!enter image description Company will use open standards to enable degree and non-degree programs.

New York, April 8, 2015 – The Noodle Companies today launched Noodle Partners, a new venture that will bring together great technology and service organizations to help colleges and universities improve learning, raise revenues, and lower costs. Noodle Partners will enable high-quality online degree and certificate programs, as well as hybrid online-classroom programs.

Over the past decade, universities have struggled to create high-quality, authentic online and hybrid learning experiences. Historically, available technologies were clunky and designed for a broadcast model of education, with very little interactive or rich media content. Companies like 2U (founded by The Noodle Companies CEO John Katzman) proved that high quality online education was possible, but building those programs was expensive; companies needed to create their own technology and rich media content, and the endeavors were risky enough to require costly venture capital. As a result, existing enablers ask universities for a majority of tuition revenues and require long-term contracts.

Increasingly, colleges and universities have access to a bevy of excellent new technologies and a growing library of licensed and open educational resources. However, pulling them together to build great online and hybrid programs is massively difficult.

Noodle Partners connects the best education technologists, recruiters, curriculum designers, counselors, and others with a school’s faculty, administration, and systems using a standards-based approach that will save schools millions of dollars and help them avoid mortgaging their futures. Noodle will provide these services at under half of the cost of existing enablers, and require no long-term contract.

“This is not just a pivotal moment for schools," said John Katzman, founder and CEO of The Noodle Companies. “It’s a chance for great providers to access universities directly and simply. Working together, we can transform not only online graduate programs, but non-degree and campus-based programs."

Examples of the Noodle Partners approach can be found in the company’s first two programs, One with NYU and One with USC Rossier. Here, Noodle Partners uses leading edge software, great support services, and the first research-based professional development curriculum for tutors to engage school communities, put income in the hands of students and recent alumni, and fund student scholarships.

About Noodle Partners
Noodle Partners brings together great technology and tech-enabled service organizations to help colleges and universities improve learning, raise revenues, and lower costs. It is a division of The Noodle Companies, LLC. (partners.noodle.com)

About The Noodle Companies
The Noodle Companies, LLC creates and acquires companies with a shared mission—to be a platform making the education marketplace more transparent and efficient—and a shared potential to be valuable, meaningful and defensible. (www.companies.noodle.com)