Georgia Tech has launched its own Open edX instance, http://openedx.gatech.edu.
This platform now includes two unfinished courses (“Introduction to Pokemon Trading Card Game” and “Introduction to Studio”), in addition to the default edX demo course.
In charge of the effort is the College of Computing of Georgia Tech. Its goal seems to be intended to experiment with the technology while learning about the functionalities of the platform.
Raccoon Gang, an Ukraine-based Open edX technology provider, has announced the release of an updated version of its SCORM XBlock, which now supports the SCORM 2004 format.
“This means that any educational materials created with SCORM 2004-compatible authoring tools, such as Camtasia, Adobe Captivate, Storyline Articulate, etc., can now be easily integrated with Open edX,” explained the developer.
edX Inc. has announced the launch of the Professional Certificate program, a series of courses created by top universities and corporations, designed to build critical skills for specific careers. “As an innovator in education, edX is always exploring how to further our mission to expand access to and improve the quality of learning,” explained Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX.
These courses will be shorter in length, usually 4-8 weeks each, compared to the MicroMasters program, which are approximately 2-6 months long, created to bridge the gap between education and corporations while offering a pathway to credit.
Initially, there will be 15 Professional Certificate programs from 13 universities and companies such as Microsoft, HSBC, GitHub and The North Face. Microsoft’s Data Science program will be one of the most complete, while GitHub will support Berkeley’s Agile Development course.
Open edX platforms using MathJax have been encouraged to immediately upgrade into Ficus.3, a urgent release to address the fact that the MathJax library will discontinued at the end of April.
Ned Batchelder, a top edX engineer, wrote the following on the edX groups on April 21:
France Université Numérique (FUN), the French Ministry of Higher Education’s Open edX-based MOOC platform, has reached one million students. “We have 991,311 users in 224 countries: 48% of users are in France, and 52% are outside of France (figures for January 2017); of the latter, most users come from Brazil and Morocco,” explained a FUN representative on Class Central.
This project, launched in July 2013 with the aim to support French universities and increase their visibility in the Francophone world, has attracted 99 institutions –including three universities in Belgium, one in Switzerland, and two in Tunisia– who have produced over 300 MOOCs.
The most popular courses are the following:
| Higher education institution | MOOC title | Registration numbers |
| Le Cnam | Du manager agile au leader designer | 113357 |
| Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) | L’anglais pour tous – Spice up Your English | 99693 |
| L’Alliance française de Paris | Cours de français langue étrangère A2 | 82067 |
| Université Paris-Sud | Introduction à la statistique avec R | 47803 |
| Institut Mines-Télécom | Principes des réseaux de données | 37676 |
| Institut Mines-Télécom | Fondamentaux pour le Big Data | 36562 |
| Inria | Python : des fondamentaux à l’utilisation du langage | 33268 |
| Le Cnam | Le droit des contrats de travail en France | 31194 |
| Groupe INSA | Introduction à HTML5 – Animations et jeux | 29319 |
| Institut Mines-Télécom | Innover et entreprendre dans un monde numérique | 25380 |
(Graphic developed by Class Central.)
With 15 employees, all of the located in Paris, this platform gets its revenue through annual fees of universities, certificates from learners and custom services to partners such as dedicated SPOCs and white-label edX platforms.
The eight Ivy League universities (Columbia, Harvard, Brown, Cornell, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania) are now offering over 250 online free courses.
Class Central has made a collection of all the courses, split into these categories:
• Founder of Class Central Dhawal Shah interviewed by Free Code Camp (YouTube)
MOOC providers are leveraging their relationships with universities to jump into a new lucrative market: MOOC-based degree programs.
Today there are ten fully-fledged Masters, as show in the table below, elaborated by Class Central.
| Degree | Provider | University | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| MS Computer Science | Udacity | Georgia Tech | $6,600 |
| MS Analytics | edX | Georgia Tech | $10k |
| MBA | Coursera | University of Illinois | $22k |
| MS CS Data Science | Coursera | University of Illinois | $19.2k |
| MS Accounting | Coursera | University of Illinois | $27.2k |
| Masters in Innovation and Entrepreneurship | Coursera | HEC Paris | €20k |
| Cyber Security (Masters) | FutureLearn | Deakin University | £24k |
| Development and Humanitarian Action (Masters) | FutureLearn | Deakin University | £24k |
| Professional Practice: Information Technology (Masters) | FutureLearn | Deakin University | £24k |
Coursera is the leading company. Now they have four Master’s degrees, after adding two more in March: Accounting, with the University of Illinois ($27.2K, 32 credit hours, 18-36 months) and Innovation and Entrepreneurship with HEC Paris (€20K, 20 courses, 10–16 months). And they plan to offer 15 to 20 programs by the end of 2019, according to Inside Higher Ed.
“To contrast, 2U, a public listed company that helps universities put their degree programs online, currently has 45 such degrees. 2U made $205.9 million in revenue in 2016, an increase of 37% over its 2015 revenue,” explains Class-Central.
HarvardX’s online learning content, which is now accesible via edX.org, will be searchable and available to Harvard professors looking to reuse it in their classroom courses.
In other words, all of HarvardX’s videos, recorded lectures, illustrations, text pages and teaching materials will be part of a tool called HarvardDART (Digital Assets for Reuse in Teaching), available only to the Harvard community on campus or through VPN.
The application will allow Harvard professors to integrate these assets directly into Harvard’s residential LMS, Canvas, so their students can use and share them.
HarvardGazette broke the news.
“Half of today’s job won’t exist in 2030”, says Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX. “MOOCs can help to equip your workforce with the skills and knowledge needed to remain competitive and grow”.
MOOCs offer an opportunity to fill employees’ training gap and allow them to keep up with innovation and ever-evolving technology.
More than ever workers rank opportunities for learning & development as a primary source of job satisfaction. A robust learning & development program is therefore more essential than ever to both attract talent and keep it. An online learning initiative can of course be used to onboard new hires, but it can also be used to develop employees far beyond the onboarding phase. In fact, offering opportunities for growth — in both hard and soft skills — is an ideal way to motivate employees and signal the importance of continuous development. Unlike in-person learning, online learning also allows employees to learn in a self-directed manner, exploring those courses and skills that interest them personally. Self-paced courses mean no one is left behind or stuck waiting for the course to move on. And with online learning, the material can always be referenced again long after the course has finished, unlike with in-person learning.
Training a large, distributed workforce can be both costly and logistically difficult. Online learning provides a cost-effective and highly scalable solution to the problem. Because it can be accessed anytime, anywhere an online learning platform is an ideal vehicle to train the modern workforce. We’ve recently deployed a platform for the US Air Force designed to accommodate over 700,000 learners all across the world. Until the advent of online learning such reach was practically impossible. Moreover, when training materials are provided online, the marginal cost for delivering training to users is essentially zero.
Accessibility is not a minor point. Reducing barriers to entry and providing on-demand learning makes it far more like that employees choose to use the platform. When accessing the material is easy and convenient learners are more likely to engage with it continuously and productively. MasterCard found that by thinking of learning as a product and employees as consumers they were able to significantly improve learning outcomes. As with any product, if you want consumers to engage with a corporate learning program it’s essential to drive down the cost of consumption as much as possible. That means making it as available as possible — perhaps even with mobile apps — and as easy to use as possible. Accessibility improves both reach and results.
Online learning allows for in-depth reporting about the learning experience. An analytics suite that provides detailed, quantitative data about how learners are engaging with course materials and performing on assessments makes it far easier to determine how and where to improve learning outcomes. By implementing custom analytics criteria businesses can extract the data they need to make informed, actionable analyses.
Furthermore, implementing learner profiles makes it instantly clear who has taken which courses, developed which skills, and achieved which certifications. Awarding badges or certifications upon completion of continuing professional education (or other compliance and regulatory training) is a user-friendly way to both administer CPE and verify who has completed it. Of course, badges can be awarded for other types of courses, too — as well as entire course tracks. For example, awarding a badge upon completion of a leadership course track might signal that the user is interested in future leadership roles and has undertaken training in service of that goal. And by providing rich dashboards for users and administrators alike, this sort of progress becomes easy to track and verify.
On top of that, the elements that make it easier to track and verify progress — profiles, badges, dashboards, etc. — also add an element of gamification to the platform, which has been shown to increase engagement and, thereby, learning outcomes. That said, incorporating additional gamification elements is never a bad idea. Advanced elements like leaderboards, avatars, content unlocking, challenges and more can further engage users and encourage more active use of the learning platform.
The most successful corporate learning programs do more than simply train and develop employees — they also encourage employees to interact and build relationships with each other. Corporate learning should encourage a productive, collaborative environment just as much as it imparts skills and knowledge. There are several ways to do this. Built-in video conferencing features allow for natural discussions in real-time and are ideal for workforces distributed across great distances. Discussion forums provide an avenue for learners to pose and answer questions with fellow learners and instructors alike. Building more advanced social networking features into the platform can provide even more benefit. Incorporating elements like learner profiles, private messaging, likes and real-time notifications encourages the spontaneous interactions and organic discussions that help build a sense of community.
Of course, social components are beneficial from the pedagogical standpoint, too. In fact, facilitating informal discussion and collaboration is the surest way to promote social learning, which the research shows leads to more impactful learning outcomes all around. By designing courses around these social networking features, businesses can thereby foster community engagement while simultaneously improving the effectiveness of their courses.
To be sure, corporate learning isn’t necessarily inward facing. Educating customers can be just as essential as educating employees. Salesforce found that a robust customer education program is essential in providing cheaper, more effective customer support. And if customers need help with using your product or service, an online customer education program can be there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Factor in the cost savings and the value proposition is clear.
That said, online customer education can offer advantages beyond availability and low-cost. It can also be used as a business development tool by increasing brand awareness, fostering customer engagement, and providing opportunities to cross-sell. Best of all, when it’s offered online customer education can do all those things in the background — automatically and for no additional cost.
Are you interested in learning more about online learning can impact your business? Get in touch!