If you are new to Newlane University, you can be excused for being confused by frequent references to “Teachur”. Your confusion is warranted. This short post aims to clarify the difference between “Newlane University” and “Teachur”, and to explain how the two are related, and hopefully, to resolve your confusion. It’s a brief history lesson. Here goes!
Teachur, Inc. is a Delaware C-Corp, formed Feb. 21, 2017 by Ben Blair and Josh Stanley. “Newlane University” is the DBA designation for Teachur, Inc. This DBA was registered in 2019. Prior to that, “Teachur, Inc.” was the only name of the company, platform, or degree-granting institution. There are still many resources, including orientation videos and documents, that reference ‘Teachur’ as a degree-granting institution. We registered the DBA “Newlane University” in 2019 to better align the name of our degree-granting institution with the expectations and assumptions about our name for students, experts, and others interested in our community.
Today, in practice, “Newlane University” is the name of the degree-granting institution. Accordingly, “Newlane University” appears on student or graduate diplomas, transcripts, etc. Though Teachur, Inc. is the name of the Delaware C-Corp, we also use “Teachur” to refer to our learning platform, including our Learning Management System (LMS) and Mastery Verification System (MVS). In principle, we could license this learning platform to other companies or organizations while continuing to use the platform to support students and other community members of Newlane University. At some point in the future, it may be advisable that we formally separate the platform from the institution, but it does not seem necessary to do so at this point.
When we refer to “Newlane University” we are referring to the degree-granting institution (that is also the DBA designation of Teachur, Inc.). We anticipate that when students earn a degree, or discuss their schooling with others, they would say they earned their degree from Newlane University; or they are working toward a degree from Newlane University. When we refer to “Teachur, Inc.” we are referring to the Delaware C-Corp that was formed in 2017. When we refer to “Teachur” or “The Teachur Platform” we are referring to the learning platform, LMS, and MVS we designed and built to optimize learning and mastery verification in a world with abundantly available instructional resources. A simple way to express how the university relates to the platform is this: Newlane University uses the Teachur platform to organize curriculum, provide instructional resources, and verify student identity and mastery.
Hopefully now when you come across a historical or current reference to Teachur, you’ll panic less, and understand how Newlane University and Teachur relate. Moving forward, we’ll strive to be clear and consistent in our uses of ‘Newlane University’ and ‘Teachur’. And we’ll do our best to update past resources to align with these current uses, but this will take some time, so we’ll appreciate your patience.
