Higher Ed Can SupporgBetter Upskilling…

Degrees continue to increase in value, and so too does lifelong learning; today’s rapid acceleration of the knowledge economy guarantees that virtually all professionals will need to pick up additional skills between graduation and retirement.

Most universities have colleges of continuing education, but it’s tough for a single college to compete with third-party platforms that aggregate courses and certificate programs from many institutions. Those platforms, however, dilute the learning environment to a passive experience with little support or engagement— which explains why only 3.13% of their students complete their courses (from an article in Science entitled “The MOOC Pivot” by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Justin Reich and José A. Ruipérez-Valiente).

Further, these platforms keep up to 65% of the tuition revenue and most of the data, unlike online marketplaces in almost every other category, which take from 10-35% of tuition.

The Noodle Learning Platform supports students with counselors and TAs to better reflect a true university environment, creates a social, well supported learning experience, and returns more of tuition to faculty

… for Learners

Good learning starts with a thorough discovery process in which a learner carefully considers which course or programs maps to their life and career goals. Noodle makes this process social, allowing a user to collaborate with colleagues, friends, or family to sift through the available options. We supplement that program-seeker’s efforts, at no fee, with access to automated tools and human counselors to help them think things through.Noodle also makes the course itself more social, and offers better learner support than other platforms, all in an effort to drive completion. Learners are organized into small classes based on experience and location, and given tools to collaborate effectively around the material. And we assign teaching assistants to each class, available to step in with live instruction as needed, whose fee is shared by participating classmates.The result of this social functionality and support? Better, more informed program decisions, a more enjoyable course, and more effective learning.

...for Employers

Employers pay for lifelong learning because it helps make their teams better managers and technologists. When a learner takes the wrong course or certificate program, or doesn’t complete it, this investment is wasted.

Accordingly, Noodle analytics helps employers understand which courses and certificate programs are most popular with employees and which have the highest and lowest completion rates.

...and for Universities

Developed with our partners at D2L, Kaltura, AWS, and other leading providers, the Noodle platform is a better home for your courses and certificate programs, whether they’re simple video-based MOOCs or sophisticated blends of synchronous and asynchronous learning offered for credit.

We provide unparalleled management tools, from our learning content management system to our management platform. And we take a different approach to content: rather than see ourselves as a marketplace, Noodle is a course catalog. Each course entails a unique blend of what it teaches, whom it teaches it to, and how it teaches it. As long as your course is up-to-date and excellent, we will encourage other universities to find their own place to add value. Finally, the platform is inexpensive. Noodle takes between 15 and 35% of tuition, under half of the fees taken by our competitors.

Even if we weren’t more social, better supported, more flexible, more transparent, and less expensive than our competitors, your university would benefit from the existence of a new channel for your content to keep those guys honest. But isn’t it nice to know we are?