ONLINE EDUCATION
Businessiwire | May 26, 2023
Battelle has funded a new portfolio of 14 out-of-classroom education programs that build science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills through the latest awards with its Central Ohio STEM Grants. As a nonprofit philanthropic trust, Battelle directs the majority of its giving to STEM-related programming to provide opportunities for students to develop skills to become the next generation of innovators.
"Through this program, Battelle is committing more resources toward empowering our local partners’ ideas to expand access to STEM opportunities for students across Central Ohio,” said Wes Hall, Vice President of Philanthropy and Education. "STEM programs that integrate music, agriculture, entrepreneurship and environmental science will ignite sparks of inspiration for thousands of young minds in our community."
This is the tenth year for these competitive awards with the largest ever total funding awarded: $772,000. Investment in the grant program now totals more than $5.6 million.
Following are descriptions of the winning programs:
Continued Programs
Capital University
Capital University will host 100 middle school females for a day of science experimentation and STEM career and education exploration.
Columbus Fashion Alliance
Columbus Fashion Alliance's High School Fashion Club builds upon the principles of STEM to bolster the academic and career skills of participants through the lens of fashion.
Ohio Soybean Council Foundation
The Ohio Soybean Council will reach 400 students in Central Ohio afterschool/summer programs with agriculture-related entrepreneurship lessons, delivered by trained pre-service educators from Ohio State University.
New Programs
Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Central Ohio
Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Central Ohio will host a Youth Empowerment Institute to provide middle and high school students with the opportunity to participate in eight STEM-focused weekend-based sessions throughout the school year.
Charles Madison Nabrit Memorial Garden
Charles Madison Nabrit Memorial Garden will deliver week-long summer STEM camps and daylong pop-up STEM camps for 115 elementary and middle school students in Northeast Columbus around food injustice.
Clintonville-Beechwood Community Resources Center
The Clintonville-Beechwood Community Resources Center will engage K-5 students with weekly lessons on design, illustration and publishing as children each create a comic book to be shared at a family reading event.
Columbus Association for the Performing Arts (CAPA)
CAPA will offer Bite-Size Science: The Singing Zoologist to students in grades 1-5 from Columbus City Schools and other districts to teach life cycles, habitats and how these interact with larger ecosystems.
Ethiopian Tewahedo Social Services
Ethiopian Tewahedo Social Services will expand educational opportunities for New American students in the community to include programming, coding, using electronics and computers. The program will also and create a miniature working city for the local smart city initiative.
Form5 Prosthetics Inc
Form5 will leverage the organization’s PRE-FAB Workshop to inspire 9-12 graders. Students will explore engineering, design and medical-oriented careers through a team-based program as participants build prosthetic devices for mock recipients.
Friends of the Conservatory
Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens will expand a STEM program to reach thousands of students in underserved communities, where they will learn STEM principles using the conservatory's resources.
Girl Scouts of Ohio’s Heartland Council
Girl Scouts of Ohio’s Heartland Council will launch the Interactive Ecosystem Exploration Project to develop and implement a series of environmental monitoring and tracking systems for girls and to build a better understanding of the natural resources at Camp Ken-Jockety.
Highland Youth Garden
Highland Youth Garden will offer rising 1st-7th grade students the opportunity to immerse themselves in the daily life of a garden, strengthen their STEM learning, deepen their cooking and nutrition skills and participate in healthy play outdoors.
Pyramid Community Development Corporation
Pyramid Community Development’s Ctrl-R program will provide online, in-person and at-home STEAM education to underserved minority students in Linden and its surrounding communities.
TECH CORPS
Unplugged kits from TECH CORPS will excite and empower students on a range of STEM topics ranging from algorithms to virtual reality.
About Battelle
Every day, the people of Battelle apply science and technology to solving what matters most. At major technology centers and national laboratories around the world, Battelle conducts research and development, designs and manufactures products, and delivers critical services for government and commercial customers. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio since its founding in 1929, Battelle serves the national security, health and life sciences, and energy and environmental industries.Battelle conducts research and development, designs and manufactures products, and delivers critical services for government and commercial customers. Battelle serves the national security, health and life sciences, and energy and environmental industries.
Read More
EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY, CORPORATE LEARNING SYSTEMS
Guild Education and Salt Security | March 17, 2023
Salt Security, the leading API security company, today announced that Guild Education, the leader in opportunity creation for America's workforce, has chosen the Salt Security API Protection Platform to secure its growing application programming interface (API) ecosystem. Guild relies on APIs for the exchange of private and sensitive student, employer, and school data across its Career Opportunity Platform. With the Salt platform, Guild gains automatic and continuous API visibility, insights into potential data exposure, and API runtime protection to ensure the safety of its customers' critical data.
"Guild supports workers, companies, and educational organizations to build new career opportunities and address increasing talent shortages. Keeping employee, employer, and school data secure has always been a top priority," said Julie Chickillo, VP, head of security, Guild Education. "The visibility we get with Salt eliminates blindspots, allowing us to better protect the critical and personal information – including employer eligibility updates, student loan reimbursement data, and program applications – being shared via our APIs."
Although Guild looked at other API security solutions, Salt provided the most actionable insights and the most mature platform. Leveraging the robust Salt API security platform, Guild gains:
Discovery of shadow APIs – to ensure a complete and accurate API inventory and understand what unknown APIs might exist that could pose security risks
Attack prevention – the most proven algorithms in API security to pinpoint attacker reconnaissance activity, even drawn out over days and weeks, and stop attackers before they reach their objective
API security testing – to gain vulnerability insights in pre-production, empowering the Guild development team to improve the security posture of its new APIs
The Salt Security platform enables organizations to catalog their APIs, see where they expose sensitive data, detect and block API attackers, scan and test APIs, and provide remediation insights that developers can use to harden APIs and improve the security posture over time. Through its patented API Context Engine (ACE) architecture, the platform can identify the early indicators of an attack, stop attackers from advancing and turn attackers into penetration testers, leading to valuable feedback for security teams to identify and eliminate API vulnerabilities.
About Salt Security
Salt Security protects the APIs that form the core of every modern application. Its patented API Protection Platform is the only API security solution that combines the power of cloud-scale big data and time-tested ML/AI to detect and prevent API attacks. By correlating activities across millions of APIs and users over time, Salt delivers deep context with real-time analysis and continuous insights for API discovery, attack prevention, and shift-left practices. Deployed quickly and seamlessly integrated within existing systems, the Salt platform gives customers immediate value and protection, so they can innovate with confidence and accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. For more information, visit https://salt.security/
About Guild
Guild's Career Opportunity Platform enables forward-thinking employers to invest in their employees, unlocking life-changing opportunities for personal and professional growth through education and learning programs, career development and one-on-one coaching. Guild partners with the nation's largest employers — including Walmart, Chipotle, Discover, Hilton, Macy's, Target and The Walt Disney Company — to create cultures of opportunity that will help them attract and retain top talent, and build the workforce of the future. Using Guild's Career Opportunity Platform full of real-world education and learning programs, employees at those companies can gain the skills, knowledge and guidance they need to build a brighter future for themselves and their families — all without paying for tuition or career services on their own. For more information, visit https://www.guildeducation.com/
Read More
CORPORATE LEARNING SYSTEMS
iMocha | April 13, 2023
iMocha, the world's leading skills intelligence and skills assessment platform launches project-based assessments to its growing portfolio of assessment types. It is built for talent development teams to gather whether employees are skill-fit and ready to be deployed on projects and determine ROI of learning programs.
Today, tech assessments are usually done via single-task coding assessments, whiteboard interviews, and MCQs but that's seldom enough to gauge project-readiness of employees or know the effectiveness of the upskilling programs. Especially for job profiles like front-end developer, back-end developer, full-stack developer, assessments that go beyond algorithms, syntax, and logic are required. iMocha's project-based assessments help talent professionals overcome these challenges and determine skill readiness, including problem-solving skills, domain-specific skills, contextual understanding, and ability to think through a project.
In August 2022, the beta version of iMocha Projects was deployed for iMocha's existing customers that included enterprises and learning platforms. Through the project-based assessments, L&D teams were able to automate time-consuming, manual evaluations that could be subject to bias. Further they also received detailed skills analytics about their employees – which helped in creating accurate and personalized learning paths. Some of the most popular skill sets beta users utilized were ReactJS, Data Science and Machine Learning, Java Spring Boot, MySQL, and more.
Sujit Karpe, CTO and co-founder of iMocha, explained, "This is iMocha's version of capstone projects: we provide the data, the problem statement, and essentially everything required to successfully work on a project. Often, coding assessments fell short in determining real-life skills; they also cannot handle multiple project files like ReactJS, Angular, Jupyter Lab, and more. With iMocha projects, talent development leaders can bridge the gap between experiential learning and hands-on knowledge application by evaluating employees on real-world challenges, similar to what they would be facing on the job."
He continued, "With iMocha Projects, talent leaders will be able to show true value gained via their L&D programs and measure training effectiveness objectively."
About iMocha
iMocha is a skills intelligence and assessment platform that enables talent leaders to make smarter talent decisions with its skills-first insights. 500+ organizations across 70+ countries trust the platform to acquire job-fit talent faster and to measure the ROI from their talent development initiatives. It empowers talent teams with the largest skill library with 2500+ assessments, AI-LogicBox (AI-based pseudo-coding simulator), AI-EnglishPro (AI-powered language analyzer), skill benchmarking, upskilling dashboard, talent analytics, proctoring, fraud detection, and custom assessment consulting, etc.
Read More