Waterloo's ClevrU Corporation today announced that it has acquired Toronto's NewMindsets Inc., a company founded by two Schulich School of Business professors that has provided educational content and services to 10,000 Schulich students at York University over the past 10 years.
Through the acquisition, ClevrU says it will integrate NewMindsets' e-teaching pedagogy in leadership into its e-teaching platform. The technology will be presented to York as a pilot and then delivered to millions of students worldwide.
"We created NewMindsets so universities and colleges could deliver online education in a meaningful way," says Drs. Gareth Morgan, founder and chairman of NewMindsets. "Now that our pedagogy is being completely integrated into ClevrU's platform, we have the perfect solution to help students learn in a responsive, interactive and user-friendly environment."
"ClevrU is excited to partner with New Mindsets and York University," said Mark Arnason, president and CEO, ClevrU Corporation. "As the online education market matures, universities are looking at superior forms of online and distance learning as new revenue opportunities. ClevrU will provide a solution for educational institutions wishing to develop and deliver effective online courses and effective learning outcomes to students in Canada and internationally."
"Together, we're going to build a marketplace where students can use a flexible, fully-customizable learning system to gain valuable, personalized learning outcomes," he added.
MaRS Innovation, Innovation York, and York University's commercialization office joined forces to develop New Mindsets' commercialization plan. MaRS Innovation arranged an initial introduction between the companies, structured a partnership, and then negotiated the resulting transaction.
"Students expect interactivity in online learning models," Dana Fox, then of ClevrU, said in October regarding the partnership. "They want to ask questions, interact with peers and dig deeper into course topics that interest them. We're excited to collaborate with Jean and Gareth, along with MaRS Innovation and York's commercialization office, to jointly create a solution that will give educational institutions a powerful, personalized solution to capture the online learning sector."
"We were missing a mobile e-teaching platform to support our research and model," Morgan added at the time. "With ClevrU's analytics to examine how students are learning and interacting on a real-time basis, we'll have all the necessary tools to optimize both our pedagogy and their platform for mobile devices, tablets, laptops and computers."