The “History of the United States I” CLEP course is available now as part of the “Freshman Year for Free” program.

“The addition of this new course, and the ‘Spanish Language’ course, mean that students now have a way to prepare for two of the most popular exams leading to college credit,” said David Vise, executive director of the program. The goal of this program is to “offer learners a high quality learning experience that prepares them to pass a CLEP exam and provide them with a way to continue their education”, explains.

The catalog created by Modern States Education Alliance –the charitable initiative behind the program– on an Open edX-based platform includes so far the following courses:

• Introductory Business Law
• Principles of Macroeconomics
• Principles of Microeconomics
• Chemistry
• College Algebra
• Analyzing and Interpreting Literature
• Biology
• College Composition
• Introductory Psychology
• Spanish Language
• College Mathematics
• History of the United States I
• Humanities

Resource: The “Teens got Cents” blog writes about the “Freshman Year for Free” program.

Charles Severance, Dr. Chuck, creator of Sakai LMS and the LTI technology, has announced a new Learning Management System (LMS) called Koseu (course, in Korean). “This is the world’s smallest open source next generation Learning Management System”, he stated.

“Eventually, this will be the best LMS, LOR, and MOOC hosting platform in the world. But for now this is just a README file so I can get started writing the code.”

Along with Koseu, Dr. Chuck explained to IBL that he created Tsugi, a framework that enables the development and hosting of learning applications that can be seamlessly integrated into LMS.

“Tsugi is built upon a set of open source implementations of standards like IMS LTI, content item and common cartridge. Each tool built with Tsugi supports interoperability standards and can be hosted on its own in a Tsugi container for many tenants“, explained.

• Koseu-php in Github
• Tsugi

Expand your knowledge on the leading big data program and take advantage of the growing market demand.

In June, the Linux Foundation will offer a self-paced, free introductory course on Apache Hadoop on the edX platform. This 15-weeks / 3-4 hours per week MOOC will include a hands-on practice exercise based on setting up a small-scale Hadoop test platform.

It will feature six chapters, each with a short graded quiz at the end:

• The origins of Apache Hadoop and its big data ecosystem.
• Deploying Hadoop in a clustered environment of a modern day enterprise IT.
• Building data lake management architectures around Apache Hadoop.
• Leveraging the YARN framework to enable heterogeneous analytical workloads on Hadoop clusters.
• Leveraging Apache Hive for an SQL-centric view into the enterprise data lake.
• An introduction to managing key Hadoop components (HDFS, YARN, and Hive) from the command line.
• Securing and scaling your data lakes in multi-tenant enterprise environments.

“This course is perfect for IT professionals seeking a high-level overview of Hadoop, and who want to find out if a Hadoop-driven big data strategy is the right solution to meet their data retention and analytics needs,” explains The Linux Foundation.

To complete the course, a final exam will be required. A verified certificate will be available for $99.

EdX engineers launched this week Ficus.2, the second version of the Open edX’s Ficus release in order to implement some fixing:

• The certificates process was restarting constantly, due to not being able to communicate with XQueue.
• If you used the password randomization step during installation, a database user named “edxapp_replica001” is created. This username is invalid because it is too long. This issue is now fixed: the randomization step no longer creates a separate user for the replica database.
• The help links in LMS and Studio now display the Ficus version of the docs, rather than the latest version.

More details in the release notes.

The 2017 Open edX conference, scheduled on May 24 – 25 in Madrid (Spain), announced its full schedule of talks, presentations and technical tutorials. Experts from leading learning organizations worldwide will provide their insights on online education development and trends, specially regarding the Open edX platform.

This fourth edition –open to registration– will take place in the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid’s Leganes campus –6 miles away from downtown Madrid– and will be the first Open edX conference held outside the United States. Previous events were hosted at Harvard, Wellesley and Stanford universities. Over 240 attendees from 27 countries registered last year.

[Disclosure: IBL’s CEO and CTO will participate; and IBL will be one of sponsors of the conference].

• Official announcement: An exciting agenda for the 2017 Open edX Conference.

The MexicoX Open edX platform surpassed this year the milestone of one million students registered, with 85% from Mexico and 15% from Colombia, Peru, Spain, Argentina and other countries.

Funded by Mexico’s Ministry of Education ad managed by its Television Educativa, this platform features over 110 courses in Spanish and claims that its completion rate on courses is around 27% (73.25% on SPOCs and 18.13% for MOOCs), despite the fact that it does not issue certificates or credit credentials; only proof of participation.

After launching in June 2015, MexicoX has acquired 31 institution partners. It covers six major strategic lines: fundamental academic skills, specialized skills. teacher training skills, national challenges, global challenges, promotion of art, culture and for the enjoyment of knowledge.

MexicoX’s most popular courses are:

1. Redacción para todos from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
2. Finanzas para emprendedores from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
3. Introducción a los Ambientes Virtuales de Aprendizaje from Dirección General de Educación Superior para Profesionales de la Educación (DGESPE)
4. Algebra Lineal from Teconológico Nacional de México 
5. Piérdele el miedo a las mates from Teconológico Nacional de México 
6. Iniciación al uso de hojas de cálculo en el aula con Microsoft Excel  from Microsoft
7. Álgebra Lineal from Teconológico Nacional de México 
8. Cálculo Diferencial from Teconológico Nacional de México 
9. Informática en la vida moderna from Teconológico Nacional de México 
10. Aritmética y principios de Álgebra from Tecnológico Nacional de México 

Modifications over the Open edX code include a reporting analytics system, registration service which allows partners to enroll their users and different UIs for partner institutions.

Class Central has crafted an elaborated report on MexicoX.

I understand that MéxicoX is built upon Open edX. Have any modifications been made to the platform?

Yes, we have developed:

● a reporting system that gives us better insights on the information in the platform;
● a web service for allied institutions to register and enroll users from their platforms; and
● an independent front end, in order to allow different institutions and/or countries to use the platform with their own branding yet share the available courses.

Students from the University of Michigan brainstormed this month with edX leaders on how to improve the Open edX platform.

One of the ideas was based on using “bots” and systems of artificial intelligence to keep up with the magnitude and speed of questions that might come into an edX course.

More specifically, it was suggested the idea of using the IBM Watson (an artificial intelligence system) to be on the discussion boards, answering questions, in order to get speedy responses. “When you post something and nobody answers it, it’s really lonely, and there you are, with 50,000 people. It’s horrible to be lonely with 50,000 people,” explained Noni Korf, the director of the University’s Digital Education and Innovation Lab.

Students also proposed a tiered system for finding previously asked questions in the discussion boards as well as a rich-search feature for unit modules.

Regarding the use of augmented intelligence technologies, Pearson showed during the SXSW show how IBM Watson has started to provide rich, data-driven decision-support for instructors so they can personalize learning for more students, Michael Amigot reports.

The University of Michigan (U-M) announced a Teach-Out series of one-to-four hour, free courses on the edX platform addressing current relevant national and global topics intended to encourage public discourse. Each of the four offerings will begin on a Friday and run through Sunday.

The topics selected for the first four editions are:

* Democratic to Authoritarian Rule (March 31)
* Fake News, Facts and Alternative Facts (April 21)
* Reach Out and RELATE: Communicating and Understanding Scientific Research (May 5)
* The Future of Obamacare – Repeal, Repair or Replace? (May 12)

The idea of the “teach-out” courses was conceived in 1965, in the midst of nationwide protests against the Vietnam War, when faculty led an informal lecture series that brought together experts, students and community members to discuss political issues of the day.

The exclusive Juilliard School will roll out this spring an Open edX-based platform, intended to reach non-Juilliard students, called the Juilliard Open Classroom. It will follow the goal of “expanding the reach and impact of our educational programs, giving students of dance, drama, and music around the globe the opportunity to develop their craft and to understand the inner workings of great works of art under the guidance of some of the world’s greatest performing arts educators,” according to Joseph W. Polisi, President of Juilliard.

The edX Inc. non profit organization has launched ‘edX For Business‘, intended to provide corporate customers with curated solutions on courses, discount codes for verified certificates and other enterprise engagements.

The offering includes over 1,000 courses from more than 100 universities. There are courses in programs such as MicroMasters, professional and verified certificate programs. There are over 30 subject areas on courses, including:

• Data Analysis, Big data, Machine Learning and Statistics
• Computer Programming
• Business and Management
• Communication

In charge of the initiative is Lee Rubenstein, Vice President of Business Development at edX.