Category: Top News

Israel X, the national consortium of higher ed institutions in Israel, will release a new edX open course about “Environmental Protection and Sustainability” this August 6. It will be an introductory 30-hour, self-paced course taught by six scientists from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

This course is the result of an Israeli Government partnership between the Ministry of Social Equality and the Council of Higher Education, as an effort to promote academic and professional education in the country as a way to reduce social gaps and accelerate economic growth. This initiative is conducted through Campus.gov.il,  the Israeli National Project for Digital Learning.

Campus.gov.il (or Campus-IL) is, at the same time, the flagship project of Digital Israel in the field of digital education.  This platform, based on the Open edX software, is led by Shai-Lee Spigelman, CEO of Digital Israel Bureau, Ministry of Social Equality.

Unlike the eleven Israel X courses on edX, intended for an English speaking international audience, those at Campus-IL are offered in Hebrew and Arabic and are geared to a local audience of college students and professors, high-schoolers, government workers, adults, job seekers and underprivileged communities.

During the 2018 Open edX Conference, last May in Montreal, Eran Raviv, Director of Campus-IL, explained that this platform will allow the State of Israel to save around $60 million per year in teacher training costs. Mr. Raviv showcased an innovative pilot of 31 teacher training MOOCs.

Campus-IL currently has over 100 courses in development, 40,000 learners in more than 30 courses, 75,000 unique registered users, and 22 academic institutions as participants.

The graphic above shows the six covered areas:

• 21st Century Skills
• Vocational Training
• Government Professional Development
• High School Matriculation Prep
• Academic Courses

The learning opportunities that this project is trying to cover are:

• Accessible High School Education and Higher Education
• Job Training Opportunities
• Professional Development for Public Servants
• Developing Life Skills

In terms of innovation, Campus-IL is developing now the following projects, IBL News reports:

• An online computer science BA degree
• Micro-credentials as part of a teachers’ training innovative model
• A year-long MOOC to replace traditional tests
• A free SAT Course
• Computer Science courses, offering half of the credits needed for a degree

EdX has come up with the idea of creating “Hawthorn Day” in order to get feedback from its open source community before deploying a final release.

In this case, “Hawthorn Day” will be on July 30-31, during a 24 hour period from 2pm EDT/18:00 UTC on July 30th until 2pm EDT/18:00 UTC on July 31.

The edX organization will ask the community to install this software and provide insights into the installation process and its overall usability.

“We will focus on issues with deployment, configuration, performance, and new features added since Ginkgo, which include:

• Completion API to help learners visualize progress within a course
• Adaptive video streaming
• Bundled Program and Course Group purchases

If you find an issue, please help us track it in our Jira Project. If you need help during Hawthorn Day, find us in the #hawthorn-beta channel on Slack (instructions for joining),” explained Matthew DuBose, Community Support Engineer at edX.

Developers who install Hawthorn will receive laptop sleeves and branded t-shirts.

• Open edX Blog Post: Hawthorn Day
• Form to claim prize
• IBL News: The Open edX Hawthorn Version Takes Its Final Steps Before Delivery

Corporations and nonprofit organizations are creating their own online institutes to train external audiences. This is a new trend in professional education that goes beyond the legacy corporate universities. A clear example is the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI).

This Silicon Valley unicorn has created, in partnership with New York-based consultant IBL Education, a sophisticated learning mechanism for developers and data scientists. Technically, it is a distributed and built-to-scale Open edX ecosystem. NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI) follows a smart monetization model. Their courses — which vary from fundamentals to advanced industry-specific courses — are profitable as NVIDIA sells access to individual courses for $90, complete with a course certificate.

A second straightforward option of monetizing online institutes is the subscription model, or selling subscriptions to course platforms to students or corporations. Like the popular music streaming services Spotify, students pay a  monthly fee and gain access to an entire course catalog, or a large portion of it. Another example for the subscription model is the company Pluralsight, a technology learning platform that offers subscriptions for businesses ($499-$699 per user, per year) individuals ($299 per year), academia and government institutions.

A third option of these sales enablement platforms is to sell licenses of courses to resellers. Larger training companies and universities will pay other companies with online institutes to access their courses and host them on their own platforms. For example, Global Knowledge, the largest IT training company in the world, often sells access to courses built by other companies strictly because licensing those courses is more profitable. It is also built as an Open edX learning ecosystem.

IBM’s empowered Cognitive Class Open edX learning platform, which reports having 1 million learners, explained how it went “from a static infrastructure to a dynamic and scalable deployment of dozens of Open edX private portals using Docker.”

• “We migrated from a Moodle deployment to Open edX in 2015. It has served us well, as we are able to serve hundreds of concurrent learners over 70 courses every day,” said Luiz Aoqui, a software engineer at IBM Canada.

• “Docker in and of itself is a fantastic technology but for a highly scalable distributed production environment, you need something on top of it to manage your containers’ lifecycle. Here at Cognitive Class, we decided to use Rancher for this, since it allows us to abstract our infrastructure and focus on the application itself.” (…) “Rancher takes care of creating a private network across all the hosts so they can communicate securely with each other.” (…) “Our Portals are organized in a micro-services architecture and grouped together in Rancher as a stack.”

• “In our infrastructure, we use an IBM Cloud NFS drive that is mounted on the same path in all hosts. The NFS is responsible for storing any persistent data generated by the Portal, from database files to compiled static assets, such as images, CSS and JavaScript files.”

• “Each Portal has its own directory in the NFS drive and the containers mount the directory of that specific Portal. So it’s impossible for one Portal to access the files of another one.”

IBM’s Cognitive Class platform includes courses on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, data science, big data, analytics, and databases. It is offered to businesses and academic organizations as a way to have a private training portal.

•  Cognitive Class Blog: Scaling Our Private Portals with Open edX and Docker

“The edX project has enjoyed rapid international adoption, due in no small measure to how well the software works,” has concluded Mexico-based developer and author Lawrence McDaniel on a well-written introductory article about this ecosystem posted at OpenSource.com.

This is a summary of Lawrence McDaniel‘s  main points:

• Now in its seventh major release, the Open edX software has powered more than 8,000 original courses and 50 million course enrollments. (…) The Open edX platform is used by many of the world’s premier educational institutions as well as private sector companies, public sector institutions, NGOs, non-profits, and educational technology startups, and the project’s global community of service providers continues to make the platform accessible to ever-smaller organizations. If you plan to create and offer educational content to a broad audience, you should consider using the Open edX platform.

• You can install the platform yourself with on-premise equipment or by leveraging any of the industry-leading cloud infrastructure service providers. (…) You can think of the CMS as a “Wordpress” of course content creation and management, and the LMS as a “Magento” of course marketing, distribution, and consumption.

• The Open edX platform GitHub repository contains performant, production-ready code that is suitable for organizations of all sizes. Thousands of programmers from hundreds of institutions regularly contribute to the edX repositories, and the platform is a veritable case study on how to build and manage a complex enterprise application the right way.

• Open edX is extensible via its XBlock component architecture, so your instructors will have the potential to turn good course content into great course content with incremental effort on their parts and yours. (…)  The platform works well in a single-server environment, and it is highly modular, making it nearly infinitely horizontally scalable. It is a theme-able, localizable, and completely open source, providing limitless possibilities to tailor the appearance and functionality of the platform to your needs. The platform runs reliably as an on-premise installation on your own equipment.

• A handful of the edX software modules are not included in the default installation and that these modules are often on the requirements lists of organizations. Namely, the Analytics module, the e-commerce module, and the Notes/Annotations course feature are not part of the default platform installation, and each of these individually is a non-trivial installation. Additionally, you’re entirely on your own with regard to data backup-restore and system administration in general. Fortunately, there’s a growing body of community-sourced documentation and how-to articles, all searchable via Google and Bing, to help make your installation production-ready.

• Setting up oAuth and SSL/TLS as well as getting the platform’s REST API up and running can be challenging, depending on your skill level, even though these are all well-documented procedures. Additionally, some organizations require that MySQL and/or MongoDB databases be managed in an existing centralized environment, and if this is your situation, you’ll also need to work through the process of hiving these services out of the default platform installation.

• Poking around in an Open edX platform installation is a real thrill, and architecturally speaking, the project is a masterpiece. The application modules are Django apps that leverage a plethora of the open source community’s premier projects, including Ubuntu, MySQL, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, Hadoop, and others. (…) The platform’s UI is in flux, with the aim of eventually standardizing on React and Bootstrap. Meanwhile, you’ll find multiple approaches to implementing styling for the base theme, and this can get confusing.

Other articles by Lawrence McDaniel: