London-Based Edtech startup YouMakr.ai Raises $500K in Pre-Seed Round
YouMakr.ai, a London-based EdTech startup that redefines the study process with a pioneering AI technology that predicts exam questions, has raised $500,000 (€460,000) in a pre-seed round led by prominent investors. With this investment round, the company intends to launch its ground-breaking product and make it accessible to students worldwide. It is poised to influence their learning experience in a significant way positively.
Founded by Abbas Moledina and Rami Akily, YouMakr.ai is committed to innovating the educational landscape with its AI-powered tools for students globally. The startup aims to democratise advanced tech study aids, allowing students to study smarter, not more complex, and enhancing academic success rates. Its product will significantly optimise how students prepare for their exams, allowing them to maximise their success by focusing their efforts strategically.
Speaking about the capital raised, Co-founder & CEO of YouMakr.ai, Rami Akily, said:
YouMakr.ai is on the verge of a revolution. This pre-seed funding and the faith that investors and users have shown in us is a testament to the potential of our AI-driven approach in reshaping exam preparation. We are thrilled to lead this transformation.
The platform’s new offering has already stirred up considerable interest, demonstrated by the organic growth of its user base, surpassing 100,000 registrations without the company spending anything on traditional marketing efforts. By harnessing the power of AI, individuals should be free to produce quality content and claim ownership of their results without discrimination. AI detectors, however, hinder this progress by discouraging users from embracing these advancements.
YouMakr.ai offers a suite of AI tools for students. Its AI-powered private tutor engages, teaches and tests the student bespoke, considering each student’s learning style and speed at a fraction of the cost, making private tutoring available to all.
Moodle added SMOWL as Certified Integration to offer secure assessments
Moodle HQ has added SMOWL – a reliable online proctoring software by Smowltech as a certified integration partner. SMOWL helps educators and trainers monitor and supervise learners during their assessments, ensuring integrity by preventing fraud, and enhancing the user experience.
The integration of SMOWL technology into Moodle makes it possible to configure and manage online proctoring quickly and easily while saving money on travel, infrastructure, and documentation. The software also provides advanced proctoring capabilities, such as continuous monitoring and detection of unauthorised actions, AI, and virtual machine detections.
Ricardo Vea, Founder and CEO of Smowltech, says:
At Smowltech, we are proud to be recognised as a Moodle Certified Integration. Our advanced proctoring solution, SMOWL, seamlessly integrates with Moodle, ensuring secure, fraud-free digital assessments. Our commitment to society drives us to achieve a world with access to quality and sustainable education.
As an open-source platform, Moodle’s social impact aligns perfectly with our mission to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals. Together, we drive academic success and integrity in the digital learning landscape.
Check out more about the SMOWL integration with Moodle on the official page here.
Kids Learning App Kinjo Raises $6.5M in Seed Round to Broaden Its Reach
Kinjo, an educational technology platform focused on improving the value of kids’ screen time, has recently announced that it has raised $6.5M in a seed round led by LiveOak Venture Partners. The investment round also saw participation from other investors, including Silverton Partners, Breyer Capital, and Roble Ventures.
Kinjo, co-founded by EdTech veterans Charles Thornburgh and Laura Malcolm, is an entirely new learning app that combines parents’ goals and children’s interests to level up screen time learning. The software encourages children to play educator-evaluated activities and pays them to take on significant challenges and learn more. It provides a weekly digest for parents that offers insight into the level of challenge in their children’s gameplay, the time they spend, the friends they play with the most, and the skills they are developing.
Speaking about the company, Co-founder & CEO of Kinjo, Charles Thornburgh, said:
As a career education entrepreneur and parent, I know firsthand how hard it is to build educational products that can compete with the games and videos that hold our kids’ attention. At Kinjo, we flipped that model. Instead of trying to drag them away from the platforms they love, we are meeting kids where they are and rewarding them for building skills in the games and media that have already captured their imaginations. Starting with Roblox was an easy choice because of its incredible traction with young learners and its remarkable diversity of experiences. Still, our sights are set on each digital platform our children find most compelling.
The startup’s initial apps, which transform Roblox into a family learning platform, have already supported thousands of youngsters to spend 3X more of their Roblox time on games handpicked by education professionals to provide high cognitive challenges. Kinjo’s next goal is to bring enjoyable learning to the time kids already spend on YouTube, Minecraft, and other popular online platforms.
Adding further about the platform, Co-founder of Kinjo and Head of Product, Laura Malcolm, said:
As a former teacher, I see the importance of agency and choice for kids, who have so little control over their own lives and how they spend their time. By creating truly child-centred products, Kinjo is channelling natural passion and joy to unlock potential and empower children to love – and succeed at – learning.
Propose your Moodle Projects for July-Dec 2023 Project Development Cycle of MUA
Moodle Users Association (MUA) the community arm of Moodle LMS is currently into the July-December 2023 Project Development Cycle. Currently, the cycle is into the Project Proposal phase and you can propose your favorite project before 31 August 2023.
The MUA Project Development Cycle goes through three different phases which includes:
Phase 1 – Project Proposals : Where the projects are proposed by the MUA members followed by preliminary round of voting. After that the project requirements are finalized
Phase 2 – Committee Review : In phase 2 the MUA committee reviews the Project development with Moodle HQ and get the cost estimates.
Phase 3 – Final Voting Cycle: In the final phase the MUA team goes for the final voting cycle.
You can propose any new feature which you would like to see in upcoming Moodle version in the MUA community. Here are the projects proposed till now:
Pune's Kombai raises $4.5M to simplify UI coding with AI
Kombai, a startup that aims to help front-end developers easily convert UI designs to code using AI, has emerged from stealth and announced a $4.5 million in a seed funding round led by Stellaris Venture Partners and Foundation Capital.
Kombai plans to utilize some of its funding to start inbound and to continue investing in research and development, improve its base models and build compatibility with a range of libraries and frameworks used by developer teams.
As technology hardware gets better and faster, there’s a growing demand for better user interfaces in software. Startups and big tech companies alike want to create standout user interfaces. However, front-end developers often find the swift coding of these unique designs challenging. Kombai’s AI model, aimed at addressing this issue, is scheduled for public research release this Wednesday.
Dipanjan Dey, CEO of Kombai told:
The model tries to develop an intuitive understanding of the design . . . and then it starts generating the code. The model could potentially be easily integrated with other design tools, including Adobe XD.
The Palo Alto–incorporated startup, which operates from an office in India’s Pune, was founded by former Mindtickle executives Dipanjan Dey (serving as Kombai CEO) and Abhijit Bhole (CTO) in April 2022 — after over 16 months of groundwork. It uses a collection of deep learning and heuristics models, each designed to tackle a specific aspect of interpreting UI designs and generating code from said interpretation.
Alok Goyal, partner at Stellaris Venture Partners said:
In Kombai’s team, we discovered a rare blend of tech and product expertise needed to solve the problem with a fundamentally new approach. We’re thrilled by the remarkable strides the team has taken in developing the product and the positive developer feedback
While Ashu Garg, partner at Foundation Capital said:
Excellent designer tools like Figma and Adobe XD have emerged in the last decade. But they do not generate meaningful code that can be used by developers. On the other hand, LLM-based tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot are great for generating code suggestions from textual inputs, but they don’t work for UI development. As a result, developers need to manually translate all parts of a UI design into code, which is frustrating and incredibly time-consuming. We believe this presents a huge opportunity that has practically been begging for a solution. That’s why we’re thrilled to partner with the Kombai team in their mission of enabling the world’s 20 million developers to spend more of their time on hard, interesting problems, not mundane CSS
AI-Based Digital Worker Startup 11XAI Raises $2M in Pre-Seed Round
11XAI, a leading AI and automation company that builds best-in-class autonomous digital workers, has raised $2M in a pre-seed round led by Project A Ventures, with participation from No Label Ventures, Tiny Ventures, and Felipe Navio and Mandeep Singh.
The London-based company builds automated digital workers that can be used in lieu of human employees. It has built an AI sales development representative called Alice and plans to create James, focused on automated talent acquisition and Bob, targeting automated human resources work in the upcoming years.
The company aims to create a future where AI tools like the ones it is developing free up more time for human workers rather than replace them. It is targeting both large and small businesses. The firm claims its AI digital workers can integrate with products like Slack, Salesforce and Outlook.
Speaking to TechCrunch, co-founder and CEO Hasan Sukkar believes autonomous agents are the future of the workforce and specifically designed 11xAI to help smaller businesses increase their productivity to better compete with larger companies. He told
Our mission is to help people rise above mundane, repetitive tasks, and that way, we can focus on the more creative and more human-driven tasks
Mila Cramer, a principal at Project A Ventures, said recent AI advancements allowed her and her team to imagine a future with automated end-to-end processes carried out by digital workers. She told:
We are very excited to support 11x in bringing us that future today. Hasan has an incredible, unique level of dedication and conviction, which made us immediately believe that he will do something special.
Send selective, bulk emailing within courses by using the CLAMPMail plugin
Moodle LMS is world’s most popular open source learning management system with more than 370 million users around the world. With more than 2050 plugins in the official plugins repository it offers an unmatchable degree of customization. In this post we will see how you can send emails to selective students right from your Moodle course.
There may be times when as a Moodle teacher you might need to send reminder emails to your students to participate in course and complete the activities. Most of the teachers, send the emails from their official email clients which makes it error prone as you might miss a few students.
By using the CLAMPMail Moodle plugin, you can easily send the email to selected students right within your Moodle course. You can download the CLAMPMail Moodle plugin from the official plugins repository here.
After installing the plugin, you can add the block to any course where you want to send the emails. The block allows you to easily filter out the students based on the roles or groups. You can also add an attachment with the email.
The block also allows you to add signatures, drafts as well as previous emails sent to selected students. You can also prepend the course name in the subject field as well as receive a copy of the email sent.
Overall, the plugin offers a nice additional feature for the Moodle teachers to connect more easily with the students.The plugin is maintained by CLAMP Project which is maintaining the LAE Moodle versions.
What is your feedback about the CLAMPMail Moodle plugin? Please share with us in the comments section below.
Minnesota-Based Creatively Focused Raises $3 Million in Seed Funding
Creatively Focused, an educational technology company dedicated to helping keep special education teachers in the classroom and reducing burnout, has announced that it has raised $3 million in seed funding led by York IE. Mairs & Power Venture Capital, Groove Capital, and Gopher Angels also backed the round.
Creatively Focused, founded by Elizabeth Orme, automates workflows and improves training, education, and professional development for special education teams. The platform works with school districts to empower teachers, paraprofessionals, and administrators to recapture necessary time and create connections in a lively professional community through axis3, its human-centred SaaS platform, personalised services, and a curated resource library. This approach strengthens the resilience of special educators and administrators by providing the essential support needed to stay dedicated to their chosen career path and allocate more time to their core focus – the student.
The Minnesota-based startup intends to use this funding to expand its impact on the national extraordinary education shortage crisis by focusing on teachers’ and paraprofessionals’ learning and development needs as they navigate the daily demands of working in a passionate and highly regulated field. It also intends to expand in public K12 school systems throughout all 50 states, adding to the 1,000+ special educators now sponsored by axis3.
Speaking on the fundraising, Founder & CEO of Creatively Focused, Elizabeth Orme, said:
We’re thrilled to have closed this round with investors who see the great opportunity we have to impact education. Every special educator who chooses this work deserves to feel like it can be their career, and students deserve passionate, committed, and supported educators. This funding positions Creatively Focused to ensure all school districts across the U.S. know there is a solution to increasing the retention and recruitment of these valued educators.
Vice President of Investments & Strategy, York IE, added:
There is a significant retention problem that exists in the educator ecosystem today. Elizabeth and her team are helping bridge this gap with technology and professional development – making these educators’ jobs more sustainable. We envision a world where Creatively Focused powers every classroom.
How to Suspend Users in Bulk via CSV from your Moodle Courses?
Moodle LMS offers one of the best platforms to offer online learning portals. It can be scaled to offer learning for thousands of users. With more enrolled users in your Moodle courses, the responsibility of managing the users accounts increases. In this post we will see what is a Suspended user in Moodle and how you can suspend users in bulk via CSV files from your Moodle courses.
When a student is not expected to participate in your Moodle course, you can remove their access from the courses. By removing their access, they will not be able to access your Moodle course and participate any further. There are two ways to remove a user from your Moodle site:
Suspend a User – Suspending a user will allow future restore of account, if required.
Delete a User – Deleting an account results in user data being permanently deleted. If you wish to retain any data, you should instead suspend the user’s account.
So, now lets see how you can suspend a user in your Moodle course.
How to Suspend a single user
In order to suspend a single user or a few users as a teacher, you can simply follow these steps:
Go to the Course > Participants > Enrolled Users page.
Click the edit icon opposite the user’s name
On the user profile edit page Under Status – tick the ‘Suspended account’ checkbox and Save changes.
But what if you need to suspend multiple users in one go. Now, let’s see how you can suspend multiple users in Moodle course as Moodle administrator.
Here is a screencast explaining the process of Suspending the users:
Suspend users in Bulk via CSV in Moodle course
There are two steps to be followed to suspend multiple users. In the first step you need to create the list of users which needs to be suspended. In the second step you need to modify & upload the csv file and update the status in Moodle.
Step 1: Create the list of users to be suspended
Navigate to Site Administration > Users > Bulk User Actions. Here we can get the list of users by two ways, so lets discuss them one by one:
Adding users manually
You can use the ‘Users in list’ section to manually add the users which needs to be suspended.
Users in List
Select the users which needs to be suspended in left page (You can select multiple users by clicking CTRL or CMD key on your keyboard.
Then click “Add to Selection button”. The users will be then added to the right pane.
Then choose “Download” under with Selected users and click Go.
Save this file as a CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) format.
Using Filters
The other way to select users is to use filters. You can choose from a vide variety of fields to filter out your users.
Moodle filter users
On the same Bulk User Actions page:
Under the New Filter Section, click Show more button.
Select the filters you wish to apply and click on “Add Filter”.
Click on the “Add all” button.
Then “With Selected Users” dropdown, select “Download” and click “Go”.
Save this file as a CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) format.
Step 2 – Modify & upload the CSV file
After getting the list of users which needs to be suspended, you need to modify this csv file. All you need to do is to add a new column in the file and save it.
Suspend Users CSV
Open the file in Excel or LibreOffice Calc or any suitable program.
Add a new column on the extreme right with name “suspended”. Kindly make sure that it is spelt in lowercase without any space.
Add “1” under that column for all users.
Save this file again as a CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited).
Uploading the file in Moodle
Suspend Users
To upload this final file in Moodle, you need to follow these steps:
Navigate to Site Administration > Users > Upload Users page.
Click on “Choose File” and upload the CSV file you just created and click “Upload Users” button.
On the next page, you need to change the following fields:
Upload Type – change it to “update existing users only”.
Allow suspending and activating of accounts – Set this field to Yes
Click Upload Users.
On the next page, you will see the status of the Suspend Users action. Moodle will display the number of users Suspended as well as the number of users skipped.
Click Continue.
This is all about suspending users in bulk via CSV in your Moodle course. In case you are facing problems while suspending users in your Moodle site, please feel free to us know in the comments section below.
Moodle added Videa EdTech as a Moodle Certified Partner in Vietnam
Moodle HQ has added Video Edtech as a Moodle Certified partner in Vietnam. Videa, a dynamic and innovative eLearning solution provider, is set to make a significant impact on the eLearning landscape by leveraging Moodle LMS to provide cutting-edge solutions for online learning and training.
Established in 2019, the company is driven by a team of experts with over 6 to 23 years of practical experience in the international EdTech sector. With Moodle as its core, Videa specializes in open-source technology, delivering a range of innovative solutions, from cloud-based LMS to e-proctoring, learning analytics, content repositories, and more. Videa’s global footprint spans over 20 educational organizations across 12 countries, revolutionizing education through technology.
Joining the Moodle ecosystem means we are better positioned to deliver on our goal of improving education in our world. Videa’s objective is to foster a deep understanding of the Moodle ecosystem in Vietnam and across Southeast Asia. Videa recognises Moodle as more than just a platform; it’s a foundational part of a vast ecosystem. We aim to grow alongside Moodle
With the addition of Videa Tech in the Moodle Certified Partners Network, the overall Moodle partners count has reached to 103 across the globe.
