Author: IBL News

Another cost-effective option for students to earn affordable college credit on edX. This is the fourth initiative on university credit related to edX released this year, after the Global Freshman Academy with Arizona State University, MIT’s MicroMaster’s credential and ACE Alternative Credit Project. Currently, there are eight credit-eligible courses on edX.org.

CharterOak State College, a Connecticut-based public online college offering bachelor’s and associate’s degree programs, will now award college credit for select edX courses –two of them for now:  MITx Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python and UC BerkeleyX Engineering Software as a Service (SaaS) Part 2. Additional courses will be included in the program in the coming weeks.

This credit will follow a “pay-when-you-pass model”. Students enroll in an edX course, successfully complete and pass the course (with an 80% grade of higher), and then decide to pay for Charter Oak credit ($100 per credit hour). This credit can be applied to credentials, continuing ed credits and completion of a college degree.

“EdX learners around the world will now be able to earn credit for their hard work and success in MOOCs, offering an opportunity to many learners who would otherwise never have access to high-quality education and credit,” explained Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX.

“A variety of edX partners are enthusiastic about working with us on innovative credit offerings. We look forward to announcing more credit opportunities and pathways for our learners in the coming months,” he added.

edX has begun an executive search for a new Vice President of Product, after Beth Porter decided to leave this organization on December 11.

“Our commitment to open source and the Open edX community remains strong, and these changes will not significantly impact our resource allocation or collaborations“, has said Wendy Cebula, President and CCO.

During this transition, Joel Barciauskas (in the picture) will continue to lead the Open edX community and manage the Open edX engineering team.

Dec 8, 2015 – Posted in the Open edX Portal: Upcoming Change in edX Leadership

Proversity.org, a London-based MOOC provider and early adopter of the Open edX system, has raised $1.6M (£1 million) from the venture capital firm RSBC Financial Services, according to the company. Funding will be used to recruit managers on sales, digital production and software engineering.

With a network in London, Santiago, Boston and Cape Town, Proversity has worked on training and professional development projects for clients such as the Bank of England, the British Army, Lloyds Bank and Family Mosaic.

“Analytics are no longer a nice-to-have feature”, stated Dr. Linda Baer during the first Open edX Universities Symposium, celebrated last month at The George Washington University in DC.

Baer presented a graphic forecasting the evolution of the analytics technology, from descriptive and diagnostic to predictive and prescriptive analytics, where educators will be able to advance what will happen and how can they make it happen.

Currently, learning analytics technology is just on the first stage of the graphic.

INSIGHTS ANALYTICS ON OPEN EDX

The edX organization offers the Insights Analytics server to their paid partners –all of the universities and known brands that belong to the xConsortium.

Last week, IBL was able to complete the first installation of the last version of Insights Analytics –including Video Insights– on the Open edX community. GW Engineering’s Open edX platform is currently taking advantage of this service.

Beth Porter, Vice President of edX and one the most prominent advocates of the Open edX software and methodology, has decided to leave the organization. “I’m going to take a break for a couple of months to spend time with my family and figure out what to do next”, she explained on an email to IBL’s Founder.

No more information about her departure was provided from her or the edX Corporation.

Beth Porter is not the only one. Sarina Canelake, one of the managers of the Open edX community, reached out to IBL as well to communicate her decision to leave edX.

“American higher education organizations will undergo from packaged courses and degrees to unbundled course offerings,” argues Ryan Craig, managing director of University Ventures, a private-equity fund, in his new book, “College Disrupted”.

“This ‘unbundling’ of higher-education will allow students to earn new kinds of educational credentials,” wrote Jeffrey R. Young in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Experts say that students will want to save money by picking from a menu, trying “micro-degrees”, personalized modules and courses, skipping costly perks such as library access or a gym. Paying for a bundle of services seems to be over.

From a pedagogic point of view, students can retake any module they struggle with before moving on to more advanced material.

More and more colleges are examining this “iTunes playlist-style” offer. MIT, Harvard and other edX universities are experimenting with making in-person courses modular. In fact, this is a powerful idea that the Open edX platform promotes. Udacity and Coursera also offer these kinds of mini-degrees, credentials and badges.

Working adults looking to update their skills have been the early adopters. And, in this sense, Ryan Craig predicts that “LinkedIn will become the arbiter of these mini-degrees”, generating standardized lists of proven competencies from users’ profiles that employers will easily search for.

The main three MOOC providers are putting together specific business models to evolve from a money-losing activity, become sustainable and even thrive. Coursera and Udacity are designing corporate courses, while edX is convincing universities to offer credits through their courses.

Udacity attracted in November $105M from venture capitalists showing that students are ready to pay and complete courses that might land them top jobs. Corporations such as AT&T, Google, Facebook, Cloudera and MongoDB partner with Udacity and design market-oriented courses that support much-needed skills.

edX has incorporated 27 edX new members in the past year –generating around $15 million. But it now faces a new challenge: to convince its university partners to renew their three-year contracts, as Allison Dulin explains in a article at edSurge.

“Learners want credit, and to provide credit we must create quality learning environments that meet the needs of diverse learners, and are recognized by institutions and employers. And it’s no secret that credit is a bridge to financial sustainability for edX and its partner universities”, Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX says.

edX announced this month a new collaboration with Microsoft to develop online courses for K-12 school leaders, principals and superintendents.

These courses, which will be created by edX university partners, will help K-12 education leaders improve their schools and enhance classroom learning through technology.

This agreement expands upon the existing collaboration between edX and Microsoft. Microsoft offers more than 35 online MOOC and professional education courses on edx.org.

No further details have been disclosed. Read the official press release here.

The Open edX community’s real-time conversation has moved from the aging IRC (#edx-code on irc.freenode.net) to the modern Slack communication tool. This is the address: https://openedx.slack.com.

Anyone can join this space by entering her email here.

Currently, there are ten channels to interact with one another and share ideas. These are some of them:

• #general (for all things Open edX)
• #events (for discussions on upcoming meetups and conferences)
• #news (for discussions on news stories)
• #docker (for containerizing all of the things)
• #front-end (for design and implementations)
• #learn-technologies
• #ops (for discussion of operational issues)
• #tastyburger (for jokes)

There was a consensus at the edX Global Forum that the future of higher education is blended.

The same course design methodologies employed to produce a MOOC will be applied to redesign residential classes. “The desire to leverage data and analytics to evolve pedagogical practices that has been so much a part of the MOOC world also applies to residential teaching and learning,” states Dr. Joshua Kim, from Dartmouth College.

Open online initiatives such as ASU’s Global Freshman Academy, MIT’s Micro-Masters-based courses or entire MBA programs like the University of Illinois’ $20,000 iMBA degree through Coursera indicate what comes next.

In other words, the investment in effort and dollars in MOOCs has started to pay-off in residential teaching and learning.

Joshua Kim has observed the impact that MOOC-based initiatives are having. We have summarized them here:

• MOOCs provide an opportunity to rethink and redesign introductory classes.

• MOOCs accelerate the transition from a lecture teaching to an active learning model for larger-enrollment courses. A poorly executed flipped class has unintended consequences.“How much could faculty do with introductory courses if they had access to collaboration with a team of instructional designers, librarians, media educators, and assessment experts?What MOOCs can do is shift how faculty think about the process of creating a course – opening up new ideas about how this process can shift from a purely solo effort to a more collaborative creative process.”

• MOOCs create new capabilities in instructional design and educational media and result in new skills in assessment and learning research.