Author: IBL News

All of the talks of the third Open edX meetup celebrated on January 7th in New York have been posted on IBL’s YouTube Channel.

IBL has published all of those videos, along with the PowerPoint presentations, in an edX-style course on its new site, IBLCampus.com.

Speakers were:

• Maurice Matiz, Director, Media & Instructional Design Studio, Columbia Center for Teaching & Learning, Columbia University

• Joel Barciauskas, Engineering Manager at edX

• Lorena A. Barba, Professor at George Washington University and Chair of Open edX Universities Symposium

• Paul Schiff Berman, Vice Provost for Online Education and Academic Innovation, George Washington University

• Jennifer Gormley, Senior Director, Product and Marketing at McKinsey Academy

• Michael Amigot, Founder at IBL Studios (Open edX)

• Ivan Shumkov, Founder at Open Online Academy (ooac.org)

IBL CAMPUS OPEN EDX PLATFORM AND APP

IBL Campus is also the name of a new iOS app, which allows to watch videos and course content online and offline. This is the first fully-featured Open edX-based app available.

This means, for example, that all of the video content of the last Open edX meetup is available on the app. The only requirement to access it is to enroll in that course at IBL Campus.com.

IBL Campus App has been considered as one of the best educational apps by the Best iOS Appz review-specialist website.

Dogwood, the latest Open edX version, will be released this coming week, according to edX.

Dogwood RC3 has been available since January 22. Since then edX engineers have been mostly working on migration scripts.

Dogwood’s new features include XBlocks such as Oppia, Office Mix and LTI.

This LTI XBlock will replace the existing LTI XModule and will offer course teams the ability to configure the way LTI components open when learners use them: in a modal window, in a separate web browser window, or embedded in a course page.

Another interesting feature is Partial Credit. In Studio, course teams will be able to configure four problem types (checkbox, multiple choice, numerical input and write-your-own-grader) so learners can receive partial credit for a problem if they submit an answer that is partly correct.

The edX Release Notes contain a summary of changes that are deployed. Those changes are part of the master branch of the edX platform in GitHub.

A major characteristic of this Dogwood version was the upgrade from Django 1.4 to Django 1.8.7.

The solution to improve learning outcomes is mostly based on launching open software ecosystems. And Open edX is a step in that direction.

Stephen Laster, Chief Digital Officer at McGraw-Hill Education, has written a revealing analysis on EdSurge, highlighting the idea that technologies that live within closed systems create roadblocks in students’ learning pathways.

“Building digital content and learning technology around open standards ensures that educators and students can determine what’s most effective without worrying about whether different technologies will work together,” he states.

“The simple solution to accelerate open edtech for everyone is to support technology standards set forth by organizations like the IMS Global Learning Consortium.” 

These are Educause’s top 10 IT technologies of 2016 to focus on:

1. Incorporation of mobile devices in teaching and learning
2. Software as a Service (SaaS)
3. Administrative or business performance analytics
4. App development (responsive design, hybrid, etc.)
5. Accessing online components of blended/hybrid courses from mobile devices
6. Mobile apps for enterprise applications
7. Service desk tool and management strategy
8. Learning analytics
9. Data collection and sophisticated analytics methodologies for information security
10. Application performance monitoring.

Educause Review: Top 10 IT Issues, 2016: Divest, Reinvest, and Differentiate

An interesting initiative from edX and the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation –the “Cooke edX Challenge”– to help qualified 7th grade students. They enroll in selected edX courses and successfully complete one of five. Up to 70 eligible students will receive many benefits, such as individualized counseling and funding for educational programs, through the Young Scholars Program.

These are the seven courses:

• Tsunamis and Storm Surges: Introduction to Coastal Disaster – Waseda University
• The Art of Structural Engineering: Bridges – Princeton University
• Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python – MIT 
• Solving Public Policy Problems: UC Berkeley’s Eightfold Path – Berkeley
• Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe – Australian National University

The third Open edX developers’ conference, called Open edX Con, will take place at Stanford University on June 14th and 15th.

Registration is now open, as well as the call for proposals.

The conference will be followed by a hackathon, June 16th and 17th.

edX made this announcement today. “Stanford has been a supporter of the Open edX initiative since day zero. The Stanford team was instrumental in the open-source release of the edX platform, and continues to contribute their code, effort, and enthusiasm to the project,” said edX.

Tickets will cost $200 to $450.

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Open edX: Open edX Con 2016 Call for Proposals

Columbia University’s Center for Teaching & Learning’s Director, Maurice Matiz, explained during the third Open edX Meetup in New York, on January 7, why MOOCs are worth it. These are the reasons:

• Showcase our faculty and our programs
• Attract applicants to our on-campus, distance education, and certificate programs
• Improve how we teach on campus
   – Leverage technological/pedagogical advances for our resident students and tuition-paying students in distance and hybrid education programs
   – Publish excellence
   – Teach the world; share knowledge freely
• Foster lifelong learning programs for alumni
• Fundraising opportunities

Currently, Columbia University, which posts MOOCs on edX.org (seven published courses and five more in production) and Coursera (11 courses) has a dedicated team of over thirty people. All of the MOOCs are released as open content under the Creative Commons license.

Download Maurice Matiz’s presentation

The third Open edX Conference for developers will take place in June in the Bay Area.

Joel Barciauskas, engineering manager at Open edX, made this announcement during the third Open edX Meetup in New York. Further details will be communicated throughout the following weeks.

DOGWOOD BY THE END OF JANUARY

During the event, organized by IBL and McKinsey Academy and rated with five stars on meetup.com, Joel Barciauskas also announced that Open edX’s Dogwood version will be released by the end of January.

Dogwood will have as supported components the edx-platform, including its dependencies, Ora2 and Forums. The picture above, which is part of Joel’s presentation, reflects what’s new in Dogwood.

In addition, Dogwood will include these three components, which won’t be officially supported by edX:

• eCommerce (Otto)
• Insights Analytics
• Mobile applications (iOS and Android)

After Dogwood, the next release will be Eucalyptus, scheduled for March/April.

> Joel Barciauskas’ Open edX Presentation (.pdf)
> Third Open edX’s Meetup: photos, comments and video (streaming quality)

EdX Inc., the not-for-profit venture that runs edX.org, the xConsortium and the Open edX community, has started to rebuild its team and thereby posted a listing of new jobs after some key developers and managers  left the organization.

“EdX commitment to the open source community is not changing, and we have posted a listing on our careers page for Developer Advocates“, said Joel Barciauskas, engineering manager at Open edX.

In addition, a position of Open edX Community Marketing Manager has been added. This person will help to promote the platform and related events, growing both the developer community as well as overall adoption.

The Open edX team at edX Inc. is now formed by Joel Barciauskas, Molly DeBlank and Ned Batchelder, after Sarina Canelake and David “DB” Baumgold decided to pursue other opportunities.

Currently, edX Inc., a well-funded organization created by MIT and Harvard, has 26 open positions, including a VP of Product who will be a member of the executive leadership team and report directly the President and COO. Over 140 people work today at edX’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Early MOOCs were entirely free, including statements of completion. But now they can be a substantial source of revenue.

Wharton, University of Pennsylvania, has understood this reality better than anyone and has established itself as a leading, global purveyor of MOOCs, showing one of the highest enrollments of any business school in the world.

In 2015 it got $5 million in revenue, mostly through Coursera, according to Fortune magazine. Two-thirds of its learners are outside North America, with heavy representation from India, China, Russia, and Latin America.

• Over 300,000 people have taken Wharton’s “Intro to Marketing” course, one of the top 10 business MOOCs on Coursera, since 2013. Nearly 100,000 more have completed its second MOOC on “Consumer Analytics”.

• The eight-week-long executive education MOOC called the “Strategic Value of Customer Relationship”, priced at $3,700, will be offered for a fifth time this spring. 20 to 30 students have enrolled each time.

• Since 2012, some 2.7 million people have enrolled in Wharton’s 18 MOOCs; 54,000 verified certificates have been awarded since 2012 and 32,000 verified certificates in specialization courses since April of this year. Each certificate is $95. The school’s specializations in business fundamentals and business analytics, composed of four courses plus a capstone project, cost $595 each.

• Over the next 12 months, Wharton plans to launch at least two dozen new online offerings, including its first three SPOCs on digital marketing, gamification, and advanced product design. They will all be offered on edx.org at significantly higher price points than the $95 certificates for its single MOOC courses on Coursera.

  For example, the “Global Strategy” course, originally distributed on Coursera, has been moved to the edX platform. Now it will cost $149.

  Prices could be raised further in the future. “After all, a used corporate finance textbook on Amazon goes for $200”, says Wharton.

  Wharton also will bump up the number of specializations from two to five through July of next year. The school is hoping that its MOOC revenues will double next year, to at least $10 million.

“The big bet is being placed by Wharton’s new Dean, Geoffrey Garrett, who views the initiative as a way to further extend the school’s brand around the world; reach users who would never be able to get to the school’s Philadelphia campus; get faculty more comfortable using technology to teach; and transform how faculty and students engage in the classroom,” writes Fortune. 

• “More than 10% of our faculty have now had experience building and running online classes”, Geoffrey Garret says. “That translates into more than 30 professors who have been involved in Wharton’s MOOC efforts.”
  

• “Content Wharton has been developing can be a viable alternative to non-degree education, long the province of the school’s on-campus executive education programming.”

• “If it helps a person advance his or her career, it’s a bottom-up credential. Non-degree education will increase pretty dramatically for those who find that the tuition and opportunity costs of either a degree or traditional executive education don’t make sense.”

Wharton has taken important lessons:

• Students want learning squished down into four weeks. “Today, we’re being more customer-centric and asking what people need.”

• Students prefer so-called asynchronous online learning that they can tap into at any time, no matter where they are in the world. “The market doesn’t require synchronous learning. If you re in Beijing and I’m in Philadelphia, there is no good time to get together.”

• MOOCs are about learning, not about teaching. “You don’t invest money to make faculty think they are Oprah Winfrey in the 21st Century.”

• “It is dumb to have a faculty member stand up in front of a class and deliver a lecture today. (…) MOOCs are raising the bar for face-to-face education. (…) We want class to be more interactive, team oriented and focused on problem solving. We tend to be in the learning-by-studying moment, but I think we are going to have to balance that with learning-by-doing.”

Fortune Magazine: “What’s Behind Wharton’s Massive Bet on Online Learning”