The companies did not disclose the size of the round but Fortune reported that it was Shmoop’s first venture capital raise.

Launched in 2007, Shmoop was founded by long-time Silicon Valley executives and “power couple” David and Ellen Siminoff. David Siminoff was an executive with investment group Capital Group and Spark Networks before briefly becoming a partner at Venrock. Ellen Siminoff was an early executive at Yahoo and now sits on the boards of Zynga and the Mozilla Corporation.

Shmoop says its teen-friendly content is created by subject-matter experts from top PhD and masters programs and that its guides come with a “point of view.”

“We want to school you,” the site tells students. “So you don’t get schooled.”

Since launching, the startup says it’s grown to attract seven million unique visitors each month and offers more than 7,000 titles across the web and multiple mobile platforms. David Siminoff told Fortune that, prior to this round, the startup had been funded with about $10 million and that the only outside investor was retired Capital Group manager Gordon Crawford. It’s generated revenue from course-material licenses and online advertising, he added.

In addition to the funding, Shmoop announced a long-term partnership with AKAStudy, an Asian mobile education app developer. The company agreed to a shared revenue model and licensing agreement to translate and sell Shmoop’s content in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Other U.S.-based online learning ventures, like Coursera, Udacity and edX, are also more closely eyeing Asia, but while those providers of massive open online courses (MOOCs) focus on higher education and lifelong learners, Shmoop targets K-12 students.

Ahead of the new season of its hit TV show The Walking Dead, cable network AMC has partnered with education technology company Instructure and the University of California at Irvine for an online course based on the popular television series.

The eight-week course, titled “Society, Science, Survival: Lessons from AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead,’” will include content, video clips and examples from the show, as well as possible participation from the actors.

And it won’t be just about zombies. The companies said the interdisciplinary course will use the show as a lens to examine topics like Maslow’s hierarchy, public health and pandemics and the science of hope.

“Others have focused on specific pedagogical models and approaches… [We wondered] how could we get a course with high numbers of users and engagement?” Instructure co-founder Brian Whitmer said in a briefing ahead of the announcement.  “We decided to see what a pop culture connection does to engagement.”

Unique partnership

Instructure, which has built its business with a learning management system for schools, last year launched its own MOOC service, called Canvas Network.  But, for the most part, its efforts in the MOOC space have been overshadowed by those of its Silicon Valley and Boston-based peers Coursera, Udacity and edX.

Teaming up with a show that draws more than 10 million viewers is a smart way to bring its service to an entirely new audience — especially as it eyes an IPO. For AMC, it’s not going to bring in eyeballs the way other more traditional marketing efforts might, but it’s a creative way to deepen its relationship with the fans the show already has.

“We hope this online course will drive a deep, sustained connection with the show… and provide a legitimate educational experience,” Theresa Beyer, AMC’s vice president of promotions and activation, said in a statement.

Personally, I’d love for this to lead to Mad Men- and Homeland-themed MOOCs. But Whitmer said the company doesn’t have any further entertainment-related plans – yet.

As creativeLIVE’s user base grows, it needs additional capacity to film more courses, said CEO Mika Salmi. Since its launch in April 2010, the company said its students have surpassed a total of 12.5 million learning hours and top one million learning hours per month.

Despite growing competition in online education — from veteran companies like lynda.com to newer entrants like Udemy — Salmi said it’s increasingly attracting students with its high production quality and live online broadcasts.

“It’s not just about telling you what to do, it’s about people in the classroom attempting to do what the teacher is doing,” he said. “It’s a real-time event.”

Unlike other companies targeting lifelong learners, creativeLIVE doesn’t just offer pre-taped video courses. Users can purchase recorded courses but watch frequent live broadcasts of classes on everything from software development to filmmaking for free. Salmi said that the average live class receives 30,000 unique viewers and while he declined to share how popular the paid courses are, he said that the company has paid out a total of $3.5 million to the more than 100 instructors who teach 250 different courses on the site.

The company was launched in 2010 by photographer Chase Jarvis and entrepreneur Craig Swanson but mostly operated under the radar until last year, when it announced a $7.5 million round of financing from Greylock and others and added Salmi, formerly the president of Viacom Digital, as CEO. (It later raised a smaller amount from Hollywood talent giants Creative Artists Agency and William Morris Endeavor, as well as Google Ventures and Crunchfund.) Now that it’s making a bigger push in a crowded field of online education, it makes sense that the company wants to maintain a bigger presence in Silicon Valley, where it can be closer to potential teachers for its classes and talent to help the startup grow.

For now, the company’s audience is mostly U.S.-based, although Salmi said that its most successful broadcasts get viewers from around the world. But it has aspirations for cultivating an even more global audience. Given its focus on live broadcasts, it would make sense for the company to open up studios in different time zones. But Salmi declined to comment on future plans regarding new studios, saying only that viewers tune in at all different times of the day and night to watch its broadcasts and that it’s exploring different products that would enable the company to reach a global market on a real-time basis.

TV shows Top Chef and America’s Test Kitchen have both launched their own online cooking programs, and we’ve even see the emergence of the first online professional culinary school. Now a San Francisco startup called Feast is taking a tech startup’s approach to the cooking school.

Feast co-founder and CEO David Spinks doesn’t have a cooking background. Instead he’s online community developer that has created or managed the community portals for the LeWeb conferences, Zaarly, u30pro, BlogDash and Scribnia. He even created a meta-community for community managers called, you guessed it, TheCommunityManager. But after he did some consulting work for online learning startup Udemy, helping it develop its community strategy, Spinks got the idea for Feast.

Spinks said he wanted to apply the same online education methods underlying teaching sites like Udemy and Coursera to create a platform for cooking lessons. In addition, Spinks wanted to anchor those classes with a strong community, not only to address the inevitable questions and problems that emerge when trying to prepare a dish, but to keep students interested and engaged.

Spinks added that he didn’t want to create something dull or overly academic either – not the cooking equivalent of a coding course.

“We wanted to take the entertainment value you get on television, but create a format where you can actually learn,” Spinks said. “There is a problem with the Food Network. It’s entertaining you, but they’re not really teaching you how to cook. They’re selling you a lifestyle. We’re actually trying to get you in the kitchen.”

Last fall, Feast launched its first online cooking course, a four-week class designed to teach basic cooking techniques ranging from knife skills to braising. Led by Feast’s in-house chef Jeremy Umansky, the self-paced lessons use detailed text descriptions and photographs along with numerous videos.

It’s in the community discussions, though, that a lot of the real learning goes on, Spinks said. Not only does Umansky engage with students on the boards, but students interact with one another, often solving problems before an instructor get involves, Spinks said. That student interaction also acts a motivator, helping solve one of the key problems of online learning: retention. In self-paced learning programs such as those offered by Coursera, Spinks said, as few as 7 percent of students actually finish the curriculum from beginning to end. Feast’s inaugural class last winter attracted 75 students, and more than half participated up to the very to its conclusion.

The company’s spring semester starts up next week, offering a new kitchen basics class as well as a new course on vegetarian cooking (both $60 for four weeks). Feast has also begun offering a free mini-course on fermentation where you can learn how to make Kimchi, Korean spicy preserved cabbage.

Feast has also managed to attract the attention of Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, which accepted the company into its accelerator’s sixth batch of startups.

Saute pan photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Fedor Kondratenko

Launched in partnership with the American Graphics Institute, the new site provides a marketplace of video tutorials and digital books for learning about creative software, web design and development and office applications. Video tutorials range from newbie-level instructions on how to play music and video on your iPhone to more advanced lessons on using CSS with Dreamweaver.

Like competitors in the space, Digital Classroom targets individuals looking for professional advancement, as well as personal enrichment, and it is looking to snare enterprise clients. Wiley’s move into this space underscores the opportunity companies see in helping individuals and corporations acquire new skills needed to compete in a rapidly changing economy.

Even though other companies already provide software training courses online, Barry Pruett, vice president and executive publisher for Wiley Professional Development, said his company believes it can compete on price ($20 a month or $10 a month with an annual subscription, compared to lynda.com’s starting price of $25 a month) and customization.  Enterprise clients can create their own sites that include the content most appropriate for their employees (potentially including content beyond software training). And college professors can create private groups for their classes, integrate Wiley content with other course content on their university site and track student progress, he said.

Even though the site offers competitive pricing and flexible content integration options, the initial content itself didn’t seem as engaging to me as what Udemy, creativeLIVE and lynda.com offer. From a quick tour of the site, it seemed as though most of the video content included screenshots of the software and audio narration. Much of the content on Udemy and lynda.com, however, puts an expert instructor front and center and alternates video of the software with video of a person talking and other shots for a more interesting experience.  But Pruett said future videos could offer more engaging formats and he emphasized that this is just the first version of the site.

Wiley has a 200-year history and other verticals beyond software training that it could add to Digital Classroom but, for now, its library of 46 courses, 50 digital books and 3,000 videos is dwarfed by lynda.com’s nearly 1.700 courses.

Rafter CEO Mehdi Maghsoodnia said the company has expanded its footprint to more than 260 active schools (500 have signed up), but the one thing campus administrators continue to ask for is more sophisticated analytics around pricing, price comparison features, as well as better tools for adoption. With HubEdu, the company will gain an inventory analytics system to optimize store pricing, tracking systems to monitor student purchase behavior and price comparison capabilities.

“The cost of tuition and education is getting higher and higher… one of our primary cost factors outside of tuition is the cost of textbooks and content,” said Maghsoodnia. “We’re trying to find the cheapest content on behalf of the students.”

For individual schools, the process of navigating the complicated textbook industry (which is become increasingly complicated as more of it becomes digital and interactive) is expensive and time-consuming. But with Rafter’s platform, he said, school administrators and students can more easily weigh their content options – which range from traditional textbooks to more exotic interactive content – and make the selections that work best with their budgets.

It’s worth noting that open educational resources (read: free) are becoming more available. In April, Boston-based Boundless Learning announced that it raised $8 million to bring a free textbook alternative to students. But they’re not without challenges and, regardless, Maghsoodnia’s bet is that education will continue to be a major area of expenditure. The San Mateo, Calif. company, which launched as Bookrenter in 2006, has raised $56 million.

And he’s not the only one finding a new stream of income from Udemy. This morning, the San Fransciso-based startup released the salaries of the top 10 instructors on the 2-year-old platform. In total, the group earned $1.65 million in the last year, with all of them bringing in more than $50,000 on their own and the top individual making more than $200,000. All of the instructors’ top courses focus on Web development, programming and tech entrepreneurship – not a surprise given Udemy’s roots in those field and increasing interest in coding.

“We’ve just seen over the last couple of years, amazing success that teachers are starting to have teaching folks online,” said Dinesh Thirupuvanam, VP of marketing for Udemy. “We’re moving from an era where the best teachers were teaching just 50 people in a tiny classroom to where they can teach hundreds or thousands.” In the case of Salman Khan, of the online tutoring nonprofit Khan Academy, that number is in the millions, he added.

To meet the growing opportunity in online education, a handful of startups have rushed in, including 2tor, Lynda, Codecademy, Udacity and Pathwright. But Thirupuvanam said Udemy is unique in its model that allows anyone (not just instructors affiliated with educational institutions) to potentially earn money for teaching audiences across all kinds of categories (not just technical and vocational topics but the humanities and sciences as well). Thousands of instructors have joined the site to teach class for free or for between $20 and $250 a course, the company said. (For paid courses, Udemy takes a 30 percent cut.)

Udemy: Non-technical courses are gaining traction

Of those instructors, just a small percentage are earning money comparable to that of a full-time job and many of the top earners had already made names for themselves as industry experts and authors. But it does show the disruptive potential of an open platform for online education. Thirupuvanam said Udemy courses tend to attract students who would have otherwise spent money on a community class or “scrounged around” on YouTube or just read book. The benefit of the Udemy class is that students can take the classes on their own time and have the option to interact with the instructors online.

For now, Udemy’s top courses focus on technical training, but Thirupuvanam said the platform is seeing increased traction in lifestyle categories, such as yoga. He thinks those areas could grow to be as big as programming over time. In the past year, the company said it’s experienced 700 percent user growth, with instructors adding 7,000 lectures every month.

For the full list of Udemy’s top 1o instructors, take a look below:

• 1. Infinite Skills instructors: $565,320 in total course sales; 10,505 subscribers (top course: “Microsoft Excel for Beginners”)
• 2. Bess Ho: $218,935; 2,588 subscribers (top course: “Learn to Develop an iPhone or iPad App in 4 Weeks”)
• 3. Victor Bastos: $175,168; 2,157 subscribers (top course: “Become a Web Developer from Scratch”)
• 4. Mark Lassoff: $162,051; 4,033 subscribers (top course: “HTML and CSS for Beginners”)
• 5. Zed Shaw: $126,585; 3,305 subscribers (top course: “Learn Python the Hard Way”)
• 6. Miguel Hernandez: $96,508; 1,549 subscribers (top course: “How to Create an Awesome Demo Video for Your Business”)
• 7. Huw Collingbourne: $88,285; 1,307 subscribers (top course: “Ruby Programming for Beginners”)
• 8. Robin Nixon: $86,797; 1,814 subscribers (top course: “HTML5 Beginners Crash Course”)
• 9. Chris Converse: $81,258; 1,327 subscribers (top course: “Creating Responsive Web Design”)
• 10. Eric Ries: $53,573; 5,889 subscribers (top course: “The Lean Startup”)