Thanks to a slew of high-profile startups like Coursera and Udacity, online education may be most associated with MOOCs and other disruptive technologies in higher education.
But corporate training is another area where education technology can come in handy. Just ask Twitter.
On Tuesday, a company blog post by Senior Vice President of Engineering Chris Fry announced that the social media company has acquired open-source training company Marakana to launch a technical training tool called Twitter University. No price for the transaction was given, though Fry noted that the companies have been working together for several months.
"To help our engineers grow, it’s important for them to have access to world-class technical training, along with opportunities to teach the skills they’ve mastered," Fry wrote.
The new program will be for Twitter employees, but Fry said the company wants to release some of the Twitter University content online for anyone to use.
Details on specific educational topics or the structure of the new program are still forthcoming. The company already offers training for engineers on topics ranging from iOS development to distributed systems, in addition to hosting periodic hackathons.
San Francisco-based Marakana's website has been replaced with a message explaining the move to Twitter's engineering division. The message says the company had provided training to 100,000 professional engineers and 3.5 million total users who watched more than 350,000 hours of free online educational videos over the last decade.
As rumors swirl that the San Francisco-based company is gearing up for an IPO, there's also a definite recruiting element to Twitter University.
The program's tag line? "We want Twitter to be the best place in the world for engineers to work."
Read more about the niche education market for online corporate training right here. Read the Business Journal's full coverage of technological upheaval in the education sector here.