Category: Top News

Open edX courses now can take advantage of Creative Commons licensing

The Open edX platform has started to incorporate Creative Commons licenses for websites that choose to offer them. Course staffers can enable this feature simply on Advanced Settings –setting the feature flag LICENSING to true.

The platform also allows for a mix of licenses, so instructors can include copyrighted videos or other materials too.

In addition, edX has joined the global Open Educational Resources (OER) movement.

The Delft University of Technology played a big role in this story as well—the CC plugin was developed during Open Education Week 2014, an Open edX hackathon organized by Delft.

The second Open edX conference will take place on October 12-13th at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, according to their organizers.

Registration is open. Booking in advance will allow to save $100.

Wellesley –edX consortium member– is one of the most prestigious women’s colleges in the US, and one of the top liberal arts colleges. It is located 18 miles away from Boston. 

Creativity and innovation happen everywhere.

Watch this video about the 1st Open edX Hackathon in France.

#OPENEDXHACK was held for 48 hours during May 29-30, 2015, in eight French cities. IONISx, France Université Numérique and edX organized the event.

The winning project was Gutenberg and Bruxelles, who wrote an XBlock to create interactive videos with problems. See all the projects here.

EdCast has re-oriented its strategy based on being solely an Open edX hosting provider toward becoming a billion-dollar social media learning platform for millions of users who aspire to engage in life-long learning while networking with peers. The first step in this new address is “EdCasting”, a Twitter-like platform that allows people to post video or link snippets of educational content. This initiative was announced a week ago. EdCast‘s new website reflects the new strategy.

“EdCasting” is meant to be an informal learning ecosystem, where users follow channels or people and groups, and educators can curate relevant content to their followers. So far there are 10 channels ranging from entrepreneurship, architecture, robotics, technology, and health, filled with insights from over 100 globally-renowned experts and influencers. This app is available on iTunes and Google Play. There is also a Chrome extension that allows people to do EdCasting from Google’s browser.

Karl Metha, Founder & CEO of EdCast, is merging in this project the power of Facebook’s and Twitter’s social networks with the allure of online courses, MOOCs and micro-MOOCs. The platform uses mostly Open edX technology.  “Just as podcasting and Tweeting made it easier to share general content, EdCasting empowers everyone to share their knowledge and help create the new culture of lifelong learning in this knowledge economy. With EdCasting, you are just a button push away from being connected to subject experts,” Karl Metha said.

An initial list of “EdCasters” include the following people:

• Dr. William J. Perry (page), former U.S. Secretary of Defense and head of the Dr. William J. Perry Project, providing public education on the danger of nuclear weapons

• Mitch Kapor (page), founder of venture capital firm Kapor Capital

• Prof. Jeffrey Sachs (page), director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University

• John Seely Brown (page), former Chief Scientist and Director of Xerox PARC

• Vivek Wadwha (page), of Singularity University

• Joi Ito (page), Director of MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship

• Mark Surman (page), of the Mozilla Foundation

• TJ Bliss (page), of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

• Karl Mehta (page), the outspoken founder of EdCast and nonprofit Code for India

Companies are spending more of their training budgets in-house and setting up their own “corporate universities”, rather than relying on business schools and consulting firms. Their main goal is to build a curriculum tailored to the company’s strategy.

General Electric opened the first corporate university in 1956. The number of corporate universities in America doubled between 1997 and 2007, to around 2,000. According to the Economist, more than 4,000 companies around the world have them, including big brands such as Unilever, ArcelorMittal, Tenaris (on edX) and Apple –who has hired Yale’s business school’s dean.

Open edX is designed to run on AWS and automatically scale.

But what is the business behind Amazon’s cloud service?

AWS is generating an annual revenue of about $6 billion, about ten times the revenue of its closest competitor in the public cloud market –Microsoft’s Azure, with $500 to $700 million.

That is what Karl Keirstead at Deutsche Bank estimates, according to Bloomberg Business Week.

Amazon’s cloud business (AWS) may be the fastest-growing corporate technology business of all of all time. Currently, it holds 28 percent of the worldwide market for cloud infrastructure services.

Unlike big hardware makers, Amazon built his success pitching a relatively cheap product to masses of developers rather than CIOs.

AWS is facing challenges from startups such as DigitalOcean in New York, which is used also by many Open edX developers. Its best-seller is a server that coders can have access to for $10 a month.

With nine data centers around the world, DigitalOcean has become the third largest hosting company in the world, after raising almost $100 million in funding.

Video is a great teaching tool, but sometimes you don’t need it in order to create an engaging and successful online course.

Take Prof. Lorena Barba’s “Practical Numerical Methods with Python” course at George Washington University (GW), which was designed around a set of IPython Notebooks.

This GW instructor [disclosure: IBL works for GW] has written a controversial, although enlightening article in Class-Central, later reproduced in edSurge,  titled “Why My MOOC is Not Built on Video”, that states that “expensive, high-production-value videos are not necessary to achieve a quality learning experience.”

Here is a summary:

• “The fixation with videos in MOOCs, online courses and blended learning is worrisome. At the edX Global Forum (November 2014), it was often mentioned that producing a MOOC is a high-cost operation, with an estimated average expense of $100,000 per course. This is probably a somewhat overindulgent price for appearance, rather than substance. There is no evidence justifying the “production value” from a learning perspective. In fact, as far back as 1971, Donald Bligh concluded that “there is not much difference in the effectiveness of methods to present information.” In this sense, a video—however nicely produced—is not better than a lecture.”
• “Videos are nice, they can get you exposed to a new concept for the first time in an agreeable way, but they do not produce learning, on their own. Students need to engage with the concepts in various ways, interact with ideas and problems, and work through a process of “digestion” of the learning material.”
• “Despite their popularity in MOOCs and flipped classrooms, “lecture videos” have the same pitfalls as regular lectures: they provide a false sense of clarity and are utterly forgettable.”
• “Unfortunately, most of the video I see in MOOCs is not very effective, despite the so-called production value. I question the rationale behind spending large sums in making documentary style videos and placing emphasis on the amount of time students spend watching.”
• “The problem with making videos “central” to the student experience is that it comes at the expense of higher-order learning activities. More worrying is that students will spend almost all their time watching videos, as if that could magically elicit learning, without the hard work.”
• “Videos can be one device for building a MOOC or a small online or blended course, but not generally the most important one. We need to acknowledge the limitations of video and place emphasis on authentic learning and not just “engagement” (time watching, # of clicks).”

The University of Notre Dame will launch in June 1, on edX.orgm the six-week, introductory free online course “Jesus in Scripture and Tradition”.

The course will deepen our understanding of the figure of Jesus Christ. It will be organized around three topical questions:

• Who is Israel? (Primary source material: the book of Genesis)
• Who is Jesus? (Primary source material: the Gospels and the Creeds)
• Who is the Church? (Primary source material: a selection of post-Biblical Christian writers)

Is “edutainment” a good teaching tool? How about leveraging the popularity of a TV series to get people interested in science?

The University of California at Irvine will offer in June, on the Canvas Network, a four-week-long MOOC based on a TV series: “Fight or Die: The Science Behind FX’s The Strain“. The course, open for enrollment, will focus on three topics that come from the show: parasites, cyber attacks, and disease dynamics.

In 2013 the University of California launched another MOOC based on a television show. It was a course based on AMC’s The Walking Dead, which attracted around 65,000 learners.

This MOOC from the University of Notre Dame, “Understanding Wireless: Technology, Economics and Policy”, set to start on May 18th on edx.org, will award the best plan that applies the knowledge and experience gained in the course to implement wireless technology in local communities with $5,000.

Submissions from enrolled students will be judged according to their potential impact, feasibility and creativity. Three finalists will be chosen and flown to the Notre Dame campus in September where one selected winner will receive the cash prize.