Category: Top News

All of the videos and presentations of the 2016 Open edX Conference celebrated on June 14 – 15 at Stanford University have been published on YouTube and the Confluence community page. Additionally, a set of photos on Flickr from the event have been posted.

Technologists, developers and educators from 27 countries all over the world attended and participated in over a dozen sessions, tutorials, and workshops. 77 contributors delivered talks, ran tutorials and sat on panels.

• Presentations on Confluence

• Videos on YouTube

• Videos on IBL’s YouTube Channel

Microsoft announced this week an online certification program, intended for professionals and graduates who are interested in Data Science. This program features several courses on Microsoft Excel, Power BI, R and Python languages, statistics and machine learning.

Available on edX.org as a free initiative with a verified certificate from $25 to $99, the Microsoft Data Science Curriculum outlines three units —Fundamentals, Core Data Science and Applied Data Science— and a capstone project requirement where “learners” showcase their acquired talents.

“At Microsoft, we believe the approach and tools used for learning need to continually evolve to meet the demands of our device-centric and data-driven world,” said Alison Cunard, the general manager at Microsoft Learning Experiences. She added that in the current era of technology, “both technical and functional skills are becoming increasingly critical across all careers and vocations.”

AdelaideX, the University of Adelaide in Australia’s initiative on edX.org, announced that it surpassed the milestone of 300,000 students since the program was launched two years ago. Students from 200 countries have enrolled in seven introductory-level MOOCs produced by the University.

• Introduction to Project Management has attracted more than 100,000 students.
• Other popular MOOCs are:
  • World of Wine: 46,780 enrollments
  • Think. Create. Code: 45,964 enrollments
  • Cyberwar, Surveillance and Security: 37,256 enrollments

“MOOCs are also leading us in new ways of using digital technologies to enhance our on-campus courses. In Australia, MOOCs have proven popular with hundreds of high school students and pre-university students, who are looking for ways to gauge whether a program is right for them,” said Dr Katy McDevitt, AdelaideX Program Manager.

Microsoft’s partnership with edX is working very well: over one million enrollments in one year in Microsoft courses.

This seems to be the most successful corporate example on edX.org, with the largest lead-generation deal in the MOOC universe.

“We were their first corporate member to offer MOOCs on their open, global platform and today, in a little more than one year, I am thrilled to announce that Microsoft just passed the threshold of 1 million enrollments in Microsoft courses on edX,” explained a Microsoft manager. “Reaching this milestone signals both significant interest from students and demonstrates the viability of using online channels to broaden the reach of quality education.”

So far Microsoft has created 75 courses on edX.org and they plan to produce more courses in the areas of cloud services,  mobile development and data science. The goal is “to meet  the demands of the device-centric, data-driven world we live in, where technology skills are becoming increasingly imperative across all careers and vocations,” explains Alison Cunard, from Microsoft Learning.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that by 2020 there will be 1.4 million new computer science jobs, with only 400,000 computer science students to fill them.

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Microsoft partners with ISTE to provide new school planning and professional learning resources

The historical “Circuits and Electronics” course, offered by edX CEO and MIT Professor Anant Agarwal, Piotr Mitros, Chief Scientist at edX and MIT Professor Gerry Sussman, has relaunched.

This course, originally released in September 2013, was the inaugural course on MITx and started the edX revolution. Today it’s taken by all MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science majors.

It is a self-paced course, with no weekly deadlines. Weekly coursework includes interactive video sequences, readings from the textbook, homework, online laboratories, and optional tutorials.

Many instructional designers –or we should say now “learning engineers”– took it as an example of how to build interactive sequences.

Beyond the traditional instructional designers, a new speciality is emerging: learning engineering. Courses need to be re-engineered to create online and blended experiences and improve learning outcomes.

This was one of the conclusions of the recent 2016 LINC Conference at MIT from Sanjay Sarma, vice president of open learning at MIT:

“Understanding how people learn is critical to understanding how — and when — to apply digital technologies for education. This is where “learning engineers” come in, designing new approaches to the practice of learning. Online education is not as simple as posting coursework on the internet; courses need to be re-engineered for the digital environment. By taking advantage of the available technologies, educators can create a blended learning experience, enhance the curriculum and, ultimately, improve outcomes for students.”

MIT News: LINC Conference addresses the changing face of education

Paco Cruz, lead engineer for edX and Open edX at UC3M –the Spanish university that will organize the 2017 Open edX Conference– showed during Spain’s 2016 Open edX Meetup all of the developments his organization is delivering in terms of XBlocks, learning analytics and gamification.

• XBlock to rate videos and add comments (available on Github)
• Regarding analytics, UC3M is using Elastic and Analyse (internally developed software)
• Additional developments on the iOS app in Spanish and a coming-soon app for flipped classrooms (Flip App)
• “Quiz video” XBlock to insert questions inside videos using the “Paella Interactive Video Player”
• Private video stream XBlock for Wowza
• Full interoperability between its Moodle and Open edX platforms, which is used for SPOCs (Small Private Online Course) at spoc.uc3m.es

UC3M is one of the most active non-US universities both in course creation and developments. It has attracted 280K enrollments through 12 courses on edX, and is now preparing another 5 courses. Additionally, it has launched 10 SPOCs and is creating 7 more.

See the video above –captions are available in English– as well as main conclusions from this university regarding the future of learning.

Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)’s MOOC strategy in online learning, branded as IDBx, is paying off.

Since it started 20 months ago, IDBx has attracted over 306,000 participants on edX.org, officials reported to IBL.

• “Project Management Techniques for Development Professionals” has been the most successful course, with 88,300 enrollments in its two editions.
• The courses “Introducción a la Gestión para Resultados en el Desarrollo” and “Desarrollo Urbano y Vivienda” have accounted for over 19,000 registrants each.
• Courses developed in Portuguese attract an average of 4,000 people.

The series of MOOCs developed by IDB on the edX platform are aligned with its commitment to achieve results and increase integrity, transparency and accountability on the public sector in Latin America. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the IDB provides loans, grants, technical assistance and does research and training. Its shareholders are 48 member countries, including 26 borrowing member countries.

In addition to MOOCs, IDB maintains a Moodle platform hosting many courses targeting students in Latin America.

EdX has established a plan to reduce the complexity of the edX-platform codebase, while focusing on extensibility and interoperability.

The new Chief Architect of edX, Eddie Fagin, who will execute this transformation, removed the old architecture diagram (below) and presented a new one (above). (Watch his talk below).

Along with it, notable technology updates are coming soon. The new “Eucalyptus” version, scheduled for July, will include new features such as:

• New course home and navigation
• Bookmarks
• Teams
• Student Notes
• Video Closed Captions
• Self-Paced Course Pacing

Additionally, the new iOS and Android mobile apps will continue to evolve from being a video companion app into a much more sophisticated setup, including learner profiles, discussion forums, native course discovery and push notifications, according to Marco Morales, Product Manager at edX.

The Open edX community has registered an increase of 77 % since October 2015 in the number of sites and 105 % in courses. Today there are more than 3,700 courses, 250 public sites and 5.5 million of learners, as Joel Barciauskas, Open edX community manager, revealed during the edX conference.

With the 8 million students on edx.org, the total number of learners using the Open edX technology accounts for 13.5 million worldwide.

“We are just getting started. We are seeing a world-wide accelerating adoption of the platform, a wider variety of organizations showing interest, and an ever larger scale problems being solved”,  Mark Haseltine, CTO at edX, stated during the 2016 Open edX Conference at Stanford.

“The Open edX platform goal is to be the standard for scalable delivery of educational content in order to foster education efforts worldwide, allow a broad array of organizations to participate, relieve burden of platform development on content providers, promote interoperability of courseware and encourage reuse of proven course models”, Mr. Haseltine added.