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Dartmouth College Professor Petra Bonfert-Taylor and Institut Mines-Télécom (IMT) of France Professor Rémi Sharrock won the 2019 edX Prize for Exceptional Contributions in Online Teaching and Learning. The announcement was done during a virtual Town Hall, which replaced the annual edX Global Forum (canceled because of the uprising in Hong Kong).

The winners teach, through a joint partner program, the C Programming with Linux Professional Certificate program. This class has been running on edX.org since June 2018 and will be offered again in March 2020.

To date, the program has logged over 170,000 enrollments in the seven courses of the series.

“Both instructors solved how to provide rich, formative feedback to learners in real-time, at scale,” Anant Agarwal, co-CEO at edX, explained in a blog-post. “By using two open-source learning environments, the team was able to remove the most common barriers to beginner coders.”

The two professors and their team spent a full year intensively working on the design, production, and development in this seven-course sequence.

Part of Bonfert-Taylor and Sharrock’s team were: Joseph Beaudoin, senior video producer at Dartmouth; Michael Goudzwaard, DartmouthX lead; Delphine Lalire, MOOC program manager at IMT; Ella Hamonic, an independent instructional designer commissioned by IMT; and Mathias Hiron, developer at IMT.

“The world is a better place when knowledge flows freely,” Professor Bonfert-Taylor said. “One of my biggest passions is to transform education through the development of programs that provide accessible and high-quality student-centered learning opportunities across international and socio-economic boundaries.”

The two winners of the edX Prize were chosen among more finalists, as shown below.

IBL News | New York

D2L, whose signature product is the Brightspace LMS, announced yesterday that it completed in moving 100% of its clients to the AWS Cloud, in a modernization effort that took three to five years.

In addition, DSL – one of the three commercial LMSs, along with Canvas and Blackboard Learn– added other improvements to their core platform.

The major transition to the cloud has allowed D2L to retain 98% of its education clients, according to its data.

“We said we’d do it, we did it — and our customers can count on us to deliver,” said D2L CEO John Baker. “We listened closely to our clients to make sure we were doing it right.”

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Not all schools have turned into the all-for-business MOOC-model. The George Washington University (GW), which hosts four MOOCs, still holds the belief that self-paced classes help disseminate knowledge at no cost.

In addition, officials at GW said the courses help their schools reach out to thousands of people from around the globe and make learning accessible beyond the GW community for students who can not attend classes full or part-time on-campus or online.

Ken Schappelle, Director of Marketing and Communications for the School of Nursing, said at GW’s The Hatchet, “by the belief that all people deserve quality health care, we aspire to be trusted advocates for the advancement of societal well-being in the clinic, community, and statehouse.”

The School of Nursing offers two MOOCs, one on healthcare safety launched in May 2016 and one on clinical simulations launched in June.

These courses have attracted more than 10,000 enrollees from around the world, with especially “strong” representation from Europe and Asia.

MOOCs at The George Washington University started in 2014, with Dr. Lorena Barba, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

She established two semester-long MOOCs in computing and aerodynamics in 2014 and 2017.

More than 10,000 users have enrolled in her Practical Numerical Methods with Python course since its inception in 2014.

The course teaches users how to work with Python, an online programming language.

Barba has taken on the responsibility for creating, running and updating the existing courses, which are fully open at openedx.seas.gwu.edu.

“These are all a ‘one-woman show,’” she explained.

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The Open edX platform is immersed in a race against the clock to upgrade to Python 3, as Python 2 will be non-supported and deprecated at the end of 2019. Meaning, if someone finds a security problem in Python 2, it will not have the ability to be easily fixed.

The Python Software Foundation decided that January 1st of 2020 will be the day that it will sunset Python 2. Python 2 was released in 2000 and today there are improvements that Python 2 can’t handle.

A part of the upgrade of the Open edX platform corresponds to course authors. In this regard, the edX managing team has urged instructors who use Python Evaluated Input problems to immediately upgrade into Python 3.

Recently, edX outlined in this document how it plans to scope the problem, migrate the code, and work with the Open edX community to “ensure that the process is as painless as possible, and meets the needs of our stakeholders.”

The Open edX software is considered a large project, spanning many applications and GitHub repositories, with even more dependencies on third-party libraries.

“Thanks to helping from the community, we’re making good progress,” Ned Batchelder, Open edX Software Architect said. “The Python test suite for our main repository now runs under both Python 2 and Python 3.”

Another porting effort ahead points to Django, the framework extensively used on Open edX web applications. The current version 1.11 of Django is coming to its end soon and there is a need to move to Django 2.2.

Once the platform runs on Python 3 and Django 2.2, the next Open edX release, called Juniper, will get started.

• OEP-7: Migrating to Python 3