Category: Top News

Welcome to the MOOC 2.0 age.

MOOCs created a market for free online courses. The MOOC 2.0 concept arrives to make courses more engaging, interactive and personalized. Now that there is more data and analysis, instructors are researching best practices in teaching and learning. In addition, there are several studies on how student interaction promotes learning and retention.

The Open edX platform has been fully translated into Spanish (Spain).

A team of three universities from Spain –Carlos III, Autónoma de Madrid and Politécnica de Valencia, which are members of the edX Consortium– along with the Germán Sánchez Ruipérez Foundation (FGSR) and IBL Studios Education, completed the translation in December. In total, 4888 strings were translated.

The project has been conducted through the collaborative platform Transifex.com.

The Open edX platform is, so far, 100 percent translated into five languages: Spanish (from Spain), English (from the United States), Arabic, Russian and Lithuanian.

In addition to the translation of the Open edX platform, the three mentioned Spanish universities, FGSR and IBL Studios Education have tackled the translation of most of the edx.org website, specially the part regarding the certificates.

Perfectly translated certificates from edx.org will foster enrollments from Spanish-speaking students in the U.S., Latin America and Spain.

These three universities will launch several courses in Spanish on February of 2015. The GSR Foundation will also launch an enhanced Open edX platform (lectylab.com) with paid and open courses, intended for professionals focused on reading and literacy. This platform has been developed by IBL.

The GSR Foundation is a recognized non profit organization devoted to reading promotion as well as the Spanish language.

Over 40 mobile-friendly courses will be added in the coming weeks to edX.org. This will allow Android users to play them in their smartphones.

Right now only 21 mobile-friendly courses are available on the Android app –downloadable for free at the Google Play store, under the name “edx”.

This Android app is a beta version that works as a companion tool to watch course videos and see announcements and handouts. It does not allow users to take courses entirely on their smartphones. In order to complete readings, homework problems, and exams, the user is redirected to the website. The same applies to forum discussions and the assignments, which must be completed on the computer.

edX is working to make the app available on iPhones, iPads and Android tablets, as well as to make all of the edX courses mobile-friendly, although no release date has yet been provided.

This is an interesting promotion in the MOOCs landscape. Not only you learn, but also you get a cloud service for free.

Any learner who earn a verified certificate in MITx’s Entrepreneurship 101 or Entrepreneurship 102 courses will receive a $1,000 credit for Amazon Web Services (AWS) as well as some training and support on this cloud service.

“Entrepreneurship 101” is great edX course directed by Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Founders behind start-ups such as HubSpot, FINsix, Oscomp Systems, Lank and other took the course while studying at MIT.  As the course states, “the 25,600 companies started by MIT alumni generate $2 trillion in revenue and have created 3.3 million jobs”. “If MIT were a country, it would be the 11th largest economy in the world.”

What is the cost estimate to build Open edX?

According to OpenHub.net, it is $5,4 million.

This math comes from considering that the size of the Open edX codebase size is 374,602 lines, the average salary of a developer is $55,000 per year and the estimated effort amounts to 99 person-years. The Basic COCOMO model, an algorithmic software cost model, was used for the estimate.

Finding documentation about Open edX’s functionalities is not an easy task.

In addition to our ebook (“The Ultimate Guide to Open edX”), updated to the December 2014 edition, this web page came out recently. It is a useful collection of links to documents.

When you produce a blended course or a MOOC you realize how important it is to have free digital teaching and learning content at your disposal.

Here is a list of helpful websites:

1. Open Educational Resources (OER) Commons. Almost everything (peer-reviewed textbooks, lesson plans, video lectures, worksheets…). Creative Commons-licensed and open for modification and adaptation.

2. Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. Colleges, government agencies, and other education organizations belong to this group.

3. Flat World Knowledge. Creative Commons-licensed material.

4. HippoCampus. Intended for high school and college students and instructors interested in supplementing their course materials.

5. Open Textbook Catalog. Customizable and printable online textbooks.

6. P2PU (Peer 2 Peer University). This organization leverages both open content and the open social web.

7. CK-12. This foundation provides free, openly-licensed digital textbooks for K-12.

8. Shmoop. Writing guides, analyses, discussions and other free resources.

9. Curriki. Free-to-use digital learning and teaching material.

10. MIT Open CourseWare: Videos, lectures, exams… all open to the public and free of charge.

edX is growing fast and as a result there are sixteen new job positions available at edX’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Engineers, analysts, designers, developers, interns, etc. edX’s workforce is formed today of 120 employees, and 40 of them are developers.

Moderating a discussion board on the edX platform is not an easy task, especially if you have a huge audience.

The way Davidson College is handling this job caught our attention. They put together a group of 18 students who have already completed the course, and asked three of them to monitor the board for two hours each day. During scheduled times, the visitor receives a quick response to any question. Smart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiAbJanKIqM

Because of the lack of proper documentation and poor promotion, XBlocks are not getting much traction on the Open edX platform. This technology was intended to be the Open edX’s weapon to become dominant among learning systems. Instead, the old LTI components are getting a successful second chance.

During Open edX’s first conference in November, Phil McGachey, Tech Lead of Teaching and Learning Technologies in Harvard University made a presentation titled “Tool Integration with LTI”, reflected in the video above and in these slides.

He explained how LTI technology has allowed Harvard to share content between the two LMS they use for distance learning and in-campus teaching –edX and Canvas. He mentioned that Harvard installed a server to host new, LTI-based pedagogical tools.

Wait a minute. Harvard, co-founding member of edX, putting its innovation energy on creating LTI modules instead of XBlocks? You read it well.

There is even a satellite development group that was created during the Open edX conference to develop LTI technology.

As an additional note, it is worth noting that edX is not even a member of the IMS Global consortium, the LTI consortium, and therefore its LTI activity is not certified by this institution.