Author: IBL News

The three big MOOC providers – Coursera, edX.org, and Udacity – have built effective marketing channels, having a unique competitive advantage because of their lower user acquisition costs of in the online degree space compared to traditional players.

“MOOCs have become big business,” concludes the expert Dhawal Shah, director of Class-Central.com. Both the online degree and the corporate learning markets are their new revenue sources.

• Coursera, with 1000+ corporate partners, is making $100M in annual revenue, according to Class-Central.com. Along with the launch of six new MOOC-based online degrees, Coursera recently disclosed they made $9.6M in tuition from their online degrees.
• Udacity, with over 400 employees, got $70M in revenues in 2017, up from $29M in 2016.

This optimistic atmosphere was shared two weeks ago in San Diego, during the ASU+GSV summit.  A panel of the top leaders provided hints, but no numbers, on the future of education and training at scale.

• “Every degree will be offered online,” said Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO at Coursera. “Coursera for Business grew 300 percent last year”, he added. “CEOs want these programs for their employees”.
• “We see many employees taking these MOOC-style courses”. “People will be constantly upskilling,” said Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX. “Education is now much more modular.” “Modularity and stackability are very important”.
• “Now we see a job description and we do the curriculum”, revealed Vishal Makhijani, CEO at Udacity.

Below is the video of the entire talk.

“MOOCs Afters The “Madness”
Moderator: Louise Rogers, Strategic Advisor, GSV Acceleration Fund
Anant Agarwal, CEO, edX;
Li Chao, President, Xuetang;
Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO, Coursera;
Vishal Makhijani, CEO, Udacity

The growth of deployed Open edX websites and produced courses significantly accelerated in the last year: from 340 websites to over 800, and from 240 courses to more than 800.

These data come from the edX organization‘s internal research and are shown in the graphic above.

The majority of these websites and courses are located out of the United States, although some big Open edX ecosystems have been released in the country; namely, NVIDIA‘s Deep Learning Institute to train engineers, Global Knowledge‘s new platform or George Washington University‘s Engineering initiative with courses using Jupyter technology.

More details will be provided during the 2018 Open edX conference. Specifically, four edX managers will address the edX growth subject during a talk titled “The State of Open edX”. Also, Global Knowledge and GW’s representatives will talk about their projects.

We took our data of global #openedx deployments, imported into @MapD, et voila! We have a snazzy graph! From installing Docker to displaying the graph took less than 30 mins. pic.twitter.com/I67HnCwDTI

— Open edX (@OpenEdX) April 26, 2018

George Washington University’s Professor Lorena Barba has announced the release of the Jupyter Viewer XBlock for the Open edX platform. This tool, developed in collaboration with IBL Education, allows to dynamically display content from a Jupyter notebook available on a public URL. It is available now as open source software on GitHub.

Prof. Barba used the XBlock in the second half of her course module, Get Data Off The Ground with Python.

“Jupyter is a killer app for education. Many people are writing lessons, tutorials, whole courses and even books using Jupyter. It is a new genre of an open educational resource (OER). What if you want to create an online course on Open edX using content originally written as a Jupyter notebook? You certainly don’t want to duplicate the content, much less copy-and-paste. This XBlock allows you to embed the content dynamically from a notebook available on a public URL,” said Prof. Lorena Barba.

“This is the first of a series of integrations between Jupyter Notebooks and Open edX. It takes care of the code visualization problem, especially that which distinguishes between inputs and outputs,” said Miguel Amigot, CTO at IBL Education.

Along with this XBlock, Lorena Barba and Miguel Amigot will present during the 2018 Open edX conference (May 29-31, Montreal, Canada), a solution for grading student work submitted as an uploaded notebook.

Redis University is a new online destination launched last week by Redis Labs with the goal of training its community of developers.

So far it only includes a foundational course: a six-week / 15-hour, free course titled “RU101 – Introduction to Redis Data Structures”. It will start in June 2018 and be taught by Alvin Richards, Chief Education Officer at Redis Labs (see intro video below).

This initial course is designed as an introduction for developers at the beginning of their journey. It will include video tutorials, quizzes, demos and assignments with firm due dates. Learners will be able to explore the Redis Enterprise solution for free while sharing information and discussing applications and use cases with their peers.

Students who complete it with grades of 65 percent or higher will receive certificates and online badges for their LinkedIn profiles.

Redis plans to launch two courses this year and run each of them twice, focusing initially on developers.

“Redis University was designed to foster that sense of community by opening the door to new users and use cases. We want to give everyone in the ecosystem the opportunity to explore the full breadth of the Redis platform and share ideas that could spark future innovation,” explained Mr. Richards.

Redis University has been built using the automatic “Tahoe by Appsembler” tool to create Open edX-based websites.

An adaptive learning architecture for the Open edX platform has been tested in the last months by a research group led by Harvard University and Microsoft.

This project, called ALOSI (Adaptive Learning Open Source Initiative), is based on creating an open source adaptive engine powering individualized learning and assessment pathways. This software includes the Bridge for Adaptivity and the ALOSI adaptive engine, two applications supporting a common framework for experimentation that integrates several modular components.

The ALOSI architecture integrates seamlessly via LTI with edX, Canvas and other LMS’s as well as independently with content repositories.  ALOSI uses Bayesian Knowledge Tracing—a  machine learning algorithm—to power the individualized pathways.

During the 2018 Open edX Conference, Andrew Ang, a research data engineer from Harvard University, will show this modular architecture for adaptive learning.

Mr. Ang will demonstrate the use of this system with the Microsoft MOOC on edX, “Essential Statistics for Data Analysis Using Excel”, and how the mentioned research group used various advanced features of Open EdX (LTI provider, course blocks API, import/export, content experiments).

The 2018 Open edX conference schedule was finally disclosed this week, with workshops intended for beginners and advanced users, either in academia, enterprise or educational organizations. This is the URL, https://openedx2018.sched.com/

Some of the of most innovative sessions will be the following:

• Building blocks for adaptivity: a modular architecture for adaptive learning implementation and research.
  – Andrew Ang, Harvard University
• Future Directions of Open edX Architecture
  – Nimisha Asthagiri, edX
• Collaborative-based Personalization On Campus and Online
  – Zachary Pardos, UC Berkeley
• Course Recommendation Systems with Open edX Data
  – Chinmay Nivargi and Niharika Sharma, Applied Materials
• Designing Tools to Scaffold Collaborative Learning within MOOCs
  – Dr. Aneesha Bakharia and Mr John Zornig, The University of Queensland
• Lessons Learned from Launching a Global Enterprise Learning Platform Based on Open edX
  – Miguel Amigot (IBL Education), Michelle Lockard (Global Knowledge), Paul Tocatlian (Global Knowledge)
• An instructional designer’s POV: a love letter to Open edX and how to make it better
  – Gabriel D’Amours, Opencraft
• Jupyter-based courses in Open edX: authoring and grading with notebooks
  – Lorena A. Barba (The George Washington University), Miguel Amigot (IBL Education)
• Building an online M.S. with Open edX
  – Elliot Visconsi, Notre Dame
• Analytics from Scratch: Harnessing your data to learn from your learner
  – Nick Ettlinger, edX

• Class-Central: Sessions We’re Excited About at the 2018 Open edX Conference
• IBL: Open edX 2018 Conference Speaker Schedule Released

edX released this week a beta version of the Hawthorn Open edX platform. Its branch name is open-release/hawthorn.beta1.

This beta version is based on edX code master branches of April 18. Essentially, it provides developers a marked version to test installation and migration of the code, which the edX organization encourages to do as a way to get feedback.

The release candidate of the Hawthorn Open edX software is now officially expected by the end of May, ready for the Open edX developers conference, scheduled for May 29-31 in Montreal, Canada.

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Hey all,

• IBL: The Hawthorn Open edX Release Plan Will Start This Month

Finally a course about ethics on Artificial Intelligence!

Microsoft has launched on edX “Ethics and law in data and analytics”, a six-week, self-paced, free course to learn how to apply ethical and legal frameworks to initiatives in the data profession.

This edX course, which is part of the Microsoft Professional Program in Artificial Intelligence, will allow students to explore practical approaches to data and analytics problems posed by work in Big Data, Data Science, and AI.

Also, they will be able to investigate applied data methods for ethical and legal work in Analytics and AI.