This graphic above shows how EMC uses EdCast’s Open edX platform to train their customers and partners. Additionally, EMC uses EdCast’s Knowledge Network to publish micro-learning and try to engage their customers.

Over 23 million students signed up for at least one MOOC in 2016, triggering the total number of learners to 58 million, according to data provided by Class Central. Additionally, 2,600 new courses were announced in 2016 (up from 1,800 last year), taking the total number of MOOCs to 6,850 from over 700 universities –disclosed Dhawal Shah, founder and CEO of Class Central, on an article in EdSurge.

Since the first massive course was offered by Stanford professors in late 2011, MOOC providers have raised over $400 million in capital and now employ more than a thousand staff.

The “Big Three” MOOC providers — Coursera, Udacity, edX—combined potentially made around $100 million in revenues in 2016, according to the same source.

The edX.org educational portal celebrated its fourth anniversary in 2016 by adding over 500 courses and launching 19 MicroMasters programs from 14 international universities. Four million new learners enrolled in the edX courses throughout 2016.

This graphic below reflects the advancements.

 

The University of Queensland (UQ), a prominent edX university, has partnered with the giant Chinese Open edX platform XuetangX to offer five MOOCs in Chinese. These courses have attracted more than 65,000 learners. UQ’s popular The Science of Everyday Thinking had more than 50,000 registered users.

The partnership with XuetangX, which holds more than 1000 courses and six million users, has provided UQ with “a valuable opportunity to raise its profile among Chinese learners”, said this Australian university.

Professor at George Washington University and creator of the lauded Open edX MOOC Numerical Methods Lorena Barba, has been awarded with one of ten 2016 Berkeley’s Learner-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science.

Dr. Barba, a leading advocate of the Open edX technology, received the award for “her work developing and delivering curriculum focused on transparency in science and education, as well as for her clear dedication to and advocacy of open science and reproducibility.”

The award, which includes $10,000, was presented during the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) Annual Meting, on December 15.

• Winners of the 2016 Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science

 

These are the ten most popular courses of 2016 at edX.org. The list, elaborated by the edX team, is based on total enrollments and learner ratings.
1. Introduction to Computer Science – HarvardX (Self-Paced)

“Just incredible, can’t speak highly enough about this course and do not believe that there could be any better introductory course on CS.” – Philip

2. Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Excel – Microsoft (Self-Paced)

“I’ve learnt a lot and I’ll be able to apply almost everything immediately… It will be very useful for our company and for our clients.” – Jordina

3. TOEFL® Test Preparation: The Insider’s Guide – ETSx

“Amazing course, great instructors always there to answer the main concerns. Highly recommended if you want to take the TOEFL Test.” – Anonymous

(Starts January 25)

4. Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python – MITx 

“Excellent! This course is a must-take. It is a very comprehensive and great course in Python as well as computer science.” – Yew

(Starts January 10)

5. The Science of Everyday Thinking – UQx (Self-Paced)

“As a psychologist I was thrilled not only by amount and quality of material, but also by the interviews with top psychologists of the world. The guys interviewed Richard Nisbett, Elizabeth Loftus, “MythBusters”, even Nobel prize winner Daniel Kanneman. Incredible job! Fantastic course and great experience for everybody.” – Dmytro
6. Introduction to Java Programming – Part 1 – HKUSTx (Self-Paced)

“Great introductory Java course. TC Pong does a great job of explaining the content. Most of the content applies not only to Java, but to programming and problem solving in general” – Anonymous

7. Introduction to Linux – LinuxFoundationX (Self-Paced)

“This is my first online course and it could not get better than this. I wish I had known of this course earlier. The content and mode of instruction is just superb.” – Ouya

8. Introduction to Project Management – AdelaideX (Self-Paced)

“Every phase of project management was explained in detail. I do recommend this course to enhance professional and personal skills!” – Joana

9. Conversational English Skills – TsinghuaX (Self-Paced)

“Fun course! For those who are not very proficient in English, it will definitely help. You get to learn a lot about different cultures as well!” – Bharat

10. The Science of Happiness – UC BerkeleyX (Self-Paced) 

“This was an incredible experience. I am in tears. I think there are many things to highlight about this course that would not be fair if I name any of it. People have to work hard but the reward of this will change your life for good. I assure you. Thanks a lot.” – Oscar

(Starts January 3)

 

 

The next release of the Open edX platform, Ficus, is almost here.

For now, the edX engineering team has launched a pre-release, alpha version available just for testing but not for production purposes.

“We will have a real release candidate available soon, once we’ve worked out how to support course-discovery as a Docker container along with the rest of the installation,” said Ned Batchelder, an edX engineer in charge of the release. “We wanted to get these infrastructure changes into your hands as soon as possible so the eventual installation will be as smooth as possible.”

The “Ficus” version contains significant infrastructure changes, such as:

The New York-based non-profit organization Modern States Education Alliance extended until December 2016 the possibility to earn free college credit without even paying the $100 of test and scheduling fees of taking the College Board’s CLEP exam. This is part of the Pilot Program of the “Freshman Year for Free” initiative, which is based on creating a public library of high-quality CLEP and AP courses.

These courses, produced by edX university partners and IBL Open edX and taught by top professors from around the country, are open to anyone through edX.org, Modern States’ website and Open edX learning platform. The program is explained in detailed on the “Passing the CLEP and Learning with Modern States” orientation course.

The Founder and CEO of Modern States, Steve Klinsky, said on an article written in RealClearPolitics.com that “as President-elect Trump reviews policy ideas to help poor and working class citizens and to ‘make America great again’, there is one education idea that is both exceptionally simple to implement and exceptionally valuable: namely, create a national digital public library of online college courses, available to everyone on a tuition free basis.”

 

 

 

There is a new digital Ivy League with millions of enrollments and a global reach, an elite of universities that includes MIT (4+ million), Harvard (4.5+ million), UPenn (5+ million), Michigan, TU Delft and a few Australian universities –reports Class-Central.com. Among all of them, Harvard University, through HarvardX, is considered a paragon, with 80 MOOCs taught by 120 faculty, and an unique ability to reuse content developed for online courses to improve in-person classroom instruction.

Through this blended approach, “students watch recorded lectures at home, and spend class / instructor time asking questions, working with other students, reflecting, and applying what they learned from the lectures”, explained Peter Bol, Harvard’s Vice Provost for Advances in Learning. HarvardX content is also being used to prepare new students before they arrive on-campus.

Another interesting fact is that around a third of HarvardX MOOC learners identify as teachers, so this university has been developing tools to help teachers incorporate and effectively use MOOC content in their classrooms. The university is also experimenting with offering its MOOCs, along with other support, in community centers.

Harvard has also begun offering its very popular CS50 course in a new virtual reality format, allowing learners to feel like they’re sitting inside the lecture hall.

—
Class Central: Harvard and the Rise of a Digital Ivy League

Editors Note: This is a guest post by Steve Klinsky, Founder at Modern States Education Alliance. This article was published on Real Clear Politics.com on November 18, 2016. Modern States uses the edX technology and pedagogy for its courses.

 

As President-elect Trump reviews policy ideas to help poor and working class citizens and to “make America great again”, there is one education idea that is both exceptionally simple to implement and exceptionally valuable.

Namely, create a national digital public library of online college courses, available to everyone on a tuition free basis. These courses — from top quality professors, with free online textbooks and credit-granting certifying exams — would make college free or much more affordable, at very little taxpayer cost and in an easily achievable way.

Online college courses are nothing new. Millions of students have now taken college courses entirely online for the past twenty years, for full academic credit, and from all types of colleges and trade schools. The problem, however, is that — due to the regulatory and “pricing power” structure of accredited post-secondary education — the tuition cost for these online courses has been set every bit as high (or sometimes higher!) than for the same course delivered in the physical classroom.

There was an important breakthrough several years ago, when the nation’s most prestigious universities (Stanford, MIT, et.al.) started to offer some of their own best courses online, entirely tuition free as a public service. These courses are known as MOOCs (or “Massively Open Online Courses”) and have also been widely popular. The very first one, for example, was a computer science course from Stanford that attracted 160,000 students worldwide as compared to the 35 or so students in a normal physical class.

The key problem with the MOOCs is that they do not lead to college credit. The student can earn a letter of congratulations, but has not been able to earn a recognized course credit that will help him finish a traditional college more quickly, or qualify for college graduation and entry to graduate school. Understandably, the prestigious schools that offer MOOCs have sought to share knowledge, but do not want to dilute their traditional brand with tens of thousands of free students, and do not want to ruin their tuition-based economic model.

As a private citizen and philanthropist, I have personally been trying to “square the circle” by creating a new charity called the Modern States Education Alliance “Freshman Year for Free” (Modernstates.org), which will offer free online courses that can lead to credit.

Modern States has now given funds to EdX (the online joint venture of Harvard and MIT) and other course developers to produce a top quality, tuition free online course for every one of the major traditional freshman college subjects. There will be about thirty six courses in all, available to anyone who goes to the Modern States website, in fields such as chemistry, calculus, microeconomics, and so on.

Each course is taught by a professor from a highly respected university, using state of the art online education technology. Textbooks and readings are provided online for free as well, along with quizzes, simulations and other aides.

Very importantly, each course is designed to prepare the student for one of the Advanced Placement or CLEP exams (“College Level Examination Placement” exams) that already are offered by the College Board. Over 2,000 traditional colleges and universities award full traditional course credit to students who have passed these College Board AP and CLEP exams and then enroll in their school.

For example, a student who passes the microeconomics CLEP exam and then enters Purdue, would begin with time and attendance credit for the microeconomics course just as if the student had transferred in from a community college with the same course. A student could potentially take eight courses online for free on the Modern States site, pass eight College Board AP or CLEP exams in those subjects, and then enroll in Purdue (which already recognizes the College Board exams) as a sophomore, with just three years of time and credit left to earn.

The College Board — with which Modern States has no financial connection — typically charges around $80 for a CLEP exam, and Modern States is now paying even this expense for our initial students. However, everything else is free. Even one such tuition free online course can save a student thousands of dollars, plus time. A full year’s worth of courses can save tens of thousands of dollars per student, and can create a practical “on ramp” into traditional universities for a whole generation of new Abe Lincolns who might otherwise feel shut out of traditional college systems for financial reasons.

Modern States “Freshman Year for Free” is in pilot phase now, with about nine courses done and many more to come. The first ever student to take a free Modern States course and pass a CLEP — a home schooler from Oregon, studying chemistry — accomplished this just two weeks ago.

The entire Modern States program will be up and running in full soon, and courses are not very expensive to develop; only about $50,000-$100,000 each. The entire Modern States website with 36 courses and texts is budgeted to be created for just $2 or $3 million of funding all in, all provided privately.

The Trump administration, or others in government, could adopt this straight forward Modern States idea and make it even much more powerful by creating additional and better courses, with additional credit-granting certification tests.

At a cost of millions — not billions — there could be a national public library of digital online courses, in a full range of subjects, available tuition free with free text books, to anyone, anywhere. Along with the 36 courses where the College Board AP and CLEP exams already exist, there could be more courses and more certification exams.

The courses could be used for self-study, or used as another teaching and curriculum tool by existing high schools, colleges and physical discussion groups where a teacher is present. They could be used by people of any age and any geography.

The same idea could be applied to vocational and job training. For example, instead of using federal Title IV funds to send students to a very expensive trade school to learn to fix computers, a fraction of those education dollars could be used to pay an employer to hire and train a worker. The employer could use free online courses in computer repair from the national online library, plus on-the-job help. A payment might even be made to the “employer as educator” when the student passes the strict certification exam.

It would be important for the online education library to work with top quality exam creators, like the College Board, to make sure that the certification exams reflect high and respected standard for passing. (Think, for example, of the respect now paid to the Bar exam for lawyers or the CPA exam for accountants).

Too much federal government control over curriculum could be avoided by funding independent groups to develop the courses or by funding multiple versions of each course. However, just as the existence of a traditional (government funded) library does not prevent book stores or free speech, a government funded online educational library would not stop other colleges or educational diversity, and would be only one of many ways for students to achieve an education.

Our existing college accreditation system is over 100 years old and began before online education was invented. The existing system gives all power to the institution to grant the credit, just as if a local symphony hall could require music lovers to attend the local town orchestra to hear Mozart, even though Mozart is now also available from the world’s greatest orchestras for free over the radio or the Internet.

Four years of physical residency at a great university like Stanford remains the gold standard for college education, and is better than free courses online. However, millions of students are already taking courses entirely online for credit, often from mediocre institutions at very high tuition expense. A national public library of great tuition free online courses, plus credit-bearing certification exams for these courses, could quickly create one practical path toward affordable and accessible education for all.

——
Steven Klinsky, a businessman and education reformer, is founder of the Modern States Education Alliance and chairman of Harvard’s Public Education Policy Group.