Category: Top News

A New XBlock to Award Badges After an Assessment in the Course
The London-based Proversity consultancy has released a Badgr XBlock, which works in conjunction with the open source Badgr Server application or the hosted version at Badgr.io. Badges are based on a passing grade for a specified subsection in a course.

It means that instructors are able to embed the XBlock directly after an assessment in the course. The XBlock reads the grade that the learner gets and, if it’s a pass, the badge is awarded.

This solution differs from the existing default edX.org development, which awards badges to learners at the end of a course.

Proversity’s Chief Learning Officer, Philippa Hardman and Lead Software Engineer, José Antonio González Rodríguez, talked about this solution during the 2018 Open edX Conference in Montreal, Canada. Here are their talk and slides.

GW BADGE OPEN SOURCE SOLUTION: OVER 300 MICRO-CREDENTIALS AWARDED

In the field of badges, the pioneering open source solution is BadgeOne XBlock and Server, developed in 2014-2015 by the George Washington University (GW) and IBL Education with the support of edX.

The badges can be awarded from graded sub-sections in a course in Open edX. The instructor sets the minimum score for the eligibility of the badge, and configures the badge component with the data of the badge service, badge ID, custom messages for the user, at the sub-section (or sub-module) level. There is no limit on the number of badges that can be earned within a course.

In November 2014, GW’s Professor Lorena Barba published a slide deck describing the concept and instructional design for her course, “Practical Numerical Methods with Python.”

She described her proposal of “unbundling the course,” as follows: “Instead of awarding one Certificate of Completion for the whole course, we want to award digital badges for the completion of each individual module.” The course was composed of five modules, each with a graded sub-section and awarded an open badge. The image of the open digital badge awarded for Module 1 of the course was available for re-use under CC-BY, as an example.

Resulting from the work by Prof. Barba and IBL in 2014, edX itself contracted IBL to complete a follow-on project that produced the Badge One server. Combined with the XBlock, this was the first complete solution to award open badges from a graded sub-section in Open edX. Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX, enthusiastically supported this badge development.

Since then, the George Washington University (GW) has been consistently using badges in their engineering courses, awarding over 300 badges. The “Practical Numerical Methods with Python” course has been the reference in this field.

CODE REPOSITORIES
- https://github.com/proversity-org/badgr-xblock
- https://github.com/ibleducation/IBLOpenBadges-xBlock
- https://github.com/ibleducation/BadgeOne
- https://code.badgeone.com/
Here is a learner sharing their badger for a course section in #numericalmooc, in December 2014: https://t.co/xtVHa8LIN0

— Lorena Barba (@LorenaABarba) July 5, 2018

OK, that’s neat, but the blog post does make it sound like this is the first Open Badges integration in #OpenEdx—we did this four years ago with @iblstudios! https://t.co/XzN6Zq95P8 https://t.co/fgDUzt2eqt

— Lorena Barba (@LorenaABarba) July 5, 2018
July 14, 2018
A New Edition of HarvardX’s “Science & Cooking” Course on edX.org with More Top Chefs

World-famous chefs, along with Harvard researchers, are participating in an open online course about the science of cooking. “Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science (Physics)” is a free 6-week, 30-42 hour course, developed by HarvardX on edX.

A new edition of the course has been launched this month of July, and it will be opened for nine months, until March 30, 2018.

The course, taught by three Harvard professors of Physics and Chemical Engineering, explores how traditional and modernist cooking techniques can illuminate basic principles in Chemistry, Physics, and Engineering. Top chefs –Ferran Adria and Jose Andres, among them– demonstrate their creations and show the scientific principles behind them.

This course lets you be an experimental scientist in your very own lab — your kitchen! https://t.co/xHDJucD1kg

— HarvardX (@HarvardOnline) July 3, 2018

Topics include how cooking changes food texture, emulsions and foams, and phase changes.

“You will have the opportunity to become an experimental scientist in your very own laboratory, your kitchen” and “you will learn to think like both a chef and a scientist,” explain the authors of the course.

https://youtu.be/FqJ4_ZaZEP4

July 13, 2018
An edX Survey Finds a Strong Appetite for Career Shifts
Career shifts and the need for continuous education are a sign of our times.

One third of Americans ages 25 – 44 have considered making a career change within the past year, according to an edX survey around trends about career transformation.

The chief drivers of these continuous shifts are a desire for salary increase (39 percent) or interest in another field (21 percent), says that survey, conducted over 1,000 consumers.
“The workplace is changing more rapidly than ever before and employers are in need of highly-skilled talent, especially in fields most impacted by fast developing and in-demand technology, such as automation, artificial intelligence and big data,” Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX Inc, said.

edX blog post by Anant Agarwal: “EdX Survey Finds that about 1/3 of Americans ages 25 – 44 have Completely Changed Fields Since Starting their First Job Post-College”

Business Wire Press release
July 12, 2018
The Open edX Hawthorn Version Takes Its Final Steps Before Delivery

The Open edX Hawthorn release will be based on the edx.org code of July 3rd.

This new version of the platform will be finally issued this July, after several months of delay.

On July 6, the first release candidate saw the light, open-release/hawthorn.1rc1. Ned Batchelder, Software Architect at edX, rightly warned that this version was “not ready for production.” The IBL engineering team was even unable to install it.

As it happened with past versions of the Open edX platform, there won’t be any upgrade scripts from the existing Ginkgo to Hawthorn. “Instead of upgrading, we will be supporting moving your data and configuration from a Ginkgo installation to a new Hawthorn installation,” explained Ned Batchelder.

Also, there won’t be fullstack. Devstack will now be based on Docker rather than Vagrant.

July 11, 2018
IBM Launches on edX a Course About How to Build Chatbots and Make Money with Them

IBM has launched its first open course on edX.org, “How to Build Chatbots and Make Money”.

This 2 week course, with a 2-4 hour per week commitment per week, comes with a marketing promotion: one year of Watson Assistant services to power 10 chatbots at no charge. It requires to sign up for a free IBM Cloud account.

Taught by Antonio Cangiano, software developer and technical evangelist at IBM, this five module course instructs on how to build, analyze, deploy, and monetize chatbots. In the third module, the instructor introduces Watson assistant.

These chatbots can be deployed on WordPress sites.

This course on edX is part of the IBM’s Cognitive Class.ai initiative, based on providing data science and cognitive computer courses as a way to promote its IBM Cloud and Watson services.

On Open edX, IBM strategy consists of building a multi-site network. IBM managers, Leon Katsnelson, Rav Ahuja and Luiz Aoqui, elaborated on that in a talk during the 2018 Open edX Conference in Montreal. [Slides, Video]

July 9, 2018
EdX Engineers Are Building a Transferrable Student Records Tool

edX is building a transferrable student records tool, which will be ready in the next “Ironwood” version of the Open edX platform, scheduled for the first quarter of 2019.

Bill De Rusha, an edX engineer, shared some insights about this development on a talk from the 2018 Open edX conference in Montreal.

The first implementation of transferrable student records will be available on edx.org in the coming weeks. This software is a need today for learners who want to apply their MicroMasters credentials as transfer credits and share their edX records with partner institutions.

This is how they will look:

July 7, 2018
UC Berkeley Launches a Blockchain Fundamentals Program on edX

The average salary of a blockchain engineer in Silicon Valley is $158,000, while blockchain-related jobs are the second fastest growing in today’s labor market, with 14 job openings for every blockchain developer.

Responding to this demand of blockchain talent, UC Berkeley is releasing on July 9 at edx.org a 6-week Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies course, as the first online class of the Blockchain Fundamentals professional certificate program.

This program, one of the most popular at the UC Berkeley campus and intended for students with no background in computer science, provides an understanding of how the blockchain and systems that are built on it, like Bitcoin, work.

July 6, 2018
UQx Builds Tools to Expand Social Polling and Collaboration in Open edX

Research shows that learners who actively engage in a forum achieve better results. However, only 5 to 10 % of MOOC learners use forums. With this evidence in mind, the University of Queensland (UQ) in Australia is developing technological tools intended to bridge the gap.

Among those developments, UQx, the digital unit of the university, has built several open source LTI tools for the Open edX platform, intended to encourage decision-making, enhance learners’ sense of community, improve critical thinking and reflection, and facilitate the co-creation of knowledge.

Its director, John Zorning, director at UQx, described these developments in a talk during the 2018 Open edX Conference in Montreal. (Video; Slides)

The code is available at https://github.com/UQ-UQx.

The University of Queensland is one of the most active members of edX and Open edX. To date, it has produced 53 MOOCs, and 4 MicroMasters, with an audience of 2 million learners.

July 5, 2018
A Free MIT Summer Online Program on STEM Courses for High Schoolers

The MIT Open Learning division has put together a summer program intended for high school students interested in STEM courses.

This program includes self-paced, free online courses from MITx on edX, as well as course materials from MIT Open Courseware (or OCW), on biology, calculus, chemistry, computer science and physics.

It corresponds to classes taken by many first-year, on-campus students at MIT, including similar assignments and tests.

“In fact, MIT students can get credit for some of these classes by passing an on-campus exam before the semester begins, and professors who teach these classes on campus recommend these online courses and course materials as good ways to prepare, or brush up, for the exam,” explains MIT.

These are the courses:

Biology:

MITx – 7.00x Introduction to Biology – The Secret of Life
OCW – 7.01SC Fundamentals of Biology
OCW – 7.013 Introductory Biology
OCW – 7.016 Introductory Biology

Calculus:

MITx – 18.01.1x Calculus 1A: Differentiation
MITx – 18.01.2x Calculus 1B: Integration
MITx – 18.01.3x Calculus 1C: Coordinate Systems & Infinite Series
OCW – 18.01SC Single Variable Calculus
OCW – 18.02SC Multivariable Calculus
OCW – 18.03 Differential Equations
OCW – 18.06 Linear Algebra

Chemistry:

MITx – 3.091x Introduction to Solid State Chemistry
OCW – 5.111SC Principles of Chemical Science
OCW – 3.091SC Introduction to Solid State Chemistry

Computer Science:

MITx – 6.00.1x Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python
MITx – 6.00.2x Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science
OCW – 6.0001 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in Python
OCW – 6.0002 Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science

Physics:

MITx – 8.01.1x Mechanics: Kinematics and Dynamics
MITx – 8.01.2x Mechanics: Momentum and Energy
MITx – 8.01.3x Mechanics: Rotational Dynamics
MITx – 8.02.1x Electricity and Magnetism: Electrostatics
MITx – 8.02.2x Electricity and Magnetism: Magnetostatics
OCW – 8.01SC Classical Mechanics
OCW – 8.02 Electricity and Magnetism

July 4, 2018
Another Self-Managed Solution with Open edX
Proversity.org, a UK-based Open edX provider, has announced its own SaaS solution, called Houston.

Advertised as “the pay as you go software suite for Open edX”. “Houston is a software suite designed to enhance your online learning system and optimise your learning experience”, said Proversity.

This service will compete with five other self-service solutions, as described at the Open edX portal.
- Open Craft
- EduNext
- Tahoe
- Bitnami
- Open IBL
July 2, 2018