Author: IBL News

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a 14-year-old global organization that sets standards for the Web (HTML5’s among others), will soon launch its first course on edX, HTML5 Part 1.

This 6-weeks-long course, scheduled in June, is led by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and CEO Dr. Jeff Jaffe, and includes experts who helped create HTML5. It is oriented to students interested in learning HTML5 and core Web technologies as well as creating rich websites and applications.

HTML5 is now supported on mobile phones, connected objects, game consoles, and automobile dashboards. It provides native support for video and audio without plug-ins as well as offline applications. “HTML5 represents the set of features that entrepreneurs and organizations will rely on for years to come,” say the course creators.

What is the cost of creating and running a MOOC? And how much money is your College or University willing to invest in it to develop distance learners’ skills?

A post on Linkedin has gotten our attention.

• University of Texas says their cost is $100k to $300k per course.

• Teachers College at Columbia University estimates them to range from $39k to $204k each.

• Harvard’s costs range from $75k to $150k.

• Cornell says that the cost of supporting a MOOC instructor, materials, and teaching assistant is about $50k.

• Udacity reports costs of $200k to produce a course, plus $50K to run it subsequently. And costs are only expected to rise, they say.

• edX gives grants of $50k for creating a course within its “High School Program”.

The two main cost components are course creation (faculty, admins, instructional designers, technical support) and the type of delivery. It is generally estimated that the cost of a high quality video production is approximately $4,300 per hour of finished video.

On average, $70k is the cost to produce a course; the delivery costs range from $10-20 per learner to access the course on Amazon or internal servers.

“Free online courses won’t revolutionize education until there is a parallel system of free or low-fee credentials, not controlled by traditional colleges, that leads to jobs,” says Kevin Carey, author of the essay “The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere”.

The new digital credentials, or badges, can solve this problem. Badges indicate specific skills and knowledge, backed by links to electronic evidence of how and why the credentials were earned. In addition, badges are not limited to what people learned in college, but everywhere else. In the meantime, traditional college degrees are inadequate tools for communicating information and presenting that data to employers.

Read the complete article here.

Update: The Mozilla Foundation’s Open Badges project has been leading the badges effort, although the project is dying and about to be abandoned, according to experts consulted by IBL News.

[Disclosure: IBL Studios presented in November 2014 the first badge system for edX and Open edX]

edX.org is the number one free online resource that can make entrepreneurs more successful, according to Business Insider.

“Taking time for a class can seem tiring, time-consuming, and expensive”.

Business Insider has compiled a list of the top free online learning sites:

1. EdX.
2. Alison.
3. MIT OpenCourseware.
4. Coursera.
5. Microsoft Virtual Academy.
6. Code Academy.
7. Moz.
8. HubSpot Academy.
9. iTunesU.
10. Doulingo.

The second Open edX meetup in the U.S. will take place in New York’s McKinsey Academy headquarters on April 9th. The title of the event is “Open edX in the Spotlight: The Future of Online Education”. 

Prominent leaders from George Washington University, edX, McKinsey and PepperPD will be speaking.

The registration is free and the event will be live streamed and recorded by IBL Studios Education. Beer on top and pizza will be served. McKinsey, WeWork and IBL sponsor the meetup.

This is the line-up of panelists:

–– First Presentation
edTech Learning: 2 years in

Michael Keany – McKinsey Academy
General Manager

–– Second Presentation
Building a Sustainable University Strategy for Online Education

Paul Schiff Berman – The George Washington University
Vice Provost of Online Education and Academic Innovation

–– Third Presentation

Building Opportunities Around Open edX

Beth Porter – edX
Vice President of Product

–– Fourth Presentation
Building a National Professional Learning Center With Open edX

Dr. Jack McLaughlin  – PepperPD.com / Public Consulting Group
Founder


[Open edX.org Community Portal: Open edX in th Spotlight: The Future of Online Education]

[The third Open edX meetup will take place in Spain, on April 20th in the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid’s campus]

History can now be learned in a new, engaging way with the help of one of the largest collections of objects and artifacts.

The Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum and research complex, founded in 1846, will offer three interesting MOOCs on edX.org. All courses, developed with the National Museum of American History, are currently open for enrollment.

• Objects That Define America. This course, co-produced in partnership with the The Great Courses, looks at the History of America through the lens of key historic objects, artifacts, and exhibits in the Smithsonian collections –from the Statute of Liberty to the Model T.

• Rise of Superheroes and Their Impact on Pop Culture. Iconic creator Stan Lee will participate in this course. Learners who sign up and earn a verified certificate will receive a credential featuring original artwork with both Stan Lee’s and Michael Uslan’s signatures.

• Teaching Historical Inquiry with Objects. This course, geared to middle and high school social studies and history teachers, will offer new teaching techniques designed to engage students in the process of historical inquiry.

“The launch of SmithsonianX on edX is one way that the Smithsonian is sharing its collections and scholarships with a global audience,” said Jacqueline Moen, Vice President of SmithsonianX. “This initial portfolio of courses with Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History will offer new perspectives on understanding the American experience.”

Instructors can now embed Google Drive files and Calendars into courseware on edX and Open edX. This improvement was added to the Open edX platform on the March 5 release.

The Google Drive files – Docs, Drawings, Forms or Surveys, Slides, Sheets – and Calendars appear in the body of the course just like any other content.

An additional possibility for the students is to add the Google Course Calendar to their own personal calendars. The course information will appear along with the students’ information.

[edX Guide for Students: Embedded Files and Calendars]
[edX Guide for Instructors: Google Calendar Tool, Google Drive Files Tool and XBlock]

Microsoft will offer seven courses on the edx.org portal in April.

These courses, taught by Microsoft experts, are now open for enrollment.

• Programming with C#, the widely-used programming language for.NET developers.

• Introduction to TypeScript, a design-time language that enables JavaScript programmers to manage projects on any platform. This course is co-authored by Anders Hejlsberg, creator of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, and TypeScript.

• Introduction to Bootstrap, an open-source UI framework created by Twitter to enable the creation of responsive, mobile-first web pages. Bootstrap has become a de facto standard for web design.

• Querying with Transact SQL, the structured query language for SQL servers.

• Building Cloud Apps with Microsoft Azure. This is part one of a three-course series.

• Introduction to Office 365 APIs. This course teaches common APIs to access Office 365 data from your applications.

• Windows PowerShell Fundamentals. This self-paced course has a fee of $200 because is offered as part of the edX Professional Education series.

“The Past, Present, and Future of the Federal Reserve” and “Business in a Political Age” are two signature MOOCs that the George Washington University (GW) will start offering in April.

These spectacular free courses, offered on a new Open edX platform, “are designed to educate the world”, said Paul Schiff Berman, Vice Provost for Online Education and Academic Innovation.

“These are courses that no other university is offering, and perhaps no other university could offer,” he added.

Registration is now open to the public.

[GW Today: New Online Course Offerings for GW]
[Disclosure: IBL Studios designed and powered the platform]

What does the Open edX architecture look like?