IBL News

Category: Top News

  • Proversity.org Open edX MOOC Provider Raises $1.6 Million

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    Proversity.org, a London-based MOOC provider and early adopter of the Open edX system, has raised $1.6M (£1 million) from the venture capital firm RSBC Financial Services, according to the company. Funding will be used to recruit managers on sales, digital production and software engineering.

    With a network in London, Santiago, Boston and Cape Town, Proversity has worked on training and professional development projects for clients such as the Bank of England, the British Army, Lloyds Bank and Family Mosaic.

  • Learning Analytics Is a Must-Have Feature 

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    “Analytics are no longer a nice-to-have feature”, stated Dr. Linda Baer during the first Open edX Universities Symposium, celebrated last month at The George Washington University in DC.

    Baer presented a graphic forecasting the evolution of the analytics technology, from descriptive and diagnostic to predictive and prescriptive analytics, where educators will be able to advance what will happen and how can they make it happen.

    Currently, learning analytics technology is just on the first stage of the graphic.

    INSIGHTS ANALYTICS ON OPEN EDX

    The edX organization offers the Insights Analytics server to their paid partners –all of the universities and known brands that belong to the xConsortium.

    Last week, IBL was able to complete the first installation of the last version of Insights Analytics –including Video Insights– on the Open edX community. GW Engineering’s Open edX platform is currently taking advantage of this service.

    analyticsonopenedx

  • Beth Porter Leaves edX

    beth-porter-300 (1)Beth Porter, Vice President of edX and one the most prominent advocates of the Open edX software and methodology, has decided to leave the organization. “I’m going to take a break for a couple of months to spend time with my family and figure out what to do next”, she explained on an email to IBL’s Founder.

    No more information about her departure was provided from her or the edX Corporation.

    Beth Porter is not the only one. Sarina Canelake, one of the managers of the Open edX community, reached out to IBL as well to communicate her decision to leave edX.

  • Unbundling University Education: Welcome to the "iTunes-Style" College

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    “American higher education organizations will undergo from packaged courses and degrees to unbundled course offerings,”     argues Ryan Craig, managing director of University Ventures, a private-equity fund, in his new book, “College Disrupted”.

    “This ‘unbundling’ of higher-education will allow students to earn new kinds of educational credentials,” wrote Jeffrey R. Young in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

    Experts say that students will want to save money by picking from a menu, trying “micro-degrees”, personalized modules and courses, skipping costly perks such as library access or a gym. Paying for a bundle of services seems to be over.

    From a pedagogic point of view, students can retake any module they struggle with before moving on to more advanced material.

    More and more colleges are examining this “iTunes playlist-style” offer. MIT, Harvard and other edX universities are experimenting with making in-person courses modular. In fact, this is a powerful idea that the Open edX platform promotes. Udacity and Coursera also offer these kinds of mini-degrees, credentials and badges.

    Working adults looking to update their skills have been the early adopters. And, in this sense, Ryan Craig predicts that “LinkedIn will become the arbiter of these mini-degrees”, generating standardized lists of proven competencies from users’ profiles that employers will easily search for.

  • Coursera's, edX's and Udacity's New Business Models: Marketable Knowledge and For-Credit Pathway Programs

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    The main three MOOC providers are putting together specific business models to evolve from a money-losing activity, become sustainable and even thrive. Coursera and Udacity are designing corporate courses, while edX is convincing universities to offer credits through their courses.

    Udacity attracted in November $105M from venture capitalists showing that students are ready to pay and complete courses that might land them top jobs. Corporations such as AT&T, Google, Facebook, Cloudera and MongoDB partner with Udacity and design market-oriented courses that support much-needed skills.

    edX has incorporated 27 edX new members in the past year –generating around $15 million. But it now faces a new challenge: to convince its university partners to renew their three-year contracts, as Allison Dulin explains in a article at edSurge.

    “Learners want credit, and to provide credit we must create quality learning environments that meet the needs of diverse learners, and are recognized by institutions and employers. And it’s no secret that credit is a bridge to financial sustainability for edX and its partner universities”, Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX says.

  • edX University Partners Will Produce K-12 Courses for Microsoft

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    edX announced this month a new collaboration with Microsoft to develop online courses for K-12 school leaders, principals and superintendents.

    These courses, which will be created by edX university partners, will help K-12 education leaders improve their schools and enhance classroom learning through technology.

    This agreement expands upon the existing collaboration between edX and Microsoft. Microsoft offers more than 35 online MOOC and professional education courses on edx.org.

    No further details have been disclosed. Read the official press release here.

     

  • Open edX's Real Time Conversation Moves to Slack

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    The Open edX community’s real-time conversation has moved from the aging IRC (#edx-code on irc.freenode.net) to the modern Slack communication tool. This is the address: https://openedx.slack.com.

    Anyone can join this space by entering her email here.

    Currently, there are ten channels to interact with one another and share ideas. These are some of them:

    • #general (for all things Open edX)
    • #events (for discussions on upcoming meetups and conferences)
    • #news (for discussions on news stories)
    • #docker (for containerizing all of the things)
    • #front-end (for design and implementations)
    • #learn-technologies
    • #ops (for discussion of operational issues)
    • #tastyburger (for jokes)

    [Open edX Community Portal: Open edX on Slack, by Molly de Blanc]

  • Investments in MOOCs Start to Pay Off

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    There was a consensus at the edX Global Forum that the future of higher education is blended.

    The same course design methodologies employed to produce a MOOC will be applied to redesign residential classes. “The desire to leverage data and analytics to evolve pedagogical practices that has been so much a part of the MOOC world also applies to residential teaching and learning,” states Dr. Joshua Kim, from Dartmouth College.

    Open online initiatives such as ASU’s Global Freshman Academy, MIT’s Micro-Masters-based courses or entire MBA programs like the University of Illinois’ $20,000 iMBA degree through Coursera indicate what comes next.

    In other words, the investment in effort and dollars in MOOCs has started to pay-off in residential teaching and learning.

    Joshua Kim has observed the impact that MOOC-based initiatives are having. We have summarized them here:

    • MOOCs provide an opportunity to rethink and redesign introductory classes.
    • MOOCs accelerate the transition from a lecture teaching to an active learning model for larger-enrollment courses. A poorly executed flipped class has unintended consequences.“How much could faculty do with introductory courses if they had access to collaboration with a team of instructional designers, librarians, media educators, and assessment experts?What MOOCs can do is shift how faculty think about the process of creating a course – opening up new ideas about how this process can shift from a purely solo effort to a more collaborative creative process.”
    • MOOCs create new capabilities in instructional design and educational media and result in new skills in assessment and learning research.

     

  • The "edX Idea": Higher Education Credentials for Everyone

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    Beyond a consortium, educational portal and open source platform, edX is a powerful concept structured into a community of learners, educators, technologists and entrepreneurs.

    Dr. Joshua Kim, Director of Digital Learning Initiatives at Dartmouth University, has expressed this thought in an article written for “Inside the Higher Ed”.

    “A meaningful higher education credential should be available to every person in the world rather than the small minority”, says Joshua Kim.

    In other words, “edX is an idea”. And there is nothing in this world as powerful as an idea.

    You might think that Coursera, Udacity or another powerful start-up can also develop this goal.

    Well, so far no one except edX has formulated the goal of reaching one billion learners in ten years. The edX consortium has a key advantage over Coursera: it is a non-profit organization and its software is fully open source.

    And a third one: the willingness to partner with the software and instructional design community. Beth Porter, VP of Product at edX, said during the “Open edX Universities Symposium” that “the goal (of the one billion learners) cannot be achieved without the help of the open source community”.

    Joshua Kim highlights that “higher education credentials need not be scarce”.

    • “EdX is not really a consortium. (Although it is a consortium). EdX is not really an open platform. (Although it is an open platform). EdX is not really a website and a global aggregator of lifelong learners. (Although it is both those things).”
    • “What in our world has transitioned from scarcity to abundance? (Or near abundance?). Light. Clean water. Food. Books. Bandwidth. Music. News. Processing Power. Storage. Information. (…) Some people (including me) think that energy will make the transition from scarcity to abundance in our lifetimes.”
    • “The idea of edX is that a higher education credential is a right for everybody, not a privilege of the few. (…) What I find amazing is that the members of the edX Consortium seem to think that it can be done.”
    • “A move to end the global scarcity in higher education credentialing will require a non-linear advance. (…) “The answer will only be found by experimentation and action (rather than talking and defending the status quo).”

     

     

  • The Global Forum Event Attracted All of the Key Players of edX

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    “There has never been a more exciting time in higher education”    , said Georgetown University’s Provost Robert M. Groves during the opening remarks at the edX Global Forum (DC, December 8 – 10). “Together we are shaking the future of higher ed”, added.

    Addressing an audience of over 400 selected attendees from all over the world, Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, stated: “You are changing the world”. During this two-day program of discussions, talks and networking activities had an stellar intervention from Megan Smith, CTO of the United States. She highlighted the importance of open education in this transitional time that education is facing. “It reminds me of the music industry’s transition”.

    Attendees –a mix of edX partners, learners, professors, researchers and technologists– noticed the success of the edX project. Every university, organization and corporation who plays a key role in the edX universe attended this conference. Discussion topics ranged from the future of credentials, blended education and skill gaps to the importance of the humanities and liberal arts. In total, 75 speakers, 60 of whom were edX partners.

    Anant Agarwal announced the incorporation of 27 edX new partners as well as the edX prize to recognize the most engaging teacher.

    New edX members join us from around the world and include: RWTH Aachen University, Smith College, Princeton University, Teachers College Columbia University, The Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, University of Pennsylvania, Galileo Universidad, Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Edinburgh, Waseda University.

    edX Global Forum 2016 will take place in Paris.

    [Additional reading: edX’s Blog: edX Global Forum 2015 wrap-up]

    The event was tweeted through #FutureEDU.