Category: Top News

The first course in Spanish on how to successfully create MOOCs is finally online, open to enrollment.

The course, titled as “Cómo crear un MOOC de éxito con Open edX”, contains four modules: Introduction, Methodology and Pedagogy, Video production and the functioning of the Open edX platform, MOOC Development and Management.

This 5-hour, self-paced, free course has been created by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and IBL Studios, with financial support from the Spanish Government technology branch Red.es.

The 2016 edX Global Forum, celebrated at the Sorbonne Universite in Paris, welcomed the 13 new partners of the edX consortium, including Institut Mines-Télécom, Babson College, University System of Maryland, Imperial College London.

This annual event discussed ideas to further integrate blended learning into education, shared new ways to unbundle the academic offering and heard views from some of the 14 partners who have participated in the MicroMasters initiative.

Recognized as best professor on a Solar Energy course

During the gathering, TU Delft Professor Arno Smets was named the first-ever winner of the edX Prize for Exceptional Contributions in Online Teaching and Learning. His course, Solar Energy, has reached almost 150,000 learners globally.

By using innovative online teaching tools like custom animations, promoting peer interaction and facilitating discussions, Professor Smets guides learners through the process of creating a photovoltaic system. The systems simulate the use of renewable energy, and show how it can have an immediate impact improving the lives of those living in developing countries and how it can make an overall contribution to a more sustainable world.

Active learners in his course uploaded information on the hours of sun and the reliability of the electricity-network in their areas to create a valuable map for the feasibility of solar energy, which is being used by researchers and installation professionals in the field today.

After spending time working with Professor Smets in The Netherlands, these learners – from Algeria, Nepal, Ecuador and Myanmar – returned home equipped with the tools they needed to make a difference in their own local communities.

The course has been translated into Arabic and is offered on Edraak. In June 2016, a Chinese version of the Solar Energy course was launched on the XuetangX China platform as well.

Additionally, Professor Smets offered the first draft of his book on Solar Energy for free.

We are very proud of @ArnoSmets for winning the first @edXOnline prize for Exceptional Online Teaching #AlwaysLearning pic.twitter.com/UBfLmKXhIf

— TUDelft Online Learn (@TUDelftOnline) November 16, 2016

.@agarwaledu welcoming @Mines_Telecom as a new @edXOnline member #globalforum pic.twitter.com/Bs2RhT40hU

— Ella Hamonic (@Ella_Hmc) November 16, 2016

Steadily growing @edXOnline #GlobalForum pic.twitter.com/uucANdtkMW

— nancyrubin (@nancyrubin) November 16, 2016

openedX @edXOnline 2016 #globalforum pic.twitter.com/ILW7fgVCVd

— Maria Laura Garcia (@malu_garcia_) November 16, 2016

#MicroMasters @edXOnline 2016 #GlobalForum pic.twitter.com/k1MqzUKsfq

— Maria Laura Garcia (@malu_garcia_) November 16, 2016

After joining the edX Consortium as a charter member, Oxford University’s first MOOC will be placed on the edX platform.

The course “From Poverty to Prosperity: Understanding Economic Development”, scheduled to start on February 2017 and currently open for enrollment, will be mostly taught by Professor Sir Paul Collier, one of the word’s leading scholars on the question of inequality.

This 12 to 18 hour, free course will elaborate on the factors that influence economic development as well as the role of the government and the external conditions that can contribute to the progress of nations.

Ngaire Woods, Blavatnik School of Government’s Dean, said the online course will be “an effective way to expand access to knowledge beyond the classrooms of Oxford”.

 

 

Open edX is the open source educational software that powers MIT’s and Harvard’s edx.org platform and its 5M+ users. It is scalable, well-tested and fully featured in terms of its web application, iOS and Android platforms and learning analytics software.

Open edX is used by the world’s top ten universities, either as a course publishing tool through edX or fully personalized instances such as Stanford’s and MIT’s. It is supported by a strong community of corporate, academic and government partners.

Moreover, since it is open source, users of the platform are able to fully control it, customize it and benefit from edX’s major upgrades and feature releases, which occur several times per year. This is very powerful for at least a couple of reasons:

Open edX allows organizations who are looking for custom-built solutions to literally stand on the shoulders of giants when building their education programs’ software. How much “shoulders of giants” are we talking about? Well, essentially, the software that runs edx.org and includes mobile apps, learning analytics and ecommerce. We can customize its user interface and backend-integrations as much as we need but, in 99% of the cases, we’re talking about days or weeks of development efforts, not months or years.

Another reason is that, when an organization deploys Open edX, it fully owns it. This includes full ownership of its learners’ data and analytics (proprietary datasets will only become more valuable) as well as an ability to scale without prohibitive costs.

Sure, at $5 to $20 per student per month, traditional cloud-based LMS’s are cheap for a small number of students, but costs can quickly skyrocket — a Fortune 500 company in the US recently disclosed to IBL that it is paying close to $1.5m for 60k learners every year (“but only $2.08 per student per month!”). It may have been necessary to pay sums like this a few years ago when Open edX did not exist and the existing open source solutions were neither appealing nor fully-featured, but that is fortunately no longer the case.

For more information, visit Open edX’s official website or read our founder’s article on its official blog, “What Makes Open edX Unique”. And, of course, please reach out to our team if you’d like to see how your organization can implement Open edX.

Georgia Tech will launch on February 2017 a free MOOC on tech on edx.org intended to allow applicants to this university to earn college credit before setting foot on campus.

The course “Introduction to Computing Using Python” will feature the same content as Georgia Tech’s on-campus course –a requirement for all undergraduates– and will be created with McGraw-Hill Education’s adaptive “SmartBook” technology.

Students who successfully demonstrate mastery will earn a statement that may be recognized for credit if they later apply and are admitted to Georgia Tech.

• Press Release: Georgia Tech, McGraw-Hill Education and edX Take Undergraduate Computer Science Online

 

The first course in Spanish on how to create successful MOOCs was released on November 18 on edX.org. This 5-hour, self-paced, free course has been created by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and IBL Studios, with financial support from the Spanish Government technology branch Red.es.

“Cómo crear un MOOC de éxito con Open edX” (“How to create a successful MOOC on Open edX”) course contains four modules: Introduction, Methodology and Pedagogy, Video production and the functioning of the Open edX platform, MOOC Development and Management.

The launch of the course will happen right after an open seminar event in Madrid scheduled for November 18. Cases studies related to Open edX and research reports on MOOCs will be shown during that session. Joel Barciauskas, Engineering Manager at edX, will intervene, among other speakers.

Above is the presentation video of the course.

 

The next Open edX release, named “Ficus” will be built on Ubuntu 16.04, instead of Ubuntu 12.04. This is a major upgrade, considering that the Ubuntu 12.04 operating system will no longer be supported officially after April 2017.

EdX engineering leaders, including Joel Barciauskas and Ned Batchelder, disclosed this development during their monthly Open edX’s remote meetup, which took place this Thursday.

The new Ficus release is planned to take place before 2017.

EdX is also working on “Dockerizing” its development stack. Docker will not apply to production environments for the foreseeable future, but it will improve the current workflow with Vagrant.

Watch the full recording below:

XuetangX, the Chinese national platform built with Open edX software, has surpassed the milestone of attracting 5 million learners.

XuetangX, one of the world’s top five MOOC providers, offers about 400 courses; 30 of them are licensed from edX under a shared-revenue agreement, and 42 include credentials. Another 63 courses are currently in production and expected to be launched in 2017. XuetangX also provides SPOCs and cloud platform services to its partner universities.

Launched on October 2013, Xuetang, which means “school” in Chinese, has a team of 130 employees –half of those technicians; by the end of 2016, it is expected to grow to 200 people.

See below the most popular MOOCs.

Its platform has been heavily modified from the core Open edX software, according to Fenghua Nie, XuetangX’s chairman and deputy secretary-general of Tsinghua University:

• “We restructured the mechanism of course grouping and presence, such that courses could be grouped and presented by major;
• we developed a self-paced mode, which was just launched from the start of September this year;
• we developed a “visualization and editing course” mode, which makes it easier for professors to edit the course; and
• we developed a website content management system, which offers more formats for information publishing and promotion.
• The course search engine and course recommendation system are both highly developed.
• The users’ learning data is presented in different perspectives for the professor to monitor the course operation and make adjustments as necessary.”

In addition to iOS and Android, Xuetang has iPad, iWatch and Smart TV apps. It also offers a channel providing self-produced content, called Xuetangxsay.

 

 

• Press Release: XuetangX: 3 Years Old and 5 Million Users.

 

Peter B. Kaufman, founder of Intelligent Television, has launched “MOOCs and Open Educational Resources: A Handbook for Educators”, a free PDF-booklet intended for university faculty, educators, and educational producers involved in producing online courses.

This guide is a step-by-step manual of how to produce and distribute educational video content under the freest of licenses, with an emphasis on Creative Commons.  Its structure follows the key stages of video course production, with analysis and support at its core dedicated to methods of keeping video content free throughout all stages of course pre-production, production, post-production, and distribution.

The handbook also provides some notes on the history of online course production and Open Courseware (OCW), and some thoughts about the future of educational video.

Peter Kaufman’s vision is based on achieving “a giant rich resource: a gigantic global encyclopedia, or Encyclopédie, or library or museum, contributing to universal access to human knowledge.”

Modern States Education Alliance, New York City – based non profit organization, has launched the “Freshman Year for Free” fall 2016 pilot program.

This program, established as a charitable initiative by Modern States in alliance with edX, is designed to give students increased access to college and reduce expenses.

ModernStates.org now contains the first eight courses, available free of charge, like a “public library of college courses”. They include free online textbooks and questions to check learners’ understanding. These courses are hosted at edX.org and a branded Open edX platform.

• “Our goal is to offer you a high quality learning experience. The courses are taught by top college professors and designed to prepare you to pass the College-Level Examination Program (CLEP) exam in the course you have chosen. These exams were established a long time ago, and are run by the College Board (an organization which is separate from us at Modern States, but which supports our goals.)”, said Modern States. 
  
• “Once you pass the CLEP exam in a college subject, many major traditional colleges will give you course credit for that subject, and you can graduate sooner and at less cost.”
• “Normally, the College Board charges $80 to take the CLEP exam. However, because you are one of the early users of our program, Modern States will also pay the fees for you to take the CLEP® exam related to your course.”

• “Passing the CLEP and Learning with Modern States” orientation course. 

• Disclosure: IBL works for Modern States as a course producer and platform developer.