Category: Top News

Instructure, the maker of the Canvas LMS and operator of the Canvas.net MOOC platform, has launched a new service called Canvas Catalog, that allows to create edX and Coursera-style public course collections online.

Canvas Catalog (pictured above) also supports customized landing pages, payment for courses, discounts and promotion codes, credentials and certificates for completion.

In other words, by building a marketplace or storefront for their course offerings, students will have a one-stop shop where they can register, enroll, pay and take courses.

The goal is to help Canvas LMS’ customers produce, host and market their own branded distance courses.

The first two organizations that will use this service are Pasco County Schools in Florida and Academic Partnership.

Even if the hype on MOOCs is decreasing, higher education institutions need to follow a strategy regarding open online courses in order to stay relevant. One possibility is to join the not-for-profit edX Consortium (or xConsortium; the creator of the Open edX software). The problem is the high price of the ticket.

EdX university partners have to invest an estimated $2 to $4 million to be part of the xConsortium. Another possibility is to negotiate a fee per course. An East Cost university was asked recently to pay around $250K per course plus 70 percent of revenue earned from it.

Bring your digital classroom when you’re on the move!

Here is a lists of recommended iOS and Android apps:

• Coursera’s free iOS and Android app gives you access to Coursera’s list of available courses.
• The Khan Academy app on iOS allows you to run course videos on the screen with a rolling transcript underneath. There’s also an unofficial viewer for khan academy app for Android.
• The MOOCs4U iOS and Android app lists thousands of different MOOCs available from providers like edX, Coursera, Udacity and more.
• GroupMOOC’s iOS app helps you build study timetable plans in a calendar-like format.
• Omni Study iOS‘s app ($1) allows also to organize your study schedule.
• On Android, the free app My Study Life is a similar study planner.
• Write, $2 on iOS, will allow you to make notes on what you’re learning while you watch a MOOC video on your computer. If you’re on Android, take notes with SomNote.

(Note: We did this summary after a NYT article.)

Stanford University –which has been successfully using its own Open edX instance since April 2013, managing 20 public MOOCs and many more courses for on-campus use– criticizes in an elaborate report the way in which the xConsortium is running the edX open-source project, while it shares its recommendations to improve governance, core technology, and community management.

“We believe making these improvements will drive adoption amongst teachers, hosting providers, researchers, IT departments, and developers. Our recommendations are informed by interviews with a dozen stakeholders,” writes Sef Kloninger, Head of Engineering at Stanford Online, in Open edX’s Google group for discussions.

Mr. Kloninger posted Stanford’s findings online, in a Google Doc and in plain HTML. This paper was authored by Nate Aune, an open-source entrepreneur.

What follows is a summary of the recommendations:

Stanford University –which has been successfully using its own Open edX instance since April 2013, managing 20 public MOOCs and many more courses for on-campus use– criticizes in an elaborate report the way in which the xConsortium is running the edX open-source project, while it shares its recommendations to improve governance, core technology, and community management.

“We believe making these improvements will drive adoption amongst teachers, hosting providers, researchers, IT departments, and developers. Our recommendations are informed by interviews with a dozen stakeholders,” writes Sef Kloninger, Head of Engineering at Stanford Online, in Open edX’s Google group for discussions.

Mr. Kloninger posted Stanford’s findings online, in a Google Doc and in plain HTML. This paper was authored by Nate Aune, an open-source entrepreneur.

What follows is a summary of the recommendations:

WordPress’ online economy is really big. It accounts for 20.8 percent of all websites on the Internet.

The graphic below, created by WhoIsHostingThis.com,  details interesting facts, such as top-selling themes and designers. Some of these themes have generated over a million dollars in revenue!

What about the idea of integrating content on a LMS?

This is what Blackboard and Discovery Education are doing.

Discovery’s Higher Ed offerings will be available through Blackboard’s learning management system, allowing faculty to search, preview, select and embed 90,000 learning resources directly into their courses. The emphasis is especially on content –videos, images, audio learning guides and writing prompts– for the 23 most enrolled higher ed courses.

Many students prefer to obtain their degree online. However, finding the best fit in the U.S. can difficult.

That’s where Ranku comes in. The site has partnered with public, private and state universities, to create a comparison shopping site for online degrees.

In my view this is a very useful website.

http://youtu.be/C2ducqPzESQ

The edX community celebrated on May 15th its two year anniversary.

This video can give you an idea.