Author: IBL News

Still no launch date for the mooc.org portal, which was scheduled for June 2014.

Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX, disclosed in his blog that the mooc.org portal will be launched “later this year”. He revealed also that “more than 5,000 inquiries from schools, teachers, foundations and individuals who want to be part of the edX open-source learning movement” have been received via the mooc.org website.

“Mooc.org remains a priority for edX. We learn something new every day from every new inquiry and innovation we receive from our growing group of members, collaborators and contributors. And this community is at the core of our vision–to create a space where we can all be learners and where we can all be teachers–as we continue to increase access to quality education for everyone around the world.”

Open edX Technical Conference, November 19, in Boston

Another important date for the Open edX community will be November 19th, 2014. The “Open edX Technical Conference” will take place on that day in Boston. It’s  intended “for developers, technologists, adopters, IT leads, education specialists, integrators, or anyone who wants to learn about Open edX, or share the experience with the platform.”

The conference will be a mixture of speakers and breakout sessions followed by a social gathering with food and beverage.

One the most-innovative trends in higher education is that of distributed knowledge.

George Washington University (GWU) is launching this fall semester a groundbreaking example of inter-institutional collaboration in open education through a MOOC titled “Practical Numerical Methods with Python”, which will be run also as a flipped classroom experience (on-campus and online).

Four instructors from four continents will collaborate in the design and development of course content and learning objectives, and all materials will be released under an open, Creative Commons licensing model, through this newly created Open edX platform: GW Online.

GWU’s office of the Vice Provost for Online Education, Academic Technologies and Professor Lorena Barba –in the picture above- will run the project, which will have as participants instructors from Southampton University (UK), Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and KAUST (Saudi Arabia). The initiative has received sponsorship support from Amazon Web Services and NVIDIA. (Disclosure: IBL Studios Education is providing technical support and professional services.)

For the project, GWU will be deploying its own Open edX instance, “without surrendering our IP to for-profits nor subjecting students to creepy data mining,” says Prof. Barba. “We believe that higher education is the core mission of universities and we want to contribute to open education with for-profit companies having only a supporting role.” The course will be aimed at first-year engineering graduate students or advanced seniors. On campus, the partner instructors will manage their course as they see fit. Learning lessons will also be hosted on GitHub and will keenly accept issues and pull requests from students, MOOC participants and observers. One of the goals is to join in scholarly conversations and course activities to keep students engaged and encourage participation. “In other words, we adopt and embrace the open-source model in our educational endeavor,” explains Prof. Barba.

“It’s going to be a “do-it-yourself” adventure, and we expect to encounter snags and make mistakes. But we are convinced that a fully open and connected model for learning is adaptable and self-healing, so we have no worries.” (…) “We want to invite you and every one who is interested in scientific computing to learn (and teach) with us.”

Updates:

• August 11: GW to Launch Scientific Computing MOOC This Fall
• August 12: El primer curso MOOC en el que colabora la Escuela de Ingeniería de UC
• August 13: GW Online, Another Great Open edX Initiative
• August 14: George Washington University adopts Open edX to launch 3 MOOCs (Class-Central)

Hybrid learning –the one that blends face-to-face and online courses and uses technology to modify lessons based on the students’ progress– is forcing to rethink the model of teaching and learning. Its positive impact is even higher than MOOCs’.

In fact, an increasing number of experts are putting hybrid courses at the top of the list of innovations.

Examine, for example, this research: “The Innovative University: What College Presidents Think About Change in American Higher Education“. 81 percent of 349 presidents of public and private not-for-profit colleges and universities interviewed feel enthusiastic about mentioned blended learning experiences.

This report, sponsored by Blackboard and The Chronicle of Higher Education, “emphasizes that schools of all types and leaders at all levels are being forced to reevaluate what it means to be relevant. We need a re-imagined educational experience that directly connects learners to success,” said Jay Bhatt, CEO of Blackboard.

With 23 blended learning classes involving 2,800 students on campus, MIT is one of the most aggressive universities adopting blended learning.

With this experience and the 3 million records gathered from the edX platform –co-founded by MIT and Harvard–, it is time to study how people learn and re-engineer teaching and learning technology –namely, the Open edX platform.

“We have terabytes of data, including students working on problems,” said Anant Agarwal, president of edX and MIT teacher, in a Campus Technology keynote speech.

“We can capture every answer entered. We know what they’re doing at what time. What country they come from. We can look at what a student did to get an answer”. “We know what parts of the learning experience contribute to successful outcomes, and whether that’s tied to certain kinds of students. We are using this to learn how students learn.”

One promising idea is to use the platform to blend the best of online and in-person education, and continuously improve the technology in much the same way that Google tweaks its services.

Anant Agarwal noted that San Jose State University has taught the circuits and electronic course in a blended environment four times and has seen the failure rate drop from around 40 percent to 9 percent. Now 11 schools in the California State University system are adopting the same approach.

A solid-state chemistry class at MIT, led by professor Michael Cima, incorporates the idea that the entire course is a continuous exam. Students solve problems online.

In some scenarios, learning becomes a sort of video game, wherein instant feedback is a powerful component of gamification.

Another interesting data regarding MOOCs and their 5 percent pass rates: when students pay a fee for ID-verified certifications, the pass rate is closer to 60 percent.

 

 

 

 

Is the Canvas open-source LMS becoming the next dominant platform in online education?

See edutechnica’s graphic above.

• An increasing number of institutions are switching their LMS from Moodle and Sakai to Canvas LMS.
• Canvas has overtaken Desire2Learn in terms of number of enrollments.
• ⅕ of institutions that currently run Sakai seem to be willing to switch their LMS and have set up tests with either Canvas or Blackboard Learn.
• The new Unizin consortium, a potential threat to edX, is creating a new learning ecosystem that will use Canvas LMS. Through Unizin, Canvas could add Colorado State University (Blackboard), Indiana University (Sakai), Oregon State University (Blackboard), Purdue University (Blackboard), University of Florida (Sakai, with some use of Canvas), University of Michigan (Sakai) and University of Wisconsin (Desire2Learn) to its list of customers.
• Canvas Catalog, a recent white label storefront solution to create branded web portals, is expected to attract many more customers.

“Instructure Canvas is quietly building what could become one of the dominant platforms in online education, from academic to vocational and lifelong learning,” writes Edukwest.com.

 

MOOCs’ offer is growing exponentially, as shown in this graphic by Class Central. In addition, there are more providers –the main ones being Coursera, edX, Udacity, Canvas.net and CourseSites in the U.S.; FutureLearn in the UK; Iversity in Europe; Open2Study in Australia; MiriadaX in Latin America and Spain– and many more MOOC finders.

Here is a list of the top 5:

• Class-Central.com. It tracks more than 50,000 courses. It has a great feature called “Mooc tracker”, which allows you to build your own catalog of courses and get notified.
• Accredible.com. It tracks free and paid video courses from the nine best course providers. It highlights the idea of collecting certificates and getting references.
• CourseBuffet.com. It includes MOOC providers such as Saylor.org Academy, India’s NPTEL and the OpenCourseWare consortium, that aren’t well represented by other aggregators.
• RedHoop.com. It covers an extensive offering of video-based courses, both free and paid. So far, RedHoop has collected over 21,400 courses, of which 3,600 are free. It features an interesting top 100 list.
• TopFreeClasses.com. It ranks courses in terms of popularity.

 

If you have taken a course at edX.org you have an idea of what this platform offers (this free demo course allows you better understand the edX learning experience; another overview for a newbie is offered by Stanford University at this address, inside the Courseware tab). There are engaging lessons containing interactive tools, videos, readings, quizzes, questions, grading techniques and progress reports.

However, building and running an edX course is not an easy task. The edX Studio authoring tool is the CMS (Content Management System) for course creators.  Multiple instructors can work on a course together.

• The 353-page document titled “Getting Started with edX Studio” describes, in detail, how one could manage Open edX’s authoring tool.  The online version is here.

 

• A summarized guide (32 pages) for creating online courses with edX that was written by Anant Agarwal, the president of edX.

 

• There is also a great self-paced course designed to walk you through the process of planning, building and running your own online course. This course is a hidden gem that cannot be found through Google and other search engines. You must register on a private site within edX.org called edge.edx.org. Your edx.org account won’t work here.

One of the largest successes of Open edX technology is the XBlock architecture. Designed by third-party developers and used to create new courseware components –such as a video player, Javascript interactive feature or discussion forum, XBlocks can be reused across courses and shared with the community.

In other words, an XBlock is an extensible system that allows to store data (content, students’ states, etc.), present data (through HTML, CSS, Javascript), run Python code, process user input (record grades, modify states…), etc.

In our opinion, these are the five best, newly developed XBlocks:

• Staff Graded Assignment. Students are invited to upload documents as a way to encapsulate their work on their assignments. Instructors download the files and grade them.
• Mentoring. It automates the workflow of real-life mentoring within an edX course. It supports free-form answers, multiple choice and response questions, rating scales and progression tracking.
• Ooyala Video Player. It places Ooyala videos into edX courses. It supports transcripts, overlays –to place raw text or HTML content at a specific moment in your video– and player tokens –to secure your video content using a token with an expiration time.
• Drag and Drop. Students are required to drag and drop texts or images into different sections as specified by the assignment.
• Image Explorer. It allows display tool tips of an image within the course content.

See a more complete list here. The official explanation of XBlock architecture is at this URL.

The edX Consortium has taken into consideration Stanford University‘s recommendations regarding how to properly run the Open edX community and the platform, and has committed to implement many of those ideas on the 2014-2015 road map.

Beth Porter, VP of Product at edX, has announced this week that the edX product development team will perform these tasks by the end of 2014.

 

1. 1. Create public bug list and active backlog

 

1. 1. Create and update a public road map on a quarterly basis

 

1. 1. Develop named releases and publish them on a quarterly basis

 

1. 1. Publish our API and make the interfaces public  [this API will provide another avenue for integration]

 

1. 1. Designate full-time community manager

 

1. 1. Clarify and welcome dialog about the Open edX mission

 

1. 1. Define KPIs for the success of Open edX (including phone home feature with opt-out)

 

1. 1. Sponsor Open edX conference (Nov 19, 2014)

 

1. 1. Publish our XML format (edXML)

 

1. 1. Launch a Platform Adopter Web site (+Developer area)

 

Beyond its own developments, edX Consortium makes a call for external code contributions and indicates the features that would become part of the supported Open edX platform:

 

1. 1. Support site styling (subset of theming)

 

1. 1. Support Open Stack

 

1. 1. Support LTI 2.0

 

1. 1. Support OLI courses on edX

 

1. 1. Support Mozilla Open Badges integration

 

1. 1. Support Shibboleth integration [no community partner]

 

Finally, edX acknowledges that there are “features that we don’t anticipate having the capacity or interest in developing in the near term.” These items are:

• • Full installation scripts and supporting documentation for non-AWS deployments

 

• • Full SIS, LMS, and other campus system integration projects

 

• • Investment in on-call or full service support engineering team for adopters and developers

 

 

The edX Consortium has announced this week a partnership with Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Labor to start in September a MOOC portal in Arabic, intended for women, youth, disabled people and citizens in rural areas.

The courseware will combine originally produced content with existing courses licensed by edX university members and translated into Arabic. This portal, empowered by Open edX technology, “will deliver vocational and employability skills to historically underserved learners in the region,” explained  Anant Agarwal, CEO at the edX Consortium.

The initiative follows edX’s adoption model as implemented in countries like France (fun-mooc.fr), China (XuetangX.org),  Jordan (edraak.org), Mexico and Rwanda, and it comes at a time wherein the private sector is growing rapidly and business opportunities are expanding in Saudi Arabia –a country wherein the public sector accounts for two-thirds of employment and about 30 percent of young people and women are unemployed, according to the IMF.

Saudi Arabia will make a “significant investment in Open edX and edX’s services”, according to edX. It will be a multi-year collaboration that includes “a research component focused on learning through innovative technologies and R&D”.

A MOOC competitor in the region is Queen Rania Foundation’s Edraak.org, a portal launched in May 2014 as the first not-for-profit Arab platform for MOOCs. The initiative was born also as a result of a partnership with the edX Consortium.

Back then pretty much the same enthusiastic comments were officially released. “We are honored to be a part of Edraak that will open up a world of possibility for intellectually hungry Arab youth and Arab-speaking students worldwide,” said edX Consortium in May. In its latest PR release there was no mention of edraak.org’s project.