An amazing year 2015 for edX, its learners and the community: 3rd anniversary, 6 million learners (and over 10 million more on Open edX sites, including Stanford, Xuetangx, FUN…), more than 800 courses (and 1,000+ on Open edX), groundbreaking educational programs such as the Global Freshman Academy and MIT’s MicroMaster’s, three new versions of the Open edX software, a vibrant community…
Most of it is reflected in the graphic below.
Definitely, MOOCs have not fixed education and the promise of a big change has not been accomplished.
Back in 2012, Stanford University proclaimed the MOOC revolution and now in 2015 declares its disappointment.
Stanford’s professors and co-directors of the Lytics Lab John Mitchell, Candace Thile and Mitchell Stevens (in the picture) have shared what they learned on a revealing article on Inside of Higher Ed online magazine.
We summarized their main ideas:
Inside Higher Ed: What We’ve Learned From MOOCs
School Yourself, a leading provider of online math lessons and author of two courses on edX.org (Introduction to Algebra and Introduction to Geometry) and an XBlock, has been acquired this month by Amplify for an undisclosed amount.
School Yourself CEO Zach Wissner-Gross and his team at the company will join Amplify and continue building learning solutions in hard sciences, game design and adaptive learning.
The current School Yourself content, which includes more than 250 interactive math lessons, will remain freely available at schoolyourself.org and via edX.org.
Founded in 2012, School Yourself got five grants since it was created, according to Crunchbase: $5K on April 2012, $10K on June 2012, $25K on November 2012, an undisclosed amount on September 2014 and $250K on February 2015.
“Our mission has always been to improve education through innovation,” said School Yourself CEO Zach Wissner-Gross. “By joining with Amplify, we’ll be able to continue that mission, while continuing to support active users of schoolyourself.org.”
The third New York Open edX Meetup will take place this January 7th at McKinsey Academy’s WeWork in downtown Manhattan.
More than 90 people have confirmed their attendance for the meetup since it was announced four days ago.
Meanwhile, the number of people who belong to this group has surpassed 450. This is the largest community of Open edX-ers.
Columbia University, edX, McKinsey Academy, IBL Studios and Open Online Academy‘s representatives will talk about the state of Open edX and explain how this open-source technology is helping universities and businesses to implement MOOC-style courses, intended for blended, continuous education, professional development, alumni engagement, lead generation and for-credit programs.
“What makes the Open edX platform unique” is the theme of this meetup.
The panelists will be the following:
• Maurice Matiz, Executive Director Columbia Center for Media Teaching and Learning, Columbia University
• Joel Barciauskas, Engineering Manager at edX
• Jennifer Gormley, Senior Director, Product and Marketing at McKinsey Academy
• Michael Amigot, Founder at IBL Studios (Open edX)
• Ivan Shumkov, Founder at Open Online Academy (ooac.org)
This event will take place after the success of the Open edX Universities Symposium in DC, organized by the same team.
This short, welcoming event –free of sales pitches– will include brief talks, along with a round-table discussion and networking.
This event will be live broadcasted and open to outside participation. All of the talks will be filmed and distributed throughout the Open edX community.
Our third Open edX meetup will be sponsored by McKinsey Academy, WeWork and IBL.
Access is free, although seats are limited. Beer and pizza will be served.
edX released this week the first pre-release of Dogwood, the next Open edX version after Cypress.
Dogwood RC2 is available for download and for fresh installations, but not for upgrading from Cypress. The RC1 wasn’t released, and the next RC3 is scheduled for January 6th, when upgrade scripts will become available.
Installation instructions have been posted at this wiki page from edX. Meanwhile, the edX Release Notes page gives a sense of what is new.
IBL provided the first Dogwood installation to the community as a testing platform.
The next Open edX release called Dogwood will be available for the code developers’ community on January 26, 2016.
Dogwood will be the fourth named release of the Open edX software, after Aspen (September 2014), Birch (March 2015) and Cypress (July 2015).
Ned Batchelder, software architect at edX, disclosed the following planned dates for Dogwood:
The edX organization has implemented a new revenue model on its catalog, based on charging to access graded problems. Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX, made the announcement today on the official edX blog.
Audit learners (free learners) will continue to access the core course content, including videos, resources, discussion forum, and practice problems, but they will need to upgrade to the “verified learner status” and pay a fee (usually $50 to $100) to unlock graded assessments.
Additionally, after the free course ends, users won’t be able to access content unless they upgrade into the paid option. This time limit feature will be set on most of the existing courses. “Existing audit track enrollments will not be affected. Learners will be able to access all content in any course(s) they enrolled in prior to December 17, 2018,” edX explained.
With this model, edX expects to generate a 30% increase in its overall revenue, which will be split with partners, as sources told IBL News.
This change, aligned with the business practices of Coursera, Udacity and other competitors, comes after several months of exploring different revenue models and is part of edX’s strategy to become sustainable. Particularly, edX’s paywall will be similar to FutureLearn’s upgrading feature. Coursera was the first to charge for graded assignments three years ago.
During the testing time prior to the implementation, edX claimed that it didn’t receive negative feedback from learners, although some university partners complained about it during the last Global Forum conference in Boston last month.
“We have decided on a model that we feel will best drive edX forward while staying true to our mission,” explained Anant Agarwal. “We wanted to strike a balance of moving edX towards financial sustainability while maintaining a robust level of free access.”
Also, MITx shared his view. “We support edX in its mission and path. We are working to ensure we maintain the integrity of the learning experience for all learners under this updated model. Materials for over 2,600 MIT courses will continue to be available for free to all learners on MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW).”
Dhawal Shah, founder of Class Central, said “that edX’s paywall will now be higher than Coursera’s, especially since Coursera has born the brunt of criticism about restricting access to MOOCs, which many attributed to pressure from Coursera’s VC investors.” “Strangely enough, with this change to edX, Coursera is now the MOOC platform that allows free users to go furthest before hitting a paywall.”
• edX Blog: Updates To Our Platform: Achieving Long-Term Sustainability
• Inside Higher Ed: EdX’s Struggle for Sustainability
In today’s technology-driven world, there is a significant job/student gap within computer science. Clearly, a background in computer science improves employability and opens up many career opportunities.
There are currently 600,000 open computing jobs throughout the U.S. By 2020 it is projected that there will be 1 million more computer science jobs than students learning computer science.
Because of the Computer Science Education Week and Hour of Code, edX.org pulled together a list of free computer science courses to help teachers, students and professionals learn programming skills.
Useful Resources
edX has discontinued the free honor code certificates, although the old ones will remain valid. Instead, learners will be able to audit courses without a fee and have the option to apply for financial assistance to help cover 90% of the cost of verified certificates.
New courses on edx.org now offer two types of certificates: Verified and XSeries.
“It seems that the top two MOOC providers in the world, Coursera and edX, are going along a similar path as they too strive to achieve sustainability. Both have made announcements to the effect that they will remove a key component of the MOOC experience,” writes Dhawal Shah in Class-Central.com this week.
Before edX and Coursera, Udacity pioneered this formula by stopping free certificates, making graded assignments a paid feature and creating their own type of credential (Nanodegree). This way Udacity reached profitability.
In this fight to generate revenue, some universities are doing well.
edX launched on December 7 an improved version of its app for iPhones and Android devices. It provides a much more complete course experience for learners.
In addition to downloading and watching videos without an Internet connection, learners are able to view course content (HTML and text components), as well as complete basic assessments (checkbox, dropdown, multiple choice, and text or numerical input problems).
There is currently a free edX mobile app for iPhones on the Apple App Store and another for Android on the Google Play Store. For iPads and Android tablets it’s not available yet.
[Disclosure: IBL has launched the first service of fully functioning iPhone/Android apps for independent Open edX platforms. GW SEAS’s prototype app is pictured above].
