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Category: Top News

  • Microsoft Has Developed 180+ Courses on edX.org, with 2.6M Learners

    Microsoft Has Developed 180+ Courses on edX.org, with 2.6M Learners

    Microsoft has become the largest private publisher of courses on edX.org, with 180+ courses and 2.6 million learners; all of it within a period of three years.

    Courses include a program in AI, and are mostly oriented toward professional development. This effort fits with Microsoft’s educational mission of democratizing learning and bringing it to the masses. From a business perspective, its main goal is to promote Azure cloud services.

    163 OPEN EDX SITES HOSTED ON AZURE

    Microsoft, who joined the edX consortium in 2015, claims that 10 % of the Open edX-based instances – namely, 163 – are hosted on Azure. One of its main instances is Global Knowledge, who partnered in 2017 with IBL Education to deploy its ecosystem. By the end of this year, the software corporation expects to reach 200 instances on Azure.

    Additionally, the Redmond-based giant launched in April 2017 a “Learning as a Service (LaaS)” partnering program, which was introduced by three Microsoft managers during the recent 2018 Open edX conference in Montreal. This initiative is mainly based on providing partners (100 so far) with free course content, which they use to enhance their private instances.

  • “MOOCs Are Not Addressing the Problems of Education,” Said Columbia’s Researcher Fiona Hollands

    “MOOCs Are Not Addressing the Problems of Education,” Said Columbia’s Researcher Fiona Hollands

    “MOOCs are not addressing the problems of education,”  said Columbia University’s researcher Fiona Hollands during a keynote at the 2018 Open edX Conference in Montréal last week.

    In her address, titled “MOOCS 2025”, she presented her most recent findings and suggested to move over the name “MOOCs” into another one, which reflects that these courses might neither be massive nor open. Some of them are: “Non-formal digital learning experience” (NDLEs) , “Informal Digital Learning Experience” (IDLE), “Digital Learning Experiences” (DLE), “Alternative Credential” (AC or Alt-C), or “Voluntary Online Learning Experience” (VOLE). 

    According to Fiona Hollands, these types of courses, which haven’t democratized higher education nor had the expected impact in academia, will gain credibility, be recognized by employers and completely change the way learning is delivered.

    (Click on the player below to watch her talk.)

    These are the keynote’s most interesting slides:




  • A Successful 2018 Open edX Conference in Montréal – Most Interesting Tweets

    A Successful 2018 Open edX Conference in Montréal – Most Interesting Tweets

    The fifth Open edX conference, which took place this week in Montréal, Canada, attracted over three hundred developers, educators and business professionals. The number of attendants was similar to last year’s conference’s in Madrid, Spain, said edX to IBL News.

    The event was well organized, and participants’ feedback was positive.

    Next year’s Open edX conference will be at the University of California at San Diego on March 26-28, 2019. Also, during the first quarter of 2019, the next Open edX platform version, called “Ironwood”, will be released. (It will come after “Hawthorn”, expected for this June or July).

    This year’s edition in HEC Montréal University was officially opened with a keynote by Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX. He disclosed that the number of Open edX instances has grown from 800 instances in 2017 to 1,500 in 2018, with over 18,000 courses and 35 million learners.

    “Open edX is the largest educational platform in the world”, he said.

    Here is a selection of the most interesting tweets posted during the conference:

     

     

  • Agarwal: We Expect to Triple Our Global Reach to 100M Learners in 2022

    Agarwal: We Expect to Triple Our Global Reach to 100M Learners in 2022

    The edX Inc nonprofit organization, which currently handles the edx.org portal (16 million learners, 2,000+ courses, and 130 global partners) as well as the Open edX developers’ community, expects to triple its global reach to 100 million learners in 2022.

    Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX, made this prediction last Wednesday during the 2018 Open edX Conference opening keynote in Montréal, Canada.

    Mr. Agarwal also disclosed that the number of Open edX instances has grown from 800 instances in 2017 to 1,500 in 2018, with over 18,000 courses and 35 million learners.

    The keynote, titled “Reimagine Education Goals for 2022”, available on YouTube, highlighted the goal of fully leveraging the power of digital technology for learning.

    According to Mr. Agarwal, it could be accomplished through AI-powered personalized learning (e.g. HarvardX Super-Earth, Quant Methods courses), leveraging the engagement of VR and AR, and harnessing the power of networks, such as crowdsourced hinting.

    Additional challenges will be based on unleashing the power of cognitive science (e.g. retrieval learning), as well as deploying deep analytics for learner engagement and platform stickiness.

    Another highlighted goal was to establish lifelong learning for all by creating a community, developing a portfolio of valued as well as relevant credentials and partnering with corporations.

    edX has plans to challenge its member partners to accelerate one year of Bachelor’s degrees with online credit, offer 20 percent of undergrad education to campus students fully online as well as offer both fully online and campus degrees and micro credentials at the Master’s level.

    Finally, Anant Agarwal presented the goal of building a fully modular model for education.

    What follows are the main slides of his presentation:


  • A Million Dollars May Be the Price Tag to Deploy and Maintain an Open edX Platform, Says a Provider

    A Million Dollars May Be the Price Tag to Deploy and Maintain an Open edX Platform, Says a Provider

    Installing, developing and maintaining Open edX is a costly effort, despite the fact that the software is free (90% of the code is open source).

    According to Nate Aune, founder of the Appsembler Open edX-cloud provider, “you’re potentially looking at spending up to $920,000 a year to host and implement Open edX yourself”. “Now for some companies, this number may be a drop in the bucket, but for many, the risk of this annual price tag is both unsustainable and unrealistic,” explains in his corporate blog. He recognizes that this projected amount is for a company headquartered in Californian Bay Area, where the engineering talent is very expensive.

    “There are two kinds of costs you will incur if you want to run Open edX yourself: people costs and hosting costs. And within each of these, there are one-time costs and recurring costs.” (…) “People roles you need are Software Engineer (with experience in Python, Django, Javascript and Docker); DevOps Engineer (with experience in Linux, Ansible, MySQL, MongoDB, RabbitMQ/Redis, Hadoop, and Cloud hosting); and Web Designer (with SASS/HTML5 experience)”.

    In terms of the infrastructure, another provider called Perpetual claims that “for a complete production, demo and testing environment set up, the cost goes to $1,829/mo or $21,932/yr.“

     

  • Duke Encourages Its Community to Use Open edX For Internal Training

    Duke Encourages Its Community to Use Open edX For Internal Training

    Duke’s Learning Innovation department has made a recent call to university faculty or staff members who might be interested in training and creating their own edX-style courses. For this purpose, the Duke uses its own hosted Open edX platform, called Duke Extend.

    “Training opportunities include advice on how to incorporate video into your course, how to structure content in an online course, and how to create a variety of assessments to match your course topic. We can also tailor the training to best suit the needs of you and your colleagues who are producing content for the course,” encourages Justin Johnsen, who assists faculty to develop MOOCs.

    Only seven courses have been developed since Duke Extend was first deployed in November 2015. The last one, Launch with Sanyin, was released on May 4, and it was a two-hour class.

  • Prof. Lorena Barba Implements An Effective Flipped Learning Experience With Jupyter

    Prof. Lorena Barba Implements An Effective Flipped Learning Experience With Jupyter

    “The video-first approach puts students in a mode where they are primed to memorize and it gives an illusion of confidence”, explains GW’s professor Lorena Barba on a report in EdSurge about her unique approach to creating effective flipped learning experiences without videos.

    “Unfortunately what has happened with edX and Coursera, they are pretty much convinced that video is the center of everything,” she says. “The edX CEO last year said interweaving videos with quizzes are active learning, and that’s ridiculous.”

    Prof. Barba’s “Practical Numerical Methods with Python” Open edX-style course, for Master’s-level students without prior coding experience, is the perfect example. This free, open-to-anyone MOOC is an extension of the on-campus course. Learners dive into programming exercises as homework using Jupyter Notebooks, an open-source web tool where users create and share live code, data visualizations, and notes about what they are working on.

    “Instead of watching videos, students individually follow instructions and experiment with Python in the Jupyter platform first, then arrive to class with questions and work through problems together. They come primed to discuss those things and learn in the classroom,” explains Barba.

    In Barba’s class, in-person active learning involves students working through examples and coding problems with peers in Jupyter. The professor also projects her own screen in the front of the class and works out a solution line-by-line so students can follow along.

     

    Useful Links

  • EdX Formulates Its Vision for Adaptive Learning

    EdX Formulates Its Vision for Adaptive Learning

    edX is working on a project in adaptive learning as a way to create a path to individualized education at scale. Nimisha Asthagiri, a principal software engineer at edX, has produced an interesting document that will be presented during the first Open edX Developer Summit, which will take place on June 1 after the Open edX 2018 conference.

    edX’s approach starts with the Pearson definition of Adaptive Learning –”Education technologies that can respond to a student’s interactions in real-time by automatically providing the student with individual support”–, analyzes the requirements, interoperable standards and technologies, and ends up suggesting an adaptive framework to be implemented in the edX platform.

  • EdX.org Enhances Its Data Protection According to the European GDPR

    The edX.org website, with 16 million of learners, updated this month its Privacy Policy and Terms of Service in order to fulfill the new European data regulation called GDPR and make clear how users can manage collected information. “We have always strived to be transparent with you, our learners, about the lifecycle of data on edX,” explains the non-profit organization on its blog.

    “We are using simpler, clearer language to describe our privacy practices; describing why and how your data is collected and used; and outlining ways to access, manage and control your information,” adds edX.

     

     

  • Open edX | May 2018: Jupyter Notebooks, Harvard, Microsoft, edX Inc…

    Open edX | May 2018: Jupyter Notebooks, Harvard, Microsoft, edX Inc…

    [ Newsletter format  |  Click here to subscribe ]

    MAY 2018 – NEWSLETTER #5

    Software

    • edX released the Hawthorn beta version of the Open edX platform

    • GW and IBL open-sourced an XBlock to add graded problems based on Jupyter Notebooks

    • An Open edX XBlock to load content from a Jupyter Notebook

    • Harvard and Microsoft test adaptive learning for the Open edX platform

    Strategy

    • These are some of the of most innovative sessions at the 2018 Open edX Conference

    • Exponential growth on adoption of Open edX websites and courses

    • “The growth of Open edX is strong, multi-vectored, and accelerating,” says author and edX engineer John Mark Walker

    • edX’s code is 90 % open source and 10 % proprietary

    • The Open edX Platform will adapt this month to European Data Protection Regulation

    • MOOCs become a big business

    Courses

    • Microsoft launched on edX.org an ethics course for artificial intelligence developers, Ethics and Law in Data and Analytics.

    • Producing one hour of learning content requires over 100 hours and costs $18K

    • Redis Labs launched an introductory course on an Open edX platform

    edX Inc.

    • EdX.org will offer fewer courses for free

    • Two Colombian universities join edX – edX revenues & expenses

    IBL Newsletter about Open edX is a topic-curated, monthly report compiled by Michael Amigot, Founder at IBL Education, a New York City-based company that builds data-driven learning ecosystems and courses with Open edX. If you enjoy what you read please consider forwarding it to spread the word. Click here to subscribe.

    Archive:
    Newsletter #5 May 2018
    Newsletter #4 April 2018
    Newsletter #3 November 2017
    Newsletter #2 Octubre 2017
    Newsletter #1 Sept 2017

    Read also the latest IBL Newsletter on Learning Innovation