edX has launched some enhancements for standard quizzes (or problems) on courses hosted at edX.org. These are the enhancements:
The “Check” and “Final Check” buttons have been consolidated, and relabeled “Submit“.
Secondary actions (e.g., hint, save, reset, show answer) are visually separated from Submit in order to allow learners to have the opportunity to take advantage of them before submitting their answers.
When a learner chooses to show a hint for a problem, every hint shown now remains visible above the Submit button. This change has the result of aggregating hints for a cumulative effect.
Feedback (Correct/Incorrect) now display in a banner at the bottom of the problem.
Practice problems (that is, problems within ungraded subsections) are now identified by a message that appears immediately below the problem display name.
edX has highlighted its commitment to the open source community and movement by joining as an affiliate member the “Open Source Initiative” (OSI), a recognized organization for reviewing and approving licenses as Open Source Definition (OSD)-conformant.
Last year the OSI extended its Affiliate Member program to include institutions of higher education, recognizing the growing engagement with open source on campuses.
“EdX, as both an open source project and an educational initiative, serves as a model for higher education where a commitment to not only open source licensing but also an open source ethos fosters ‘a thriving worldwide community of educators and technologists who share innovative solutions to benefit students everywhere,’” said Patrick Masson, OSI General Manager referring to the Open edX mission.
“At edX, we’ve always had a deep commitment to open source. We cemented that commitment in 2013 when we first released the platform under the AGPL license in collaboration with Stanford University,”said Joel Barciauskas, Engineering Manager at Open edX.
edX has updated the navigational options on the LMS on courses hosted at edX.org, as described in this announcement.
The unit navigation tool bar has new icons for HTML, video, and problem components, and includes the words “Previous” and “Next” with the arrow icons.
The course component is now indicated by an high contrast underline in the unit navigation bar, rather than by a lighter shade of gray.
The Bookmark option has been relocated and restyled. It appears below the unit’s display name, and is now labeled Bookmark this page. When you select it, the label changes to Bookmarked.
The University of Texas at Austin will host in 2017 the Fourth Learning with MOOCs Conference. George Siemens, renowned educator and speaker and faculty member this institution, will lead the event.
This announcement was done last week at Penn at the end of a successful Third edition of Learning with MOOCs conference, where IBL participated as a sponsor.
This event, celebrated at Penn in Philadelphia, brought together around three hundred educators, researchers and managers in higher education.
Provost Vincent Price and CEO of edX, Anant Agarwal, in the picture below, were among the panelists who discussed the development of the MOOCs and their visions for the future at the conference on Oct. 6 and 7. Agarwal described MOOCs as a response to what he believes is a broken current educational system. He called his solution the “unbundling” of the four-year educational system provided by universities and colleges.
The world’s top ten universities work with edX technology. Eight of them are currently edX partners (Caltech, MIT, Harvard University, Princeton University, Imperial College London, ETH Zurich, UC Berkeley, and University of Chicago), one will become a partner soon (Oxford University) and another one (Stanford University) uses Open edX technology through its platform Lagunita.
This top ten list has been established by Times Higher Education as its 2016-17 World University Rankings list. The ranking evaluates universities’ 13 performance indicators across all of their core missions such as teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.
“By partnering with many of the best institutions in the world, we are proud to offer high-quality programs that improve lives and empower learners to gain deep, career-relevant knowledge,”wrote edX in its blog.
Modern States Education Alliance, in partnership with IBL Open edX, is running an educational, disruptive program called “Freshman Year for Free”, intended to provide college access for freefor tens of thousands of students.
This philanthropic initiative, in partnership with MIT’s and Harvard’s edX, has been featured in major newspapers such as the Washington Post.
We are looking for top, energetic college professorsto teach 6-8 hours courses designed to help students pass the College Board’s CLEP exams. These courses are built following the edX methodology. Additionally, we film these courses with the latest production techniques at our professional studio in New York. The result is be an impactful, engaging online courses, created to generate a national and international outreach.
In the last month we’ve producedfour online courses (Introductory Business Law, Principles of Macroeconomics and Microeconomics and Chemistry) with top professors from George Washington, Columbia, NYU and Fairfield University. In this video, Prof. Paul Berman from GW explains how we have designed the Business Law course.
In addition to benefiting tens of thousands of students, many of them veterans and servicemen in the armed forces, we’ve set up a financial compensation of $5,000 per course, per professor. The workload for professors is based on preparing 6-8 hours of video lectures, following materials that are mostly already written.
The whole effort for a professor can be of 5-7 days. We are flexible, and can work with you during nights, weekends, etc.
Our instructional design team will support you all the time and will take care of the supplementary content and interactivity of the course. The course’s textbook and outline will also be provided.
We believe that you can make an impact!
Full list of the courses we are recruiting for (including AP-level):
The edX video player was recently updated to make options for downloading videos, transcripts and handouts more accessible, as shown in the illustration above.
Additionally, in “Discussions”, the list of topics and the controls available for adding a new post have been updated. The Topic Area list now defaults to the “General” topic if there is a course-wide topic named “General”. More info is presented here.
The edX engineering team plans to introduce course navigation improvements on the edX platform on October, as shown above. Initial improvements are focused on the usability and clarity of the course content area.
“The sequence bar has been cleaned up visually to help learners to understand where they are, including updated icons, colors, and labels for the previous and next actions”, edX explained. Additionally, the bottom of a unit page has been made more visually obvious and will have the name of the next/previous unit pages as well.
Another improvement, scheduled in this case for November, will affect the course outline, which will look as shown below. The learning content area will be expanded, and learners will enjoy a more immersive experience.
This design effort “is the culmination of a considerable amount of research, testing, and review of various course navigation concepts,” edX said. “To help you form targeted questions, we invite you to interact with a clickable prototype of the changes. You can review or comment within this prototype: https://invis.io/JW8G21BQV. “
These changes will be implemented on the master branch platform, and will probably arrive into the Open edX platform on December or January when the next named version, called Ficus, is released.
Click on the image below to navigate through the prototype.
The Open edX software-based, educational website SDSNedu was rebranded this month into SDG Academy (or Sustainable Development Goals Academy).
With 7 full-length courses and 2 mini-courses, this learning platform linked to the United Nations and hosted by edCast, announced that it has attracted over 100,000 enrollments since it was created in 2014. Its goal is to launch a program of 17 courses on Sustainable Development and reach one million students by 2020.
The faculty of the SDG Academy is comprised of global experts on sustainable development like Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General on SDG and Director of the SDSN, Prof. Johan Rockstrom, Dr. Srinath K. Reddy and Professor Paul Collier.
This is a milestone for edX and its consortium partners, and it marks an evolution beyond the “classic” MOOCs, following edX’s mission of enabling learners to access high-quality, career-relevant education in an affordable and flexible manner.
Fourteen top universities that belong to the edX consortium have announced the adoption of the MicroMasters online credential created by MIT, and the launch of eighteen programs.
Among these universities are Columbia University, offering a microcredential in artificial intelligence and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, with MicroMasters degrees in user experience (UX), research design, leading educational innovation and improvement, and social work: practice, policy and research. This first course starts on October 4 and is open for enrollment now.
Basically, this MicroMasters credential has no admission requirement and enables online learners to take a semester’s worth of master’s-level courses on edx.org and then, if accepted, to complete a master’s degree in a single full semester on campus.
The first MicroMaster, Supply-Chain Management, launched on October of 2015, attracted over 127,000 students worldwide. More than 7,000 signed up for verified ID certificates in at least one course, according to MIT News.
Sanjay Sarma, Vice President for Open Learning at MIT, explained: “Not all high-potential master’s candidates can afford to spend a year or more on campus, so it’s important to provide multiple pathways to a degree. MicroMasters gives learners the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities through a series of online courses, earn a valuable credential and, if they excel, complete their master’s with an additional semester’s residence.”
Regarding the economics of this initiative, The Chronicle offered this view:
“MIT piloted its first micro-master’s in supply-chain management last fall. Students who complete five online courses — and pay about $1,000 in fees for proctored exams for the courses — earn the credential. Those students are also eligible to get the credit transferred to MIT toward a full master’s degree if they win acceptance to that in-person program. To get a sense of the odds, though, consider that MIT admits about 40 students a year to its supply-chain management master’s program, while 3,500 people paid to take courses in the online micro-master’s series in the past year, according to Anant Agarwal, head of edX, in an interview on Monday.”
This is the full list of institutions and MicroMasters programs:
United States
Columbia University (ColumbiaX): Artificial Intelligence
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MITx): Supply Chain Management
Rochester Institute of Technology (RITx): Project Management
Thunderbird School of Global Management, a unit of the Arizona State University Knowledge Enterprise (ThunderbirdX): International Business Management
University of Michigan (MichiganX): User Experience (UX) Research and Design; Leading Educational Innovation and Improvement; Social Work: Practice, Policy and Research
International
Australian National University (ANUx): Evidence-Based Management
Curtin University (CurtinX): Human Rights
Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HKPolyUx): International Hospitality Management
Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMBx): Business Management; Entrepreneurship
Université Catholique de Louvain (LouvainX): Management (offered in French); International Law
The University of Queensland, Australia (UQx): Leadership in Global Development
Wageningen University (WageningenX): Biobased Sciences for Sustainability
Offered in Spanish
Galileo University (GalileoX): e-Learning: crea actividades y contenidos para la enseñanza virtual (offered in Spanish); Professional Android Developer
Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPValenciaX): Liderazgo y trabajo en equipo en grupos de mejora continua (offered in Spanish)
Resources
For more information and a complete list of MicroMasters course offerings, visit www.edx.org/micromasters
