The edX engineering team plans to introduce course navigation improvements on the edX platform on October, as shown above. Initial improvements are focused on the usability and clarity of the course content area.
“The sequence bar has been cleaned up visually to help learners to understand where they are, including updated icons, colors, and labels for the previous and next actions”, edX explained. Additionally, the bottom of a unit page has been made more visually obvious and will have the name of the next/previous unit pages as well.
Another improvement, scheduled in this case for November, will affect the course outline, which will look as shown below. The learning content area will be expanded, and learners will enjoy a more immersive experience.
This design effort “is the culmination of a considerable amount of research, testing, and review of various course navigation concepts,” edX said. “To help you form targeted questions, we invite you to interact with a clickable prototype of the changes. You can review or comment within this prototype: https://invis.io/JW8G21BQV. “
These changes will be implemented on the master branch platform, and will probably arrive into the Open edX platform on December or January when the next named version, called Ficus, is released.
Click on the image below to navigate through the prototype.
The Open edX software-based, educational website SDSNedu was rebranded this month into SDG Academy (or Sustainable Development Goals Academy).
With 7 full-length courses and 2 mini-courses, this learning platform linked to the United Nations and hosted by edCast, announced that it has attracted over 100,000 enrollments since it was created in 2014. Its goal is to launch a program of 17 courses on Sustainable Development and reach one million students by 2020.
The faculty of the SDG Academy is comprised of global experts on sustainable development like Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General on SDG and Director of the SDSN, Prof. Johan Rockstrom, Dr. Srinath K. Reddy and Professor Paul Collier.
This is a milestone for edX and its consortium partners, and it marks an evolution beyond the “classic” MOOCs, following edX’s mission of enabling learners to access high-quality, career-relevant education in an affordable and flexible manner.
Fourteen top universities that belong to the edX consortium have announced the adoption of the MicroMasters online credential created by MIT, and the launch of eighteen programs.
Among these universities are Columbia University, offering a microcredential in artificial intelligence and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, with MicroMasters degrees in user experience (UX), research design, leading educational innovation and improvement, and social work: practice, policy and research. This first course starts on October 4 and is open for enrollment now.
Basically, this MicroMasters credential has no admission requirement and enables online learners to take a semester’s worth of master’s-level courses on edx.org and then, if accepted, to complete a master’s degree in a single full semester on campus.
The first MicroMaster, Supply-Chain Management, launched on October of 2015, attracted over 127,000 students worldwide. More than 7,000 signed up for verified ID certificates in at least one course, according to MIT News.
Sanjay Sarma, Vice President for Open Learning at MIT, explained: “Not all high-potential master’s candidates can afford to spend a year or more on campus, so it’s important to provide multiple pathways to a degree. MicroMasters gives learners the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities through a series of online courses, earn a valuable credential and, if they excel, complete their master’s with an additional semester’s residence.”
Regarding the economics of this initiative, The Chronicle offered this view:
“MIT piloted its first micro-master’s in supply-chain management last fall. Students who complete five online courses — and pay about $1,000 in fees for proctored exams for the courses — earn the credential. Those students are also eligible to get the credit transferred to MIT toward a full master’s degree if they win acceptance to that in-person program. To get a sense of the odds, though, consider that MIT admits about 40 students a year to its supply-chain management master’s program, while 3,500 people paid to take courses in the online micro-master’s series in the past year, according to Anant Agarwal, head of edX, in an interview on Monday.”
This is the full list of institutions and MicroMasters programs:
United States
Columbia University (ColumbiaX): Artificial Intelligence
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MITx): Supply Chain Management
Rochester Institute of Technology (RITx): Project Management
Thunderbird School of Global Management, a unit of the Arizona State University Knowledge Enterprise (ThunderbirdX): International Business Management
University of Michigan (MichiganX): User Experience (UX) Research and Design; Leading Educational Innovation and Improvement; Social Work: Practice, Policy and Research
International
Australian National University (ANUx): Evidence-Based Management
Curtin University (CurtinX): Human Rights
Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HKPolyUx): International Hospitality Management
Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMBx): Business Management; Entrepreneurship
Université Catholique de Louvain (LouvainX): Management (offered in French); International Law
The University of Queensland, Australia (UQx): Leadership in Global Development
Wageningen University (WageningenX): Biobased Sciences for Sustainability
Offered in Spanish
Galileo University (GalileoX): e-Learning: crea actividades y contenidos para la enseñanza virtual (offered in Spanish); Professional Android Developer
Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPValenciaX): Liderazgo y trabajo en equipo en grupos de mejora continua (offered in Spanish)
Resources
For more information and a complete list of MicroMasters course offerings, visit www.edx.org/micromasters
The third edition of the “Learning with MOOCs” Conference (LWMOOCs), scheduled for October 6-7 at Penn’s campus in Philadelphia, will host several hundred top educators and MOOC practitioners from all over the country.
In addition to the latest research on MOOCs and digital learning, the schedule features keynote speakers Reshma Saujani, Founder and CEO of Girls Who Code, and Angela Duckworth, University of Pennsylvania Professor of Psychology and Founder and Scientific Director of The Character Lab.
UPenn’s organizing team has noted that the conference is still open to attendees.
[Disclosure: IBL Open edX, which will sponsor the conference, will present in this event its course production capabilities, along with an announcement to hire college professors to teach AP and CLEP courses from the College Board.]
Ahundred MOOCs and 5 million enrollments in four years.
The University of Pennsylvania has crossed this milestone. UPenn’s 12 schools and a total of 107 participating faculty have contributed to this initiative.
The University of Pennsylvania crosses 100 MOOCs and 5 million enrollments. All 12 of its schools are contributing MOOCs on Coursera and edX.
“Four years after launching some of the first MOOCs on Coursera, Penn’s Online Learning Initiative (OLI) has grown into a campus-wide effort dedicated to sharing a piece of the Penn experience with curious minds around the world,” explained UPenn at its website.
“Our main strength is ensuring that online and technology-based learning permeate everything we do here in the spirit of experimentation; we want to bring learning and benefits back to our students here and to inform other initiatives”, Executive Director Amy Bennett said.
“We’re going to focus on providing more personalized learning experiences for different segments of learners, pursuing new types of credentials (especially as the market is becoming more job-focused), and trying to break down the barriers to and negative perceptions of online education. For example, our Robotics Specialization capstone enabled students to build something and have a hands-on learning experience that didn’t require a classroom,” Amy Bennett added.
“Antarctica Online” will be the first edX course produced by Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, which has just joined MIT’s and Harvard University’s founded educational platform. This course will showcase materials and lectures that were filmed in Antarctica by two faculty professors, Dr Rebecca Priestley and Dr Cliff Atkins.
As part of its partnership with edX, Victoria will deliver eight free MOOCs over the next three years. These courses will run for either four or eight weeks.
In addition, this university will launch a Micro-Master’s course, several SPOCs (Small Private Online Course), and other formats of blended learning.
Cornell University will launch on Sept. 13 on the edX platform “The Science and Politics of the GMO”, a course on the genetically modified organisms (or GMOs), that have transformed the way we produce and consume food. The five-week, free, non-credit introductory course will examine why the GML is politically contentious.
The course’s professors are featured as super-heroes in the funny, cartoon-style video (above).
Harvard University has raised more than $7 billion so far in its capital campaign blasting its own goal, according to the Harvard Crimson.
According to the school, 45 percent will go to teaching and research, 25 percent will go to financial aid and “the student experience,” 20 percent will be used for capital improvements, and the remaining 10 percent will serve as “flexible funding to foster collaborations and initiatives.
The Crimson also previously reported that the funds would be focused on development in Allston, expansion of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, creation of common spaces, and the advancement of HarvardX, the University’s branch of the edX platform.
However, it is unclear yet how, and at what percentage, this huge funding will benefit HarvardX and the edX platform.
edX released yesterday Eucalyptus.2, under the tag name open-release/eucalyptus.2. This new version of the Open edX platform has been launched in order to fix a few bugs on Eucalyptus –an edX engineer disclosed.
This is a summary of the fixes:
Fixed a problem with django-debug-toolbar raising an exception: “process() takes exactly 3 arguments (2 given).”
Fixed poor discussion forum performance. (TNL-5173)
Fixed a problem preventing adding a comment to responses on inline discussions. (TNL-5389)
Amazon has started to position itself in the self-education space against online platforms such as edX, Coursera, Udacity and Khan Academy by adding valuable content into its catalog from The Great Courses.
The Great Courses library spans more than 550 courses and 14,000 lectures, and Amazon Prime and Amazon Video will receive 87 courses comprising 2,000 half-hour lectures to start off with –Business Insider reported.
Some of The Great Courses’ most popular topics include its photography course, taught by National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore, as well as history, science, computer programming, cooking and health and wellness courses. Each course typically has a dozen or more half-hour lectures on its subject.
For The Great Courses company, the move to Amazon makes sense, as Ed Lion, Chief Brand Officer of The Great Courses, said for USA Today. “Launching on Amazon Prime, with its broad membership, ease of use and instant access to hundreds of digital TVs and devices, is a smart next step because it allows us to reach millions of new customers. And because Signature Collection offers a curated library of popular and highly rated courses, we can deliver our brand of premium life-long learning in an even more affordable way.”
