IBL News

Category: Top News

  • MIT Partners with Boeing and NASA to Launch Four Professional-Oriented, Certificate-Based Courses on edX.org

    boeing edx
    The MIT Professional Education unit is designing along with Boeing and NASA a certificate-based program on architecture and systems engineering, which will be delivered through the edX platform this summer. Registration will open within few weeks.

    This four-course program will be focused on modern complex systems from hybrid cars to aircraft.  It will be oriented to professionals working in automotive, medical devices, system integration, aerospace, and a other industries.

    The “Architecture and Systems Engineering: Models and Methods to Manage Complex Systems” program will marry the research and knowledge of MIT’s faculty with lessons and case studies in industry and government from Boeing and NASA professionals.

    “This educational partnership enables a digital environment for learning and networking and allows us to offer professional growth to our employees, ” says Marc Nance, Boeing director for competitiveness and integration. “The certificate blends industry and academic expertise and represent a scalable solution for employers,” adds Michael Richey, associate technical fellow and principal investigator at Boeing.

    Professionals enrolled in the courses will be exposed to the latest practices in model-based system engineering, including how models can enhance system engineering functions, and how system engineering task can be augmented with quantitative analysis.

    Courses will include guest lectures and examples contributed by industrial partners Boeing and NASA. Each course will provide continuing education credits (CEUs), and professionals that finish all four courses in the series will earn a professional certificate from MIT.

    “The edX platform will provide an interactive, flexible learning experience for engineers around the world to gain technical expertise from leaders at MIT, Boeing, and NASA,” says Anant Agarwal, edX CEO and MIT professor.

     

  • Learning with MOOCs Will Be Held on October 6 – 7 at Penn

    learningwithmoocs
    The third edition of Learning with MOOCs conference will be held on October 6-7 at Penn in Philadelphia.

    “Being and Learning in a Digital Age” will be the theme of the event.  Registration is now open.

    “MOOCs and online learning now face two substantial trends and opportunities: increasing integration with on-campus teaching and learning, and the growing interest in social, affective learning and personal wellbeing of learners,” said Program Chair George Siemens.

    • Website

  • Ranking of the Most Popular Courses on Coursera and edX.org

    top-courses-edx-and-coursera

    The most successful online courses are related to technology or other Computer Science-based skills, followed by career advancement (“Successful Negotiation: Essential Strategies and Skills”, for example) and personal enrichment subjects. Missing are Liberal Arts classes (History, Art, Literature…).

    These tendencies are also reflected in the world of paid online degrees, as shown by US News and World Report’s ranking.

    Quartz.com has put together a list of the most popular courses right now on Coursera.org and edX.org.

    Coursera
    1. Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects University of California, San Diego
    2. Mastering Data Analysis in Excel Duke University
    3. Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python) University of Michigan
    4. Machine Learning Stanford University
    5. R Programming Johns Hopkins University
    6. The Data Scientist’s Toolbox Johns Hopkins University
    7. Tibetan Buddhist Meditation and the Modern World University of Virginia
    8. An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python (Part 1) Rice University
    9. Successful Negotiation: Essential Strategies and ‘Skills University of Michigan
    10. Introduction to Financial Accounting University of Pennsylvania
    11. Introduction to Public Speaking University of Washington
    12. Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems: Part 1 University of Maryland, College Park
    13. Introduction to Marketing University of Pennsylvania
    14. Grammar and Punctuation University of California, Irvine
    15. Introduction to Corporate Finance University of Pennsylvania
    16. Principles of Valuation: Time Value of Money University of Michigan
    17. Chinese for Beginners Peking University
    18. Introduction to Programming with MATLAB Vanderbilt University
    19. Project Management: The Basics for Success University of California, Irvine
    20. Introduction to Big Data University of California, San Diego
    edX
    1. CS50 Harvard University
    2. Introduction to Programming With Python Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    3. Introduction to Linux Jerry Cooperstein
    4. HTML5 World Wide Web Consortium
    5. The Science of Happiness University of California, Berkeley

  • "Letting Learning Companies Control Analytics Is a Mistake", Says a Known Researcher

    candace edx

    Candace M. Thille, a known researcher at Stanford University, has issued a warning about the use of big data and learning analytics by education companies, specially since adaptive learning is becoming an increasingly important tool in teaching.

    “Letting the market alone shape the future of learning analytics would be a mistake. Colleges should be investing in learning analytics in the same way that they invest in maintaining their buildings,” she said in an interview in The Chronicle.

    Candace M. Thille argues that colleges should have more control as a way to use data to predict students needs and deliver the right material at the right time. “You don’t outsource your core business process,” she noted. “When companies lead the development of learning software, the decisions those systems make are hidden from professors and colleges.”

    Dr. Lorena A Barba, a professor at George Washington University, has invited data scientists to work with learning scientists to contribute to the field of data-driven education.

     

  • Open edX Meetup (April 7th, New York): "Engaging Content, Successful Marketing"

     openedxmeetup
    The fourth Open edX meetup in New York will take place on April 7th at McKinsey Academy.  The theme of the event will be “Engaging Content, Successful Marketing”.

    Top presenters from Microsoft, Columbia University, Knewton, Fordham University, edX, McKinsey and Free Learning Channel will share their insights through 8-minute talks and a final round table.

    This is the line-up of presenters:

    – Rhonda Nicholson, Microsoft

    – Michael Cennamo, Columbia University

    – Kristen Weeks, Knewton

    – William Fenton, Fordham University

    – Joel Barciauskas, edX

    – Sylvia Ko, McKinsey Academy

    – Derrick Lewis, Free Learning Channel X

    Registration is open to anyone and access is free.

    Talks will be recorded, distributed throughout the Open edX community and added to our iOS app to be available offline.

    This event will be live broadcasted and open to outside participation.

    McKinsey Academy, WeWork and IBL will sponsor this initiative.

    More info 

     

  • The Open edX Conference in Stanford University is on Track

    The Open edX Conference 2016 (June 14-15th at Stanford University in Palo Alto) is on track. Registration, with tickets at $200 to $450, is open to developers, system administrators, education specialists and anyone who wants to learn more about the Open edX platform.

    Organizers have called for proposals to speak in 40-minute sessions, 5-minute lighting talks and 90-minute workshops.

    The conference, which will take place at Lathrop Library, will be focused on the development and use of the Open edX platform. A team of four edX employees (Erin Brown, Joel Barciauskas, Molly de Blanc, and Roberta Wilson) is organizing the conference.

    A sponsorship package is also in place.

    openedxconf

     

  • A New and Improved iOS App Based on Open edX

    app

    IBL Studios has released a new version of its IBL Campus iOS app, which is based on the codebase of the Open edX platform.

    This 2.0 release, which includes improved navigation and additional security, is available for free on the Apple App Store.

  • Huge Potential for New Apps in the Educational Space

    apps

    Educational apps are mostly games and classroom tools today. The largest student-oriented apps (Duolingo, Quizlet and PhotoMath) only serve a tiny part of students’ needs, leaving huge potential for new entrants.

    “Today’s educational content is painful to consume on mobile devices… Most high quality educational sites (Khan Academy, CK-12, Coursera, etc.) weren’t created to answer specific questions, so they don’t show up in these search results,” writes Christopher Pedregal, founder of Socratic.org, on EdSurge.com.

    • “Smartphones can give learners superpowers so they can learn more things, more deeply, on their own.”
    • “If you’re building a social product, be thoughtful about whom students want to share with.”
    • “It’s clear that there are billions of people around the world who want to learn, and smart phones could go a long way in making learning more accessible.”
    • Google’s Primer app is a good example of an innovative app.

    —
    Download IBL Campus’ iOS app to take courses online and offline!

  • MOOCs for Credit Offered for Refugees in Germany

    edX announced an agreement with Kiron University, a crowdfunded, German online startup, to help Syrians and other refugees in Europe (59.5 million in 2015) access college courses and earn their degrees.

    Under this arrangement, to be started in April 2016, Kiron will add 300 edX courses to its learning platform and edX will issue free verified certificates for specific courses that can translate to college credit with Kiron’s university campus partners.

    Participating universities include edX partner RWTH Aachen University, German universities of applied sciences and other European and American colleges.

  • Efforts to Ease "Insights Analytics" Setup on Open edX

    analytics

     

    Deploying Insights Analytics on Open edX is an extremely complicated issue. Several teams within edX and the consultancy OpenCraft have started a collaboration “to address some of the pain points around Insights Analytics setup, deployment, maintenance, and deployment”. Plans have been outlined on this Google document. This is a summary of all of the difficulties from the Analytics Team:

    1. Maintaining jobs on the scheduler is a highly manual and rather difficult process
    2. Jobs fail periodically, we should identify all common causes and resolve them
    3. Schema changes are very painful (see the process above)
    4. The AWS configuration is rather complex and difficult to replicate
    5. The pipeline should be installed like every other component in the edX infrastructure. Currently it is not.
    6. We should seriously consider deprecating edx-analytics-configuration and just merging it into the edx/configuration monolith.
    7. The analyticstack (devstack) lags behind quite a bit and takes some manual intervention to generate new versions of. It also doesn’t support Elasticsearch 1.5, which is used by currently-in-development features in Insights. We’d like to move this into Docker.
    8. Centralize event collection. We should probably be using Kafka or something similar.
    9. Non-AWS configuration is rather complex and difficult to setup, which is very painful for the open source community.

    From OpenCraft

    1. Lack of documentation
    2. Problems setting up edX Analytics Devstack (process took a long time, was impossible to complete for one team member; overall complexity of the stack made it difficult to distribute work to additional team members as needed)
    3. Problems with Hadoop version conflicts (fixed at the time via a couple of PRs: #128, #127), not really an issue anymore
    4. No (straightforward) way to run acceptance tests for edx-analytics-pipeline
    5. Using Analytics in production:
      1. Many steps required to install the stack (partly due to Ansible scripts making assumptions about, e.g., AWS regions)
      2. Many steps required to configure Jenkins (manually creating jobs and setting parameters/interval for each Analytics task, etc.)
    6. The number of PRs required to implement major changes slows work down (these types of changes often require PRs in four different repos; see “Dependencies” in this example)
    7. Not being able to merge PRs implementing work done for clients; having to maintain changes separately
    8. Deciding where to add different types of functionality (instructor dashboard vs. insights) was not straightforward in some cases