Author: IBL News

By Michael Amigot / IBL 

The $6,600 Online Master of Science Computer Science degree –OMS CS, for short– of George Institute of Technology, announced in May 2013, continues to be a seductive proposition for undergraduates.

Overall enrollments will reach about 10,000 students. 3,358 students registered during this spring, and the expectation is to attract 1,500 over the summer and about 4,000 in the fall.

With a 55 percent acceptance rate and no GRE entrance exam, “the program has elicited wonder, enthusiasm, and trepidation”, writes William Fenton for PC Magazine as a contributing editor. Many students praise the program.

The OMS CS, offered at Udacity, costs a third of the traditional MS CS degree, priced at $21,000 for Georgia residents and twice as much for out-to-state students.

• Students can even qualify for financial aid.
• It contains 30 credit hours, or 10 three-credit courses.
• To enroll, students only need to maintain a 3.0 GPA or higher in Computer Science at an accredited undergraduate institution and pass a TOELF exam if they’re international.

“The Georgia Tech online master’s program is more in line with ventures such as General Assembly, which enable professionals to advance skills and training,” writes William Fenton.

“While the OMS CS degree may not democratize higher education, it doesn’t cannibalize it. As Georgia Tech’s leadership put it candidly, the OMS CS won’t make that much money, even when it fully scales. Meanwhile, the traditional master’s program is a veritable golden goose. In addition, all the buzz around Georgia Tech’s OMS CS degree is driving interest in the university in general, and in its computer science programs in particular. Traditional undergraduate BS CS applications increased by 85 percent in 2014 and another 35 percent in 2015; MS CS apps jumped 30 percent in 2014 and 18 percent in 2015.”

 

• PC Magazine: Don’t Dismiss Georgia Tech’s $6,600 Online Master’s Degree

 

The University of Colorado has reported that the certificates on their MOOCs offered through Coursera.com have generated roughly $110,000 since September 2015. “Conservatively, we estimate to generate $250,000 a year from courses offered on Coursera,” said Deborah Keyek-Franssen, Associate Vice President for Digital Education for the CU system.

“That’s been somewhat a welcome surprise, as CU did not necessarily expect to make money when it began offering the courses three years ago,” she explained at the Denver Post.

• “The courses help disseminate research funded by tax dollars and have the potential to introduce millions of people to CU”.
• “The courses are helping professors teach students differently and, in the case of one faculty member on the Colorado Springs campus, crowdsource research functions”.

The CU system (coursera.org/boulder and coursera.org/cusystem) has produced more than a dozen high-quality, video-based courses for Coursera and is offering several specializations, or multi-course units on one topic. These specializations end with a capstone project –at a price around of $300– that can allow to earn some transfer credit towards Master’s degrees. Coursera keeps half of that revenue.

EdX, the MIT and Harvard University educational venture, is celebrating its 4th anniversary this week.

“With over 7 million learners worldwide, we are amazed by all you have achieved and your continued dedication to enhancing your knowledge, career, lives and confidence by taking edX courses,” said edX on its blog.

The edX.org portal now hosts 919 courses, with students from every country in the world (72 percent of learners are outside the U.S.)

• 7,250,000 learners
• 95 institutional partners
• 23,100,000 course enrollments

 

EdCast, a Mountain View, CA-based Open edX provider, has raised a new round of $16 million, the second in its three years of existence.

This new capital, that comes in addition to a $6 million Series A round led by Softbank Capital in late 2014, will be destined to expand EdCast’s “Personal Learning Network”, a social network through which users learn from influencers, peers and experts.

Karl Metha, Founder & CEO of EdCast, has explained: “We are laser focused on our mission to expand the knowledge economy with curated, contextual bite size knowledge (…) Millennials in the workplace along with the complexity of engaging and educating customers and partners is creating the need for daily relevant insights from the world’s foremost experts and influencers in a variety of industries, from tech, health, financial services, highered, entrepreneurship and expanding to telecom, banking, media, retail.”

The Series B $16 million financing has been led by GE Asset Management. Other investors include SoftBank Capital, Cervin Ventures, Stanford StartX Fund and Penta Global.

EdCast has relevant clients among Fortune 100 companies such as GE, Salesforce, EMC and HP, with its HP LIFE knowledge community of 0.5 million users.

[Disclosure: IBL has a partnership with EdCast to participate in Open edX-based projects]

 

 

 

By Michael Amigot / IBL 

Chilean PUC University’s MOOCs, hosted on their ING Open edX platform, have become an effective educational tool for elementary and secondary students. Almost 65 percent of students have enrolled from this level, while 22 percent have been from higher education, according to a university’s report submitted to IBL News.

Enrollments across five courses (one on chemistry and four in pre-calculus –all of them in Spanish) reached 8,275 students from October 2015 to February 2016. One course –“Pre-Cálculo: Progresiones y Sumatorias”– got 5,385 enrollments. Learners came from 37 different countries, while 90 percent were from Chile.

COURSERA

Meanwhile, PUC (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) revealed a different demographic and student composition of their six courses on Coursera. These courses, much more elaborate and intended for higher education audiences, attracted 53,995 enrollments with 2,335 completions. More than 33 percent of all students had Master’s and PhD degrees, and 30 were higher ed learners. In this case, there were more Mexican students than Chilean.

• Check the report (PDF).
• Disclosure: IBL assembled PUC’s Open edX platform.

All of the talks and power point presentations of the successful, five-start rated fourth Open edX Meetup have been posted at IBL’s YouTube channel and IBL Campus Open edX platform and iOS app.

Speakers:

– Michael Cennamo, Columbia University

– Kristen Weeks, Knewton

– William Fenton, Fordham University

– Christina Powers, McKinsey Academy

– Derrick Lewis, Free Learning Channel X

– Discussion

 

 

EdX has launched the FedX initiative to enable faster and more responsive development on the Open edX software front-end applications.

Andy Armstrong, edX UI architect, has shared the state of he project through these slides.

 

The edX engineering team has released Dogwood.2. “This release fixes a few installation problems, applies some security fixes, and lets learners audit courses without offering certificates,” said Ned Batchelder, an edX manager.

Occasionally, edX releases updates to Dogwood. The first of these was Dogwood.1. Then Dogwood.2 came this week.

• Instructions for upgrading previous Dogwood installations
• Complete documentation

By Michael Amigot / IBL 

Companies and universities are shifting their traditional marketing efforts into digital initiatives.

According to the Chief Marketing Officer Council:

• More than a third of CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) say that digital marketing will account for 75 percent or more of their spending within the next five years.
• 28% of marketers have reduced their advertising budgets to fund more digital marketing.
• By 2018, Internet advertising will be poised to overtake TV as the largest advertising segment.
• Among the 25 hottest skills on LinkedIn, four are related to marketing: SEO/SEM, campaign management, channel marketing, digital and online marketing.

For adding digital marketing skills to your resume, the edX.org portal hosts great courses on social media marketing, e-commerce, data analytics, SEO and digital economy. This is a selection: