Author: IBL News

edX finally announced that the Hawthorn Open edX release process will start next week, with the creation of Hawthorn.1 Beta 1.

Before issuing the first release candidate of the Hawthorn code, edX plans to add underpinnings that support the new European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law, scheduled to take effect on May 25th.

“Once enough GDPR support has landed, we will create the Hawthorn master branches from master, and release a first Hawthorn.1 release candidate,” edX engineer Ned Batchelder explained in the General Open edX discussion forum at Google.

“This means that features can shift or be added between Beta 1 and RC 1.  The Beta will be for testing the general upgrade paths and functionality of the code that has been written since Ginkgo was cut nine months ago.  I want to get that code into testers hands sooner rather than later, even if it means that there could still be significant changes in Hawthorn,” he added.

Another reason for this additional delay has been the upgrade from Django 1.8 to Django 1.11, which has already been completed.

The edX organization has started to release details regarding the upcoming Open edX 2018 conference speaker schedule.

“Here are just a few of our favorites you won’t want to miss,” says edX.

• “Using neuroscience to evaluate the influence of media richness on the cognitive and emotional engagement in MOOCs”, by Pierre-Majorique Léger of HEC Montréal.

• “Gamification in Learning” by José Antonio González Rodriguez of Proversity.

• “Lessons Learned from Launching a Global Enterprise Learning Platform Based on Open edX”, by Michelle Lockard, Director of Product, Global Knowledge & Miguel Amigot, Chief Technology Officer, IBL Education & Paul Tocatlian, Director of Engineering, Global Knowledge.

• “Building an online M.S. with Open edX”, by Elliott Visconsi of the University of Notre Dame.

The fifth Open edX conference is scheduled for May 29-31 in Montreal, Canada.

EdCast, a Mountain View-based educational platform start-up, has redefined its commercial focus, transitioning from an Open edX hosting company into a knowledge cloud solution for workforce upskilling, and launched a marketplace for corporate learning content providers called ContentExchange.

According to the company, partners in this marketplace include edX.org, Regis Group, Harvard ManageMentor, Mandel Communications, Intuition and Capella University, among others.

ContentExchange uses an AI-powered engine to maximize the relevance and timeliness of content.

Regarding the participation of edX, Lee Rubenstein, Vice President of Business Development at edX, said: “edX is proud to be one of EdCast’s ContentExchange partners, making our unique library of valuable content available to the marketplace, so we can continue to provide innovative solutions in meeting corporate learning needs.”

“We launched the ContentExchange to provide a marketplace for leading global organizations to upskill their team members, allowing them to discover and connect with leading content providers from around the world,” said Karl Mehta, Founder and CEO of EdCast.

With more than 1,000 students enrolling every semester since its creation in 2015, Foundations of Data Science, the fastest-growing course in the history of UC Berkeley, has been launched online for free this April on edX.org.

This course at California’s flagship public university , titled Data 8X: Foundations of Data Science, will cover everything from testing hypotheses, applying statistical interferences, visualizing distributions and drawing conclusions, all while coding in Python and using real-world data sets.

It will be a sequence of three five-week courses taught by three winners of Berkeley’s top teaching honor: the Distinguished Teaching Award: DeNero, statistics professor Ani Adhikari and computer science professor David Wagner. “Our goal is to bring data science to the widest possible audience,” said Adhikari.

Berkeley said that each course takes 5 to 6 weeks, with an investment of 4 to 6 hours per week, per course. Learners who want to earn the certificate will need to pay only $357 for the entire program.

The NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI) launched this week during its annual GTC conference in San Jose, California, a deeply integrated, distributed and built-to-scale Open edX ecosystem with custom labs for certified instructor-led training and self-paced courses.

The first course, Fundamentals of Deep Learning for Computer Vision, was opened on Sunday 25 during an eight hour, face-to-face training session for three hundred learners who used the edX code-based platform for assessments, exercises and laboratories while interacting in the room with peers and teacher assistants.

NVIDIA engineer and educator Mike Mendelson taught, along with two dozen assistants, this hands-on workshop, developed with the goal of providing the basics of deep learning by training and deploying neural networks.

A second course, Fundamentals of Accelerated Computing with CUDA C/C++, was also offered during the same day. Students learned, practiced and got certified on CUDA’s tools and techniques to accelerate CPU-only applications to run on massively parallel GPUs.

This uniquely blended model was praised by participants, mostly engineers, as a highly effective and engaging method of training. NVIDIA partnered with IBL Education to develop, scale and maintain the platform.

The two courses remained open as part of NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute’s catalog. In the following weeks, it will be enhanced with video lectures and other learning resources for tens of courses.

The Deep Learning Institute (DLI) currently offers hands-on training in deep learning and accelerated computing self-paced courses and instructor-led workshops designed to solve real-world problems.

DLI provides learners with a fully configured, GPU-accelerated workstation in the cloud, complete with software tools, neural networks, and datasets.

Update from our CTO, Miguel Amigot, one week after its release:

Millennials are turning to the Internet for education.

A recent study conducted by the Mayo Clinic shows that millennials thrive in online learning environments where collaboration, feedback, technology, and mentorship take place, instead of traditional classrooms.

For example, an educational social platform such as Edmodo allows students to create online communities where they can share, communicate and collaborate. In addition, the marriage of AI and ed-tech makes it easier for students to receive feedback on their performance.

• Forbes: Why Many Millennials Are Turning To The Internet For Education

Over 5,000 students (3,000 Boeing employees) have completed so far the Architecture and Systems Engineering course series developed by MITx in collaboration with Boeing and edX.

TC Haldi, senior director at MITxPro, disclosed this during a round-table at SXSW, in conversation with Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX, and Mark Cousino, Director of Learning at Boeing. Completion rate has been 97 percent.

The four-course, 17-week online certified program was designed for Boeing by MITx. The cost is $849 per course — $2,499 for the entire program. Total CEUs from MIT is 8.5. The program is now open for the Fall (September 17, 2018 – March 18, 2019).

The program is delivered on the edX platform, with integrated peer-to-peer assessments, group projects, discussion forums, polls, and surveys.

Another successful training MOOC program has been Microsoft’s. Anant Agarwal mentioned that around 16,000 Microsoft employees have taken courses at edx.org.

• Cyborgedu.net: Dynamics of Lifelong Learning: Reinventing Corporate Education.
• Class Central: Boeing and NASA Partner with MIT’s Professional Development Arm to Produce Online Courses
• Listen to the panel