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"Online learning platforms are increasingly big business in Africa, as innovators look to tackle the lack of access to and poor quality of education on the continent. Governments and large corporates are getting involved in the space, but there are a number of startups across the continent coming up with exciting ideas and getting funded to bring them to scale. Here are five of the best."

DeveloperAuction has built what they call the "first transparent marketplace for recruitment," allowing engineers to put their talent up for auction from startups that need talent. In the company's first auction, which ended August 31st, 88 engineers put themselves up for auction and 142 startups, including Quora and Dropbox, submitted over $30m in job offers.

"On Tuesday, the publishing powerhouse announced a partnership with Alchemie, an educational app startup that gamifies learning, to develop augmented reality apps for college-level chemistry courses through a National Science Foundation research grant."

"Organizations that pursue strategies like these have what I call the Ecosystem Mindset. All startups have it, while almost no big companies do. It's an understanding that your organization is not a bounded entity, complete unto itself, but part of a wider ecosystem. It comes with an implicit understanding that the solutions to your key challenges are not all inside the building, but are out there - and that you must locate and interact with them to thrive."

"It's been interesting watching this unfold in music, books, newspapers, TV, but nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watching it happen in my own backyard. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup."

Thousands of Idaho students in public, private and charter schools big and small next fall will be able to log into math, physics and history classes provided by the Khan Academy, a growing content provider focused on making free education available to anyone, anywhere. With $1.5 million in startup money from the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation, Khan Academy content will be provided in 47 schools, making Idaho the nation's first proving ground for a statewide implementation of the academy's free educational content and teaching model.

One YC-backed startup is betting that fingerprints and other forms of biometric identification may be the payment method of the future though. Called PayTango, they're partnering with local universities to offer a quick and easy way for students to use their fingerprints to pay instead of credit cards.

"Moot, a startup offering a new take on commenting and forums, is launching today after three and a half years of development with the goal of bringing these key pieces of Internet discussion into the modern era."

"OpenStax College, the year-old Rice University startup that produces free online textbooks, will more than double the number of fields in which it has titles by 2015, the university announced today. A grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation will allow OpenStax College to add to its current offerings in physics and sociology, and its two new biology books and an introductory anatomy text coming out this fall. The new titles will be in precalculus, chemistry, economics, U.S. history, psychology and statistics, Rice said, toward its goal of producing high-quality open-source books in the 25 most-enrolled college courses. OpenStax says its existing two texts have been downloaded more than 70,000 times so far."

"While $199 might cover just a single credit (or much less) at a typical college, the same fee buys a month of unlimited classes at New Charter University, one of two online schools by startup firm UniversityNow. The pricing structure is similar to online college course provider StraighterLine's model, launched in 2008, which charges $99 per month of enrollment, plus $49 per class."

Welcome to the University of Delaware's USEED portal where you can discover student projects that inspire you. These projects represent a variety of disciplines and interests, ranging from communication to engineering - from business startups to service learning. Their one common denominator: all will benefit from your support. To get started, check out the projects listed below.

the rush for institutions to join Coursera isn't just a matter of their recognizing potential for these kinds of classes to reshape higher education. In the midst of all the hype and the hoopla, it's FOMO. The fear of missing out. Indeed as Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng tells Inside Higher Ed, the startup will "probably double its university partnerships at least one more time before it stops recruiting new institutions." So hurry, folks. You don't want to miss out…

But there's a big downside to this Android growth: Severe fragmentation in the Android market means that startups must tune and debug their apps against a whole range of official Android versions, carrier tweaks, internal smartphone hardware, and external screen dimensions. Pundits have warned about this for years, but now the problem has come home to roost.

"If administrators really wanted to improve the quality of any particular online course, they would cut the professor a check and walk away.  No, I'm not talking free money here.  There'd be a call for proposals, and reports at the end to demonstrate that the professors who got the money did what they said they'd do.  All the usual accountability measures.  If the professor needs help making this happen, then they can call the instructional designers rather than the other way around.  If administrators wanted to find a place to fund these checks, they could just cut out all the money going to for-profit Silicon Valley startups rather than the actual educational experience and give it to faculty instead."

"ReCon is designed to raise and discuss current issues to do with research communication in academia and beyond. These issues range from the use of metrics for evaluating research, access to publications, how to share and store data, government policy to how this affects careers and incentives for researchers. ReCon includes speakers from government agencies, academics, publishers, people working in outreach and founders of startups working in the research space."

"Opportunities abound for software designers and developers to create impactful tools for teachers, school leaders, students, and their families. This guide for developers, startups and entrepreneurs addresses key questions about the education ecosystem and highlights critical needs and opportunities to develop digital tools and apps for learning. Crowd-sourced from knowledgeable educators, developers, and researchers who were willing to share what they have learned, this guide is designed to help entrepreneurs apply technology in smart ways to solve persistent problems in education. "

"Haters can keep hating, but the train has left the station. You can either get on board and help streamline its direction, or you can stand in its way and incrementally slow it down as it plows right through you," threatens Segal.

I remembered it this morning when I drove past a Google self-driving car and then again a few minutes later when a Tesla whipped past me and a third time during the same commute when I dictated an email to my mobile phone. Sometimes living in the Bay Area does feel like the living in future. But to Gibson's point, not every region can claim to have self-driving cars on its highways or electric car ownership or smart phone penetration rates as high as the Bay Area. Why not?

"In the case of Breaking Tweets, it was a personal blog that I started for fun on Jan. 31, 2009. I had just witnessed the power of Twitter for news as mainstream media highlighted it covering the Hudson Plane Crash on Jan. 15, 2009 and many (including myself) live tweeted Barack Obama's Inauguration at the National Mall on Jan. 20, 2009."