Last Friday, March 1^st, Mendeley co-founder Jan Reichelt went to the London Web Summit to discuss what the future holds in store for Online Education. The panel, which explored the issues behind the explosion of EdTech, also included Chip Paucek (CEO of online degrees start-up 2U), Andrew Ng (Co-Founder of Coursera, a platform for universities to provide free online courses) and Memrise Co-Founder Ed Cooke

Jan talked about how Mendeley’s 2 million users contribute an enormous amount of scientific data to the platform, which then allows developers to build interesting and useful applications on its open API.

There is no doubt that web adoption is increasing, specially within education, accelerated even more by the introduction of new and improved web technologies. Andrew from Coursera, who is a professor at Stanford, told of how through his online course he now routinely reached 100,000 students where before he would be teaching 400.

The panelists agreed that availability, access to, and accreditation of high quality online learning will only increase in future; Online lectures will continue to permeate traditional learning and will free up more and more time for professors to do more interactive and one-to-one learning in class.

Enabling more effective collaboration and communication online was a key theme of the panel, and Jan explained Mendeley’s vision of building a global platform for research collaboration, and helping researcher’s workflow to speed up science.

The panel thought it was important not to focus on platforms for their own sake, but to also make sure they solve real problems and address real needs of institutions as well as individuals; schools embracing the web makes a huge difference. Businesses like 2U and Coursera exist because of their ability to partner with such institutions, and Mendeley’s Institutional Edition has been adopted by some of the world’s leading universities since its launch last year.

You can watch a video of the panel here

There’s been some great news for Mendeley this week. For the second time in our 4-year history, we’ve won a major award at The Europas, considered the Oscars of the European Tech scene.

Mendeley’s founders Jan, Paul, and Victor, who started Mendeley in 2009 in London, were voted the “Best Startup Founders” by The Europas Judges. They were up against high-profile competition from the founders of DataHug, Hailo, Huddle, Mind Candy, Songkick, SoundCloud, TransferWise, Wonga, and Zoopla. Mendeley had already scooped up the “Best Social Innovation Which Benefits Society” award at The Europas in 2009.

“It’s both wonderful and humbling to have won the Best Startup Founders award, especially when nominated alongside some of the most inspiring tech entrepreneurs in Europe. To me, this award is really a recognition of the passionate, creative, and dedicated team we have assembled, and the work we have done together. Thanks also go to our 1,700 Mendeley Advisors and fantastic community of over 2 million users worldwide”, said Victor, our Co-founder and CEO.

We will continue to work on making science more open and collaborative on a global scale, beginning with the recent push towards moving our infrastructure to our Open API. Thank you for your support!

The “social web” has become the nexus of collaboration and discovery, but how supportive are the existing tools at making leads to scientific discovery? Mendeley co-founder, Jan Reichelt, will show Mendeley’s approach to connecting scholars with information and, by doing so, unlocking it. Mendeley is one of the world’s largest research collaboration platforms, with 750,000 researchers and academics and 65 million research papers indexed in Mendeley’s public research catalog.

Audience members can participate by submitting their questions during the webcast.

Join us on Tuesday, February 15 at 10am PST / 1pm EST by pointing your browser to http://webcast.training.apple.com/.

Webcast ID: MacLearning
Passcode: 379625