the institutions involved to count towards a qualification at their home university.