Category: Top News

Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX and MIT professor, received last Friday the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the Carlos III University of Madrid. During the same event, celebrated at Getafe’s campus in Madrid, this university conferred the honorary doctorate title to Eric S. Maskin, a professor at Harvard University and a Nobel Laureate in Economics.

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) conferred the title of doctor honoris to both professors “in recognition of their outstanding scientific and academic achievements.”

The tribute to Anant Agarwal was given by Professor Carlos Delgado Kloos, from the Department of Telematic Engineering, whereas the tribute for Eric S. Maskin was undertaken by Professor Luis Corchón, from the UC3M Economics department.

“In addition to his teaching and research into computer architectures, digital circuits, and filter design, Anant Agarwal also stands out for his face as an entrepreneur. In recent years, “he has become a key figure in digital information,” highlighted Professor Kloos.

“Anant established the challenge of educating a billion people in 10 years and is one of the most important leaders in this area, having received all of the prizes and awards possible related to MOOCs and digital education,” added professor Delgado Kloos.

.@UC3M has worked hand-in-hand with @edXOnline to increase access to education to our global community of learners. It is a privilege to partner with an institution that is driven by the same mission as edX – providing high-quality education to everyone, everywhere. https://t.co/ApntOOwUI4

— anant agarwal (@agarwaledu) February 16, 2018

Vocareum, a San Jose-based cloud learning labs, has announced an integrated solution with edX.org through LTI and a single sign-on. This way edX.org users have no need for a separate Vocareum login to stay within the learning platform when they are working on simple micro-assessments or programming exercises. More complex programming assignments or exams are launched in a new browser window.

“The Vocareum solution on edX supports a broad range of courses, including Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, Software Development and more from prestigious schools, including Columbia University, The University of California, San Diego, The Georgia Institute of Technology, and University of Pennsylvania,” has explained the company on a press release.

Another course is Georgia Tech’s CS1301x: Introduction to Computing, which includes over 300 coding exercises.

Global Knowledge, the largest IT training company in the world, has launched its learning platform with over 100 on-demand courses. This platform is a heavily customized solution with the Open edX version at its core. It has been developed in partnership with IBL Education.

 “Our platform is the result of extensive research and customer input. It has been created in response to market demand, in order to help individuals and enterprises upgrade existing skills, acquire a one and address skill gaps.”

CIO magazine recently featured this platform as one of the most innovative:

Global Knowledge offers courses in data analytics, change management, application development, cloud computing, cybersecurity and networking. It’s been around since 1995 and now has over 1,500 employees worldwide with technology partners such as Amazon Web Services, Cisco, SAP, Red Hat, Microsoft and IBM.

It promises to offer the most “relevant and timely content” from the “best instructors” via customized private programs, public training, flexible formats and support for continuing education. Companies should contact Global Knowledge to get a quote, since each program can be customized to a business’ needs.

After smart research, Class-Central.com has listed all of the MOOCs in Coursera that are still completely free (1,174 in total). These are courses from 166 universities including Stanford, Georgia Tech, Yale, Duke, and Michigan. Only 35% of the courses are not in English.

The list collects Class Central’s top 50 free online courses of all time, including the two most popular MOOCs by far — Barbara Oakley’s Learning How To Learn and Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning MOOC.

Class Central has organized the courses into the following categories:

• Computer Science,
• Business,
• Humanities,
• Data Science,
• Personal Development,
• Art and Design,
• Programming,
• Engineering,
• Health and Medicine,
• Mathematics,
• Science,
• Social Sciences, and
• Education and Teaching.

Coursera is, along with edX and Udacity, the main provider of online courses.

Mercer, a leading technology consultant subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies, will curate catalogs of edX courses to prepare its workforce of 22,000 employees.

“Research shows that just 35% of employees’ skills today will be relevant in five years and current jobs will require new skillsets,” said Ilya Bonic, Senior Partner and President of Mercer’s Career business.

The initiative comes after an agreement between Mercer Digital and the edX organization, which was announced this week.  No further details were disclosed.

Edraak.org, the Queen Rania Foundation’s educational site, has announced its expansion into K-12, in order to meet the needs of school-aged children across the Arab world. The project has been powered by a $3 million grant from Google.org as well as support from Google employees on product design.

When fully released by 2020, its digital curricula and learning resources, developed in the Arabic language, will include Mathematics materials for grades 7 and 9, with over 1,200 minutes of video lectures.

These open educational resources will be designed to align with national curricula in the MENA region, which accounts more than 15 million children out of school as a result of armed conflicts and displacement.

The platform, based on Open edX software, will also offer tools and resources for parents and educators, empowering them to guide children’s learning journey.

Edraak CEO Shireen Yacoub stated that “the new platform builds on the success of Edraak’s existing platform for adult learners, which has reached over 1.5 million learners across the Arab world since its launch in 2014”.

Bitnami has just launched a new version of the Open edX platform based on the ginkgo.2 version.

This solution allows for an easy installation for non-professional deployments in the cloud.

This is the download address.

The Linux Foundation has just passed the one million mark for people trained at edX.org, disclosed Clyde Seepersad, General Manager at this organization.

“For example, over 65,000 folks registered for our Blockchain course within the first 100 days. There’s clearly a huge appetite for materials on critical open source projects and we’re committed to continuing to develop courses to help fill the need,” he said.

Other popular courses are  “Introduction to OpenStack (LFS152x), Introduction to Linux and Administering Linux on Azure (LFS205).

“The Linux Foundation has been a valued partner since they joined edX in 2014, and we congratulate them on achieving the milestone of reaching 1 million learners,” explained Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX.

The edX organization is preparing the release of the new version of the Open edX platform called Hawthorn for this March, three months later than scheduled.

Before the launch, a major upgrade from Django 1.8 to Django 1.11 is needed. This task will be completed during February. After this, edX will start the packaging of Hawthorn, a process that will last 4 to 6 weeks.

Technically speaking, edX won’t support Vagrant; Devstack will be based on Docker.

Hawthorn will be the eighth release of the Open edX platform, replacing the existing Ginkgo version.