Author: IBL News

Our friend Dhawal Shah, founder of Class-Central.com, has written a detailed analyses about MOOC growth in 2014. Dhawal concludes that “the number of universities offering MOOCs has doubled to cross 400 universities, with a doubling of the number of cumulative courses offered, to 2400.” “22 of the top 25 US universities in US News World Report rankings are now offering courses online for free.”

What is interesting, too, is that Open edX has been the preferred platform to host MOOCs.

This is what the article says:

“Institutions choose Open edX for DIY: Open edX quickly seems to have become the de facto platform for organizations and groups who are looking to host their own MOOCs. It has been adopted by several organizations in diverse regions of the world, including Jordan, Japan,France, China, India and the US.”

(By Michael Amigot)

No doubt, a revolution is happening is higher education thanks to the edX technology and pedagogy.

I recently attended a conference in Madrid, Spain, by Eric Grimson, former MIT Chancellor and one of edX’s top pedagogy experts in the world –he has created three successful MOOCs on edX.

He explained how a 2,000 year-old industry is being disrupted today. There have been two major disruptions: the printing press in 1568 and the blackboard in 1801. And we are living the third one: the one that comes from digital tools and particularly from edX.

The conference is magnificent to understand why the edX technology is so unique.

Professor Andrés Pedreño, a leading pedagogist and entrepreneur in Spain, followed Grimson’s speech with a keynote address worth watching.

All is in this video.

Welcome to the MOOC 2.0 age.

MOOCs created a market for free online courses. The MOOC 2.0 concept arrives to make courses more engaging, interactive and personalized. Now that there is more data and analysis, instructors are researching best practices in teaching and learning. In addition, there are several studies on how student interaction promotes learning and retention.

The Open edX platform has been fully translated into Spanish (Spain).

A team of three universities from Spain –Carlos III, Autónoma de Madrid and Politécnica de Valencia, which are members of the edX Consortium– along with the Germán Sánchez Ruipérez Foundation (FGSR) and IBL Studios Education, completed the translation in December. In total, 4888 strings were translated.

The project has been conducted through the collaborative platform Transifex.com.

The Open edX platform is, so far, 100 percent translated into five languages: Spanish (from Spain), English (from the United States), Arabic, Russian and Lithuanian.

In addition to the translation of the Open edX platform, the three mentioned Spanish universities, FGSR and IBL Studios Education have tackled the translation of most of the edx.org website, specially the part regarding the certificates.

Perfectly translated certificates from edx.org will foster enrollments from Spanish-speaking students in the U.S., Latin America and Spain.

These three universities will launch several courses in Spanish on February of 2015. The GSR Foundation will also launch an enhanced Open edX platform (lectylab.com) with paid and open courses, intended for professionals focused on reading and literacy. This platform has been developed by IBL.

The GSR Foundation is a recognized non profit organization devoted to reading promotion as well as the Spanish language.

Over 40 mobile-friendly courses will be added in the coming weeks to edX.org. This will allow Android users to play them in their smartphones.

Right now only 21 mobile-friendly courses are available on the Android app –downloadable for free at the Google Play store, under the name “edx”.

This Android app is a beta version that works as a companion tool to watch course videos and see announcements and handouts. It does not allow users to take courses entirely on their smartphones. In order to complete readings, homework problems, and exams, the user is redirected to the website. The same applies to forum discussions and the assignments, which must be completed on the computer.

edX is working to make the app available on iPhones, iPads and Android tablets, as well as to make all of the edX courses mobile-friendly, although no release date has yet been provided.

This is an interesting promotion in the MOOCs landscape. Not only you learn, but also you get a cloud service for free.

Any learner who earn a verified certificate in MITx’s Entrepreneurship 101 or Entrepreneurship 102 courses will receive a $1,000 credit for Amazon Web Services (AWS) as well as some training and support on this cloud service.

“Entrepreneurship 101” is great edX course directed by Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Founders behind start-ups such as HubSpot, FINsix, Oscomp Systems, Lank and other took the course while studying at MIT.  As the course states, “the 25,600 companies started by MIT alumni generate $2 trillion in revenue and have created 3.3 million jobs”. “If MIT were a country, it would be the 11th largest economy in the world.”

What is the cost estimate to build Open edX?

According to OpenHub.net, it is $5,4 million.

This math comes from considering that the size of the Open edX codebase size is 374,602 lines, the average salary of a developer is $55,000 per year and the estimated effort amounts to 99 person-years. The Basic COCOMO model, an algorithmic software cost model, was used for the estimate.

Finding documentation about Open edX’s functionalities is not an easy task.

In addition to our ebook (“The Ultimate Guide to Open edX”), updated to the December 2014 edition, this web page came out recently. It is a useful collection of links to documents.

When you produce a blended course or a MOOC you realize how important it is to have free digital teaching and learning content at your disposal.

Here is a list of helpful websites:

1. Open Educational Resources (OER) Commons. Almost everything (peer-reviewed textbooks, lesson plans, video lectures, worksheets…). Creative Commons-licensed and open for modification and adaptation.

2. Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. Colleges, government agencies, and other education organizations belong to this group.

3. Flat World Knowledge. Creative Commons-licensed material.

4. HippoCampus. Intended for high school and college students and instructors interested in supplementing their course materials.

5. Open Textbook Catalog. Customizable and printable online textbooks.

6. P2PU (Peer 2 Peer University). This organization leverages both open content and the open social web.

7. CK-12. This foundation provides free, openly-licensed digital textbooks for K-12.

8. Shmoop. Writing guides, analyses, discussions and other free resources.

9. Curriki. Free-to-use digital learning and teaching material.

10. MIT Open CourseWare: Videos, lectures, exams… all open to the public and free of charge.

edX is growing fast and as a result there are sixteen new job positions available at edX’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Engineers, analysts, designers, developers, interns, etc. edX’s workforce is formed today of 120 employees, and 40 of them are developers.