Cengage Learning is expanding its presence in the online program management market with the acquisition of ed-tech company Learning Objects and its learning platform, Difference Engine.

The new Competency-Based Learning Platform from Learning Objects supports flipped, fully online, blended and face-to-face instruction.

These are learning object repositories (see sidebar) holding ephemeral learning assets that characterize the majority of what faculty and students use in online learning environments.

At its Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, Google today announced the launch of a new machine learning API for automatically recognizing objects in videos and making them searchable.