Category: Top News

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) –the organization that makes the standard for HTML, CSS and web apps– has attracted 400,000 students in two years with its two signature courses on edX, HTML5 and CSS.

“The success of the W3Cx training programs underscores W3C’s commitment to creating high quality courses that specifically help Web developers to acquire or increase their skills,” said Dr. Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO on APP Developer Magazine.

To mark its second anniversary year on edX, W3C will launch on 30 May its introductory-level course in JavaScript. This five-week long course, created in collaboration with University Cote d’Azur, will be run by acclaimed Professor Michal Buffa, who was nominated as one of the edX Prize best teachers in 2016. It is free to take, with a $99 verified certificate.

Additionally, W3C is launching a “Front-End Web Developer” Professional Certificate on edX, which consists of a suite of five W3Cx courses: JavaScript, HTML5 & CSS Fundamentals, CSS Basics, HTML5 Coding Essentials and Best Practices, and HTML5 Apps and Games: Advanced Techniques.

In the video below, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW and director of W3C, makes a pitch about the mentioned courses.

Georgia Tech has launched its own Open edX instance, http://openedx.gatech.edu.

This platform now includes two unfinished courses (“Introduction to Pokemon Trading Card Game” and “Introduction to Studio”), in addition to the default edX demo course.

In charge of the effort is the College of Computing of Georgia Tech. Its goal seems to be intended to experiment with the technology while learning about the functionalities of the platform.

https://youtu.be/sNDksZjUZXw

Raccoon Gang, an Ukraine-based Open edX technology provider, has announced the release of an updated version of its SCORM XBlock, which now supports the SCORM 2004 format.

“This means that any educational materials created with SCORM 2004-compatible authoring tools, such as Camtasia, Adobe Captivate, Storyline Articulate, etc., can now be easily integrated with Open edX,” explained the developer.

• Raccoon Gang’s XBlock on GitHub

edX Inc. has announced the launch of the Professional Certificate program, a series of courses created by top universities and corporations, designed to build critical skills for specific careers. “As an innovator in education, edX is always exploring how to further our mission to expand access to and improve the quality of learning,” explained Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX.

These courses will be shorter in length, usually 4-8 weeks each, compared to the MicroMasters program, which are approximately 2-6 months long, created to bridge the gap between education and corporations while offering a pathway to credit.

Initially, there will be 15 Professional Certificate programs from 13 universities and companies such as Microsoft, HSBC, GitHub and The North Face. Microsoft’s Data Science program will be one of the most complete, while GitHub will support Berkeley’s Agile Development course.

Open edX platforms using MathJax have been encouraged to immediately upgrade into Ficus.3, a urgent release to address the fact that the MathJax library will discontinued at the end of April.

Ned Batchelder, a top edX engineer, wrote the following on the edX groups on April 21:

France Université Numérique (FUN), the French Ministry of Higher Education’s Open edX-based MOOC platform, has reached one million students. “We have 991,311 users in 224 countries: 48% of users are in France, and 52% are outside of France (figures for January 2017); of the latter, most users come from Brazil and Morocco,” explained a FUN representative on Class Central.

This project, launched in July 2013 with the aim to support French universities and increase their visibility in the Francophone world, has attracted 99 institutions –including three universities in Belgium, one in Switzerland, and two in Tunisia– who have produced over 300 MOOCs.

The most popular courses are the following:

(Graphic developed by Class Central.)

With 15 employees, all of the located in Paris, this platform gets its revenue through annual fees of universities, certificates from learners and custom services to partners such as dedicated SPOCs and white-label edX platforms.

The eight Ivy League universities (Columbia, Harvard, Brown, Cornell, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania) are now offering over 250 online free courses.

Class Central has made a collection of all the courses, split into these categories:

• Computer Science (34)
• Business & Management (58)
• Humanities (69)
• Art & Design (18)
• Science (25)
• Health & Medicine
• Mathematics (13)
• Education & Teaching (16)
• Engineering (17)

• Founder of Class Central Dhawal Shah interviewed by Free Code Camp (YouTube)

MOOC providers are leveraging their relationships with universities to jump into a new lucrative market: MOOC-based degree programs.

Today there are ten fully-fledged Masters, as show in the table below, elaborated by Class Central.

Coursera is the leading company. Now they have four Master’s degrees, after adding two more in March: Accounting, with the University of Illinois ($27.2K, 32 credit hours, 18-36 months) and Innovation and Entrepreneurship with HEC Paris (€20K, 20 courses, 10–16 months). And they plan to offer 15 to 20 programs by the end of 2019, according to Inside Higher Ed.
“To contrast, 2U, a public listed company that helps universities put their degree programs online, currently has 45 such degrees. 2U made $205.9 million in revenue in 2016, an increase of 37% over its 2015 revenue,” explains Class-Central.

HarvardX’s online learning content, which is now accesible via edX.org, will be searchable and available to Harvard professors looking to reuse it in their classroom courses.

In other words, all of HarvardX’s videos, recorded lectures, illustrations, text pages and teaching materials will be part of a tool called HarvardDART (Digital Assets for Reuse in Teaching), available only to the Harvard community on campus or through VPN.

The application will allow Harvard professors to integrate these assets directly into Harvard’s residential LMS, Canvas, so their students can use and share them.

HarvardGazette broke the news. 

“Half of today’s job won’t exist in 2030”, says Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX. “MOOCs can help to equip your workforce with the skills and knowledge needed to remain competitive and grow”. 

MOOCs offer an opportunity to fill employees’ training gap and allow them to keep up with innovation and ever-evolving technology.