Category: Top News

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
• edX’s blog with the story
• Creating a MicroMasters Movement 

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.]

• Conference’s Website

A hundred 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.

• Infographic

“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.

Harvard has $37.6 billion in its endowment.

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.

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.”

The latest Open edX software called “Eucalyptus” was officially released this weekend. It replaces “Dogwood” and it comes with new course navigation, bookmarks, CourseTalk for reviews, teams, student notes and badges for completing course events.

It also includes “Subsection prerequisites”, which require learners to achieve a certain score before they progress to the next subsection. Additionally, there are a number of new XBlocks, such as: Completion, Drag and Drop Problem and Peer Instruction.

The Release Notes detail all of these functionalities.

“Eucalyptus.1 is the first release on the Eucalyptus line”, explained Ned Batchelder, manager at edX . “We’re proud of all the work that went into producing Eucalyptus, we hope you get good use from it”.

Several features have been deprecated or deleted:

• REST APIs (deprecated):
  • Mobile, course structure, and profile images REST web services
• Tools & Problem Types (deprecated):
  • Randomize component (replaced by randomized content blocks
  • Original drag and drop problem type (replaced by mobile-friendly drag and drop problem
• Tools & XModules (deleted):
  • The graphical slider tool
  • The crowdsource hinter XModule
  • Support for the always_recalculate_grades XBlock field
  • The ENABLE_JWT_AUTH feature flag

“FICUS” WILL BE NEXT

The next Open edX release, scheduled for early 2017, will be called “Ficus“. It will include notifications, downloadable audio files and several improvements on mobile, commerce, grading, discussion, SSO integration, etc. This will be the sixth official release, after Aspen (September 2014), Birch (January 2015), Cypress (August 2015), Dogwood (January 2016) and Eucalyptus (August 2016).

Key Resources:

• Open edX Portal: Eucalyptus: A New Release to Chew On 
• Slides and video with the announcement
• Open edX Eucalyptus Release Notes
• Eucalyptus Installation Instructions
• Upgrade instructions
• Getting Help on edX page
• XBlock Directory

New Features:

• Self-Paced Course Configuration
• Subsection Prerequisites
• Course Navigation
• Teams
• Bookmarks
• Drag and Drop Problem XBlock
• Peer Instruction XBlock
• Completion XBlock
• CourseTalk for Course Reviews
• Configurable Data Storage Services
• Staff Grading Options for Open Response Assessments
• Learner ORA Response Report
• Updates to E-Commerce Checkout
• Badges for Custom Course Events
• Updates to Course Discussions
• Other Updates

“The additional revenue from HarvardXPlus will contribute to the sustainability of HarvardX and defray some of the costs of producing the online materials,” Faculty director of HarvardX Robert A. Lue said for The Harvard Crimson about its new premium model on MOOCs.

The HarvardXPlus platform will charge between $200 and $500 for enrollments in four eight-week courses, starting on September. This, according to The Harvard Crimson, will “signal a move towards more financially sustainable online learning models”, after the “fiscal sustainability of the HarvardX has come under question.”

“Charging a fee will provide financial incentive to finish the course,” said Lue. According to a recent report, 5 percent of non-paying HarvardX participants completed the course, while those who paid for certification had around a 59 percent completion rate.

Lue emphasized that HarvardXPlus is “experimental,” and more premium courses are currently in the works. According to Lue, HarvardX will evaluate the first iteration of the program after the courses are completed this fall.

HarvardXPlus promises students expanded content and a more intimate contact with peers, teaching fellows, and faculty. In addition, the program will also provide those who complete the course with a “branded credential,” a two-page document that describes in detail the learning objectives, outcomes, and skills acquired throughout the course. Enrollment will be capped in the hundreds, as opposed to the tens of thousands who enroll in HarvardX courses.

HarvardXPlus –with courses on biochemistry, business contracts, world and China literature– requires a fee for enrollment; HarvardX –the Harvard-specific branch of the edX platform– allows participants to purchase $50 to $150 verified certificates for otherwise free courses.