EdX’s engineers have started to perform architectural improvements on the Open edX platform. “We are heading towards a more modular system, where we will have smaller, focused applications that work together”, explained Ned Batchelder, edX architect, during the 2015 Conference. [Watch his talk in the video below].
“We are looking to breaking Open edX into smaller pieces, as separated repositories and applications, so they can be tested and deployed independently. Most notably we are splitting the LMS and the CMS, so, for example, you will have one studio that feeds four LMSs”, added.
“We are also very interested in extension points: APIs, XBlocks, OLXs.” This will allow to increase the surface area of application without having to change the inside.
Dogwood, which is the name of the release that will be coming out at the end of this year, will include a new theming system that allows to keep the look-and-feel as users upgrade the system. It will also include Otto, a separated deployable e-commerce application, as well as an upgrade into Django 1.8 (now, Open edX is using Django 1.4).
In addition to these areas, edX’s and Open edX’s engineering team is pushing toward accessibility, in order to lead this area within online education. There is also a working group exploring “adaptive learning”.
The next version, called Eucalyptus, is scheduled for March 2016.
Progress on features as well as the next challenges are shown in the official Feature Roadmap web page.
“Anyone doing online education should be thinking about using Open edX”, said Ned Batchelder.
What is the impact of edX? See the slide above captured during the Open edX Conference, celebrated last week at Wellesley College.
Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX –a 140 people non-profit organization growing by 20 percent each year– opened the event by highlighting edX’s goal of reaching one billion students in the next 10 years, as well as other objectives such as improving on-campus education and advancing research in online learning. [Watch the whole talk below].
In terms of Open edX, there are 146 sites in multiple languages and 1840 courses. One of the latest ones is the Russian National Online Platform, with 50 courses.
Innovation on the platform is also remarkable. Top organizations have contributed with valuable software. This information came out of the conference:
Stanford University: Adaptive hinting, eCommerce, OLI integration
Google: Single-Sign-On, Instant Hangouts
Berkeley: Forums 2.0
MIT: Equations, many types of problems, SPOC/CCX, SGA XBlock
The Second Open edX Conference attracted over 250 developers and educational leaders this week in Wellesley College, near Boston. Participants and organizers agreed that the event was a remarkable success –all the goals were not only achieved, but also exceeded.
The Open edX Twitter feed reflected attendants’ excitement and satisfaction as well.
This playlist of YouTube videos includes all the conferences and talks. This pagecontains all the power point presentations.
IBL Open edX TV – 24 x 7 uninterrupted video stream (Beta) –
Featuring top presentations at the Open edX 2015 Conference
IBL Studios Education (IBL) has launched a YouTube channel with the most extensive collection of Open edX-related videos, http://youtube.com/iblstudios/
This channel comprises several playlists, which includes videos from the Open edX meetups, first Open edX Conference, tutorials, talks, edX and Open edX courses’ introductory videos and other materials.
The content curation process has taken place throughout the last year.
MIT has started to talk to other universities regarding its new online credential called “MicroMaster’s“, according to MIT News.
The first universities that will choose to adopt this concept might be members of the edX consortium that are already producing courses on edX.org.
MIT anticipates that several other universities will use the MicroMaster’s as a new unit of currency in higher education in the future.
MicroMaster’s credentials will be convertible to course credit of existing master’s programs. Anyone who successfully masters the online material and receives a high grade –higher than the existing XSeries certificate– on a demanding, proctored exam will earn the credential.
In addition, MIT expects that this new credential will be valued by companies, and will foster career advancement for its holders.
Supply Chain Management (SCM), taught on edX.org, will be the first MicroMaster’s course to be offered –in February, 2016.
Welcome to the “try before you buy” model in higher education. In other words, you first try the course through a low-cost series of edX MOOCs and then apply.
MIT has decided to disrupt itself, according to its president Rafael Reif, and stay in the vanguard of innovation (“I’d rather we disrupt ourselves than be disrupted by somebody else”, he recently said).
The first pilot of this blended model will be launched in February 2016. It will be related to the one year Supply Chain Management (SCM) program, which allows to earn a Master’s of Engineering in Logistics degree.
Learners who complete the open series of SCM edX MOOCs –see the introductory video above– will receive a new credential called an MITx MicroMaster’s and will have chances of being accepted to the full master’s program, spending a single semester on campus and paying half of the $65,000 tuition. If they are admitted, their MicroMaster’s will count toward a semester’s worth of MIT credit.
This residential program enrolls 36 to 40 students every year. This blended experiment can triple the annual output of master’s degrees in that field. It seems that MIT won’t lose money –on the contrary.
And, if the pilot goes well, MIT will expand this model to other programs.
MIT’s idea comes as universities and digital entrepreneurs are racing to integrate MOOCs into higher education.
Earlier this year, edX and Arizona State University launched Global Freshman Academy: students enroll in MOOCs, complete them and pay the university to receive credit.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created its iMBA program. Students complete much of their curriculum before deciding whether or not to apply to the university’s College of Business and pursue the full MBA degree.
George Tech is already underway with its own MOOC-powered degree program.
“Open sourcing the edX platform was the best idea we’ve ever had”, Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX, said last week during the “Learning with MOOCs II” gathering at Columbia University in New York.
During his talk, as part of the “Mooc Platform: The Year Ahead”, Mr. Agarwal disclosed the launch of the “RDX or Research Data Exchange” initiative, which will allows edX partners to share all the data generated on the platform.
He also highlighted the improvement of the “group learning” feature on edX: learners will be able to invite each other and form groups for social learning.
Cohorts and social learning for teams are specially interesting for the corporate world, he said.
Open edX: 1,800 courses and 150 sites
Answering questions from the audience, Anant Agarwal stated that “the future of learning is blended”. On the other hand, he referred to the number of edX courses: “there are 1,800 courses on Open edX platforms and 700 at edx.org“. “Also, there are close to 150 Open edX sites“.
Guest Post: Prof. Lorena Barba
Title: Q&A with Prof. John Mitchell Originally posted at Open edX Universities.org
Stanford University president, John Hennessy, created the office of the Vice Provost for Online Learning (VPOL) in Summer 2012—dubbed “the year of the MOOC” by The New York Times—and tapped Prof. John Mitchell to lead it.
John Mitchell is a computer scientist with a long career of research in programming languages and computer security. He has worked on web security and privacy, tackling the difficult task of expressing nuanced privacy concerns into programmable algorithms. This work was covered by The Economist magazine in January 2007 (“The logic of privacy,” Science & Technology section).
In 2009, Mitchell and his students developed a web platform to support teaching and learning called CourseWare. It was used for early experiments with “flipped classroom” pedagogies and was a precursor to the MOOC platforms of today.
As Stanford’s VPOL, John Mitchell supported around 450 projects involving nearly 10% of all Stanford faculty (about 200 instructors). In late 2014, the VPOL office at Stanford was combined with Academic Computing, Classroom Technology, and the Center for Teaching and Learning, with Mitchell leading the larger group as Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning (VPTL).
Q&A
—Some years back, you worked on applying algorithms to questions of privacy. What of that research could you apply today to issues related to student privacy, in an increasingly data-driven education system?
Privacy issues get interesting when clear needs for data come in conflict with privacy risks. For example, medical data is vital for improving health care and tracking the spread of epidemics. But most of us as patients worry about the privacy of our medical conditions and hope for fair treatment from insurers and employers.
Data analysis offers huge potential for improving education, but data must be handled carefully for many reasons. Students want to feel safe to try something and fail, without being judged. And parents worry about how their children will be assessed from the data collected by schools or private companies supplying learning technology.
An immediate way to reduce privacy risks is applying the computer-security principle of not collecting data we don’t need. Cryptography reduces the privacy risks and ensures confidentiality for the data we do collect. So despite the challenges of handling education data, our field draws on experience with other kinds of data and has tools to tighten security.
—In an interview with The Stanford Daily, you said: “It’s easy to build a platform … But it’s another thing getting new teaching and learning ideas adopted across campus and engaging the faculty …” What did you do as VPOL to address the second aspect?
We asked two things of each proposal from faculty teams: (1) a clear educational benefit to Stanford students; (2) a well articulated research component that pushed the envelope by trying new pedagogical techniques. They needed to do more than simply record classroom lectures or break up standard lectures into smaller pieces. Once faculty got into the studio and looked at what they could produce, they became enthusiastic about restructuring their courses and engaging students in different ways.
—The public may know of the efforts Stanford has put in MOOCs, with Stanford Online hosting its own Open edX platform and more courses available through Coursera. But what can you tell us about the adoption of online and blended learning with Stanford students on campus?
Over 2012-2014, several projects developed material to use on campus first, then released some of it in a MOOC. We worked together with the faculty over several academic terms, revising and extending the materials and coming back often to the needs of Stanford students.
The more compelling stories happened when a professor came back from the MOOC to rework the course again, looking to support a “river and tributaries” model. Rather than giving students just a linear sequence of topics, these courses let students get interested in side issues and explore them. Or they can support those that need a refresher before starting a new section, providing that support online and on demand.
—Some watchers of the ed tech scene say that Stanford’s own open-source platform, Class2Go, was a better product than Open edX. Why did you decide to abandon development of Class2Go?
Thanks for the compliment. We had a great engineering team, led by two experienced industry professionals: Sef Kloninger and Jane Manning . They did a great job. But as our ambitions grew, we decided for the advantages of teaming up with others.
—You announced the partnership of Stanford with edX to develop the Open edX software in April 2013. What brought about this partnership?
We had developed Class2Go quickly, to experiment with different learning formats and to explore different pricing models and other options. But it’s a lot of work to develop a full-featured and reliable platform. It didn’t make sense to take that on alone, if there were other institutions with similar needs. I was happy that Anant Agarwal and edX as a whole were enlightened and delivered on their promise of open-sourcing their platform as we dropped Class2Go and devoted our modest engineering effort to the shared code base.
—Stanford is unique in its approach to embracing any platform that faculty want to use—with faculty posting on iTunes U, YouTube, EdNovo, Coursera, and Stanford Online. What is the rationale behind giving faculty such freedom?
We are looking at education far into the future. The format supported by Coursera can currently be effective for many courses. But NovoEd offers a different model that could have advantages for courses that include student projects. We are learning as we go, and it’s essential to try different approaches to see what works best.
I’d like to see every professor learn from what others have done, consult experts like our VPTL team who try to keep abreast of the latest ideas, and give their students the most valuable learning experiences. Digital technology is amazingly flexible and we want to take advantage of that.
—It seems that many new ideas in education are born in Stanford and then are widely adopted. Why do you think this is? And do you see any fresh new area that could be the next surprise development?
I’m proud to be at Stanford where we have some of the most creative, committed, and knowledgeable faculty in the world. We also have an entrepreneurial spirit on campus and enough confidence to try things that fail. But we are part of a broad academic community and there are great ideas cropping up everywhere.
We all try to understand what works best for our students. I think we will see video used more sparingly. It’s a great medium for giving a short explanation and capturing the enthusiasm of the professor. But students learn by doing, so we will build more ways for students to struggle with ideas on their own or in collaboration with others.
In another front, we are still trying to find the modern digital analog of the book. Professors write text books to share their knowledge and teaching methods with others but we haven’t quite figured out how to produce rich digital learning tools that work, across institutions and for instructors who teach different student populations. It’s a challenge but very exciting to face so many unknowns!
Learn more!
Prof. Mitchell announcing the “Year of Learning” for academic year 2015–2016. Published on Sep 18, 2015
https://youtu.be/OY9RUc4kpxY
At the #mediaX2015 Conference, Prof. Mitchell gives an overview of Stanford’s online-learning initiatives over the last few years. Published on Jun 4, 2015
