Category: Top News

A Germany-based MOOC provider, iversity.org, went online in October with over 115,000 students on day one, becoming the leading European MOOC platform.

Courses are design to attract a million students by the end of next year, according the company.

The top three courses so far are “The Future of Storytelling,” from the University of Applied Sciences, in Potsdam, Germany (29,000 students); “Design 101 (or Design Basics),” from the Academy of Fine Arts, in Catania, Italy (18,000 students); and “Public Privacy: Cyber Security and Human Rights,” from the Humboldt Viadrina School of Governance, in Berlin (17,000 students). Note that this course was dedicated to a cutting-edge topic that gained world-wide prominence through the revelations of Edward Snowden.

iversity.org’s MOOC curriculum spans a wide range of topics from philosophy to physics, architecture to economics, and politics to engineering. In some of the courses, students will be granted credit points in accordance with the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS).

“We are thrilled and a little proud to be going live with such a strong curriculum of fascinating MOOCs. We receive requests from professors and institutions wanting to produce a MOOC on a daily basis. This is a clear sign that universities and professors have recognised the potential for bringing university-level education online,” said Hannes Klöpper, Co-Founder and Managing Director of iversity.

Flipped classrooms are popping up all over the U.S..

And while MOOCs might be controversial, the flipped classroom – one where students watch teachers’ lectures at home or on-the-go and leave assignments and projects for class – is a strategy that nearly everyone agrees with.

“Many people are holding the flipped classroom model as a potential model of how to use technology to humanize the classroom,” says The New York Times in an article.

One of the institutions that has taken advantage of flipping is the Clintondale High School, in Detroit.

• “Flipping a classroom changes several things. One is what students do at home. At first, teachers assigned 20-minute videos, but they now make them shorter — six minutes, even three minutes. That promotes re-watching. The school also uses audio files and readings as homework, and uses videos from the Khan Academy, TED and other sources. Many students do not ask questions in class, worried they will look dumb. But they can watch a video over and over without fear,” writes Tina Rosenberg expert in education and best-selling author.
• “It’s actually more time for kids to do higher-order thinking and hands-on projects. Instead of presenting the information in class and having students work on projects at home, where they don’t necessarily have support, here in class, one-on-one or in small groups, I can help them immediately. Students can also help each other, a process that benefits both the advanced and less advanced learners,” explains another expert.

EdX’s open source platform has been selected by a consortium of leading Chinese universities to power China’s newest and largest online learning portal, XuetangX.

This MOOC and blended learning portal – which was launched last week –  will feature courses from leading and high-quality universities in China, including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University, Nanjing University, University of Science and Technology of China, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Renmin University Of China, Beijing Normal University, China Agricultural University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University and National Tsinghua University.

While powered by edX’s open source platform, XuetangX will be independent, separate and distinct from edX.org. (Update.)

On the other hand, last month MITx –a division of MIT that offers courses on edX– announced that certificates would be offered to students who completed a prescribed syllabus of courses.

Another course-management company enters the market for MOOCs.

Desire2Learn unveiled a MOOC-enabled version of its online-learning platform, joining two competitors, Blackboard and Instructure (Canvas).

Desire2Learn Open Courses integrates online assets commonly used for classroom instruction and the MOOC system, preventing students and faculty members from having to log into different accounts. It allows professors and institutions to import content from the existing Desire2Learn platform, create their own MOOCs, and maintain copyrights on their own materials.

Harvard Business School (HBS) is preparing a plan to become the world’s top provider of high quality online business education, according to Bloomberg Business Week.

This century-old elite business school, one of the world’s best-known educational brands, will get high visibility with this initiative among students all over the world according to experts.

These business courses will likely be offered through the edX platform, starting in the spring or summer of 2014. Harvard’s offering on edX.org, known as HarvardX, currently has 17 courses.

Harvard’s initiative follows Wharton and Stanford’s major business education initiatives:

• On September, Wharton added three courses to its Coursera offering, making its entire first-year MBA curriculum available free.
• This October, the Stanford Graduate School of Business will offer –on the NovoEd platform– an eight-week course focused on retirement finance and pension polity.

France is encouraging its universities to build MOOCs with edX’s open-source platform.

This year France’s Ministry of Higher Education and Research opened a digital university called France Université Numerique, which will serve as an online clearinghouse for MOOCs offered by various French universities.

While powered by edX’s open source platform, France’s new MOOC and blended learning portal will be independent, separate and distinct from edX.org, but the French government might pay edX for support services. The first courses will began early next year.

“France is the first country to adopt OpenEdX at a ministerial level. (…) France’s adoption of the edX platform is a testament to the power of online education and the potential of edX’s open source platform,”said Anant Agarwal, president of edX.

EdX, which was founded by Harvard University and MIT, recently made the source-code for its platform available.

(Disclosure: one of IBL Studios’ premier services is the installation and maintenance of edX platforms).

Google is going to start encrypting all search activity except for clicks on ads. Marketers will no longer get valuable keyword data from searches; publishers won’t know how they are found. And without these keywords insights, marketers will have a much tougher time knowing which keywords shall achieve greater visibility in searches.

Google says it’s making the change to protect people’s privacy when they conduct web searches.

But it seems like a movement to force marketers to buy ads through Google’s AdWord program. PPC marketing (Pay-per-click) will be soon one of the only ways to actually predict online performance.

Clearly, Google –80 percent of the search market– is abusing its monopolistic position. SEO marketers are furious and feel betrayed by Google. This is a threat to the existence of SEO professionals, who will be forced to adapt.

Some experts say that the only potential savior may be the European Union, who could determine that this is anti-competitive behaviour.

However, there are still ways to work around Google’s keywords data blockade; but it increases the complexity of the SEO practice, and it makes it more difficult to get an SEO budget and justify that these techniques work, as explained in the following video.

I guess marketers will be forced to focus on lead generation, content marketing and business results rather than keywords. In addition, searches coming from Bing, Yahoo, AOL, Ask.com will give them some indication of which keywords are the most useful. Also, the the organic search query report from Google’s Webmaster Tools will be working.

Video: “SEO Guru: Google is Abusing Its Monopoly Power”.