edX has announced 23 new Professional Certificate programs tailored for specific jobs and career paths.
These skill-based courses, intended for employers who are seeking talent, have been designed by top universities and companies such as Berkeley or Microsoft.
The program was launched in April 2017, and now includes 49 series from 23 edX partner institutions.
Part of this program is also six new Spanish-language programs.
edX launched the 2018 Open edX conference website, which will be celebrated on May 30 and 31 in Montréal, Canada.
The event will take place at the HEC Montreal, Pavillon Decelles, and will be hosted by Université de Montréal, HEC Montréal, and Polytechnique Montréal, the three founding institutions behind EDUlib.
It will discuss: innovative uses across higher education, training, and lifelong learning, instructional design and course production techniques, and methods for operating, extending and enhancing the Open edX platform.
Similar to previous years, the Open edX conference is expected to attract around 300 developers, educators, and decision-makers.
In addition to Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX, a featured speaker will be Zvi Galil, Dean at Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing.
Tickets, from $220 to $470, can be purchased now at a discount.
Also, the call for proposals has been already opened. Submission deadline is March 2nd.
OPINION | CONTRIBUTING WRITER
By ZOE MACKAY*
During times of unease about the affordability and accessibility of American higher education, philanthropic programs have stepped in to qualm some aspects of the plethora of student debt anxieties. Most notably, as reported in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, Steve Klinsky founded Modern States Education Alliance and introduced the “Freshman Year for Free” initiative.
The United States is dealing with a major student loan debt issue—over 44 million Americans have accumulated 1.48 trillion in student loan debt. With little action from the federal government, both states and the private sector have attempted to tackle this issue. With the aspiration of offering high-quality education to anyone—and anywhere— The Freshman Year for Free initiative has garnered praise from many big names.
Partnering with the College Board, Modern States funded the development of 30+ courses taught by professors at top institutions, along with an advanced educational platform, based on Open edX software. These courses prepare students to take the Advanced Placement (AP) or College Level Examination Program (CLEP) tests, which allows the students who pass to gain college credit—therefore, to obtain a degree from an institution, that potential student would have to take less courses which translates to paying a lower total tuition. Although Modern States only launched last year, there are roughly 50,000 students already on their way to earning college credit.
IBL Studios was hired to produce the courses from scratch in their New York-based studios, with a requirement to produce one major MOOC per month. During the pre-production phase, top-tier educational consultants worked in partnership with professors to produce curricula that would ensure learners mastery of the many CLEP and AP topics, documented by The City Journal in their Winter 2018 edition.
IBL Studios functions on the premise that high-quality educational videos need not be time consuming nor expensive. Using the live-production technique, IBL Studios produces real-time educational videos that do not necessitate any post-production stress. Not only does this technique engage learners to a higher degree, since the professors can speak naturally and directly to their students, but it also saves months’ worth of post-production time needed in traditional forms of filming. As a testament to their time-saving techniques, IBL Studios has produced over 40 high-quality courses in the last year alone.
While real-time production is ideal in itself, IBL offers other reasons. Not only is there a three-sided white cyclorama where professors can lecture next to their pre-designed course slides, but there are many other options: a light board, best for writing or drawing complex examples, an audio recording room, green screen, and a 4k control room.
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* ZOE MACKAY is the Lead Learning Strategist at IBL
In 2017, the MOOC landscape has grown into 9,400 courses (6,850 in 2016) and 78 million learners, according to data gathered by Class Central.
“The narrative in the early days of the MOOC space was around the disruption to universities. Six years later, we know that MOOCs are not going to lead to the demise of universities. However, according to the previous CEO of Coursera, Rick Levin, while MOOCs may not have disrupted the higher education market, they are disrupting the labor market. The real audience for these courses is not the traditional university student but what Levin calls the “lifelong career learner”: someone who might be well beyond their college years, but takes online courses with the goal of achieving professional and career growth,” writes Dhawal Shah.
The total potential revenue collected by these platforms now exceeds $65 million, which comes from 7,000 students enrolled, estimates Class Central.
Revenue comes from certificates, micro-credentials, university credit, online degrees, and corporate training.
Free courses –which are increasingly shringking– acted as a marketing channel that feeds customers into other
higher priced products.
edX.org remains the only platform that still offers most of its courses for free.
On the corporate training side, the Coursera for Business service attracted over 500 companies in 2017, up
from 30 last year. EdX for Business is now working with 40 companies.
The edX organization has started to quietly develop a “MicroBachelors” degree, designed to break the undergraduate credential into modular components, according to edSurge. The project, now in the early stages, has received a $700,000 grant from the Lumina Foundation. It is part of edX long-term vision that began with its MicroMaster program.
“Education in five to ten years will become modular, omnichannel, and lifelong. We are going to make it so,” said Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, during a higher-education innovation summit hosted by the U.S. Department of Education.
“We will launch MicroBachelors within the next year or two and do the same modularization with the bachelor’s degree,” he said. “We’ve already launched Global Freshman Academy with ASU, that is a precursor to the MicroBachelors.”
Sanjay Sarma, vice president for open learning at MIT, said to edSurge.com that while his institution is not working on a MicroBachelors degree, he thinks the concept is a natural extension of MicroMasters. “It’s more for folks who couldn’t attend college.”
The big idea is offering online a low-cost, low-risk way for students to start an undergraduate education even if they can’t get to a campus.
A growing number of players in the Open edX community continues to look for a solution in learning analytics given the malfunctioning of the native Insights Analytics platform for non-edX.org deployments.
Last week the European provider Opencraft posted a call to developers and supporters encouraging them to participate in a joint effort to create “lighter, faster and cheaper” solution on analytics, in order to respond clients’ use cases and requests.
“Can we enhance the Analytics API offerings to create custom, community-used analytics applications, tailored to specific use cases?” was asking Jill Vogel.
Features required were the following:
Tech Mahindra, a large Indian outsourcing company, will reskill their 117,000 employees through edX courses.
The company has reached an agreement with edX.org to enhance their employee’s development program in areas such as Cybersecurity, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Business Analytics, amongst others, Tech Mahindra announced that they will fund certifications.
“This groundbreaking partnership with Tech Mahindra furthers our mission and underscores our commitment to edX learners in India and around the globe,” said Anant Agarwal, edX CEO.
“Training and Reskilling are more imperative and relevant to reinvent and tap into new market opportunities arising out of technological change and new customer requirements,” said CP Gurnani, CEO, and MD at Tech Mahindra.
Two million students have attracted the University of Queensland’s UQx MOOC and MicroMasters programs –in particular, Sustainable Energy and Corporate Innovation.
“The enrolment numbers confirm that MOOCs remain an effective way to present UQ’s quality teaching to a global audience,” said UQ Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) Professor Joanne Wright.
She highlighted the fact that UQ has moved from the standalone “showcase” MOOCs to MicroMasters programs which are recognized by employers and can be also used by students to seek entry to on-campus programs.
“We are applying that expertise to transform the on-campus delivery of courses for UQ students,” Professor Wright said.
UQx last year established MicroMasters programs in Business Leadership and Leadership in Global Development.
UQx’s catalog on edX now stands at 47 MOOCs, including four MicroMasters programs.
Pearson’s enterprise learning platform in India will include edX.org course programs. More specifically, Pearson Professional Programs will bundle edX courses and add instructor support, career progression services. Currently, Pearson includes new manager entry point training, programmes in the domain of business and management, new age skills, and custom learning for senior leaders.
This initiative is the result of a partnership between edX.org and Pearson. The programs offered include MicroMasters and professional certification:
1- Supply Chain management – MIT
2- Business Analytics – Columbia University
3- Artificial intelligence – Columbia University
4- Data Science – UC San Diego
5- Robotics University of Pennsylvania
6- International Business – Thunderbird School of Management
7- Digital Product Management Boston University
8- Digital Marketing – Wharton
“This partnership with Pearson will offer Indian learners a blended learning experience of online courses on the EdX platform with personalized instructor support and career progression assistance,” Amit Goyal, India head at edX said.