edX has started to offer timed exams.
This feature allows course teams to assign a set amount of time to all the problems within a subsection. If a learner goes over the time lime, she can no longer submit answers to problems and does not receive points.
An additional interesting feature is that course teams can grant individual learners extra time to complete a timed exam.
The way it works is explained in this section of “Building and Running an edX Course”.
Prof. Charles Severance –the legendary Dr. Chuck, creator of Sakai, LTI and successful MOOC creator– states in an interview by Prof. Lorena Barba that “edX is legally set up in a position to change the license of their software to a ‘non-open’ license”.
Read the interview: Q&A with Dr. Chuck.
Two premium edX-related events will take place this coming week in Washington DC: the Global Forum and Open edX Universities Symposium.
GLOBAL FORUM
The Global Forum –a conference by invitation, only for edX partners and selected players– will be hosted by Georgetown University from November 8th to 10th. Educational leaders, instructional technologists, researchers, marketers, visionaries and innovators of all stripes from dozens of countries around the globe will meet to discuss endeavors in blended learning, explore emerging trends and present pedagogical research.
The event will start with a welcoming reception tomorrow Sunday 8th, and will continue with a two-day conference, as indicated on the conference’s website. The full Global Forum PDF program is available to download.
UNIVERSITIES SYMPOSIUM
The Open edX Universities Symposium –an open event organized by George Washington University with technical support from IBL Studios– will attract over 120 attendees (20% more than what was expected).
It will start on November 10th with a free, open to all, two-hour workshop with Dr. Chuck Severance and Barbara Oakley, two of the most popular online educators of the nation. Only requisite is to RSVP via this form. This workshop will be live streamed on this page.
Later, from 6:00 to 8:30pm, a welcome reception, sponsored by Microsoft, will take place [RSVP].
On the next day, November 11th, the Symposium’s talks will take place. In addition to top speakers, leaders at Stanford, MIT, Duke, UT Austin, NYU and GW, will attend the event.
Registration is still open; the only requirement is a nominal registration fee of $75 that includes breakfast, lunch and refreshments.
Another reason to create MOOCs or Mini-MOOCs?
Alumni engagement… and fundraising!
Some of the top American universities involved with edX and Open edX are analyzing this approach.
One of the first organizations experimenting with enrolling alumni in free online courses is Colgate University through ColgateX .
Prof. Karen Harpp’s “Advent of the Atomic Bomb” course, launched in the spring of 2015 on edX’s Edge platform, is a good example. It attracted 380 alumni. In August, Professors Jennifer Brice and Jane Pinchin re-ran the “Living Writers” course, also on edX’s Edge, with an audience of 800 participants –and 678 of them were alumni.
Colgate University considers the program a success. This institution didn’t reveal whether donations have resulted from this initiative, but admitted that those types of courses could serve as an indirect way to fundraise in the future, according to “The Chronicle of Higher Education”. Colgate explained that “free online courses have proved to be convenient avenues for continuing education because they allow alumni to learn from home and get exactly what they want.”
Other universities trying the same approach are Harvard with its HarvardX for Alumni program and the University of Wisconsin.
EdX has started to offer full support for Oppia, a great third-party, open-source tool that allows to create short interactive lessons or tutorials called “explorations”.
Created by Google, Oppia simulates conversations with human tutors to encourage exploration and experiential learning –although these assessments cannot be graded on the Open edX platform. Overall, it is an effective and enjoyable learning experience.
To enable the Oppia XBlock, access Studio and add “oppia” to the Advanced Module List on the Advanced Settings page. Later, on the Course Outline page, open the unit in the ungraded subsections where you want to add the exploration.
If Oppia is not included in your Open edX platform, you can install it from GitHub.
At the oppia.org website, there are many samples of experiences created by the community.
Are Jupyter –previously IPython– notebooks a killer app in STEM education?
This what Prof. Lorena Barba, Chair of the Open edX Universities Symposium, stated during the JupyterDay conference that took place in New York last October 24.
“Modern instructors use multi-media content: printed notes, graphic-rich websites or blogs, videos of many kinds, etc. Jupyter notebooks combine all of this with computable parts written in Python (and/or other languages). This brings a huge opportunity to interact with the material and use computing to construct knowledge,” she said during an interview conducted by Professor Robert Talbert at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.
Lorena Barba, a leading proponent of Project Jupyter in university STEM education, hosted her “Practical Numerical Method with Python” course on GitHub and used Open edX to organize an open online course around the notebooks. The course assessments are all auto-graded in Open edX. This course famously only contains two videos, with the rest of the course structured around student engagement with a series of Jupyter notebooks.
“The course design follows a structure that I have used before and works really well for complex topics: chunk up the course into somewhat self-contained modules, each composed of small, achievable steps leading to one satisfying result, plus a micro project as assessment. Being about numerical computing, I knew I would use Python as the language and IPython (now Jupyter) notebooks for the content. Each notebook to a lesson, four or five lessons to a module, and five course modules, and we have a “course.”
“Knowing that online learners have many other things to do and few reasons to “complete” a course, I decided we would award an open digital badge for each module, instead of a course certificate. The final ingredient was persuading a couple of other instructors teaching similar courses at their institution to collaborate in the MOOC and invite their students to join with mine and the followers from around the world. I was looking to form a community around the course.”
“My experience with Jupyter notebooks is that students engage with the material in an almost tactile way. Manipulating a piece of code, experimenting with parameters in a problem, then reflecting and discussing the output makes for an active learning experience that works. The best results occur when students start creating their own notebooks, either documenting a mini-project or for note-taking and experimenting with code. I encourage them to do it, and it takes a lot of cajoling, but when they start doing this, I know I’ve reeled them in and they will succeed in the course.”
“Now we need the few innovative universities that decide to use this technology universally (for a broad cohort of students) and prove the impact it can have.”
> Robert Talbert’s Interview with Lorena Barba
We’re using the BadgeOne #openbadges server in #numericalmooc and 33 people claimed a badge in the first week https://t.co/4yjert8nwg #EDU15 — Lorena Barba (@LorenaABarba) October 28, 2015
earned my first badge for #numericalmooc with Python, take the online course at https://t.co/EYCFk7jzKc #opensource pic.twitter.com/XxLNPcFkqa — Gavin Wiggins (@wigging) October 28, 2015
The George Washington University (GW) and Mondragon University (Spain) are the first two higher-ed organizations on Open edX that have awarded eligible students with open digital badges. These two universities have used the fully open-source solution BadgeOne.com, developed by IBL with edX’s support.
In the case of GW, Professor Lorena Barba pioneered the use of badges on her self-hosted Open edX courses. A year ago, she launched a pilot for her “Practical Numerical Methods with Python” course. In October 2015, she adopted a solution that involved not only an XBlock but also an open-source server solution.
Mondragon University’s micro-credentials –see below– have been issued on a course in Spanish titled “Hacking ético”, that has attracted 5,800 in only two months.
EdX’s engineers have started to perform architectural improvements on the Open edX platform. “We are heading towards a more modular system, where we will have smaller, focused applications that work together”, explained Ned Batchelder, edX architect, during the 2015 Conference. [Watch his talk in the video below].
“We are looking to breaking Open edX into smaller pieces, as separated repositories and applications, so they can be tested and deployed independently. Most notably we are splitting the LMS and the CMS, so, for example, you will have one studio that feeds four LMSs”, added.
“We are also very interested in extension points: APIs, XBlocks, OLXs.” This will allow to increase the surface area of application without having to change the inside.
Dogwood, which is the name of the release that will be coming out at the end of this year, will include a new theming system that allows to keep the look-and-feel as users upgrade the system. It will also include Otto, a separated deployable e-commerce application, as well as an upgrade into Django 1.8 (now, Open edX is using Django 1.4).
In addition to these areas, edX’s and Open edX’s engineering team is pushing toward accessibility, in order to lead this area within online education. There is also a working group exploring “adaptive learning”.
The next version, called Eucalyptus, is scheduled for March 2016.
Progress on features as well as the next challenges are shown in the official Feature Roadmap web page.
“Anyone doing online education should be thinking about using Open edX”, said Ned Batchelder.
These are Open edX’s Top 10 features released in the last year, according to Beth Porter, Vice President of Product at edX.
Watch on top the video presentation recorded at the Open edX 2015 Conference.
More videos at youtube.com/iblstudios.
What is the impact of edX? See the slide above captured during the Open edX Conference, celebrated last week at Wellesley College.
Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX –a 140 people non-profit organization growing by 20 percent each year– opened the event by highlighting edX’s goal of reaching one billion students in the next 10 years, as well as other objectives such as improving on-campus education and advancing research in online learning. [Watch the whole talk below].
In terms of Open edX, there are 146 sites in multiple languages and 1840 courses. One of the latest ones is the Russian National Online Platform, with 50 courses.
Innovation on the platform is also remarkable. Top organizations have contributed with valuable software. This information came out of the conference:
In addition, the community has contributed over 50 XBlocks and software expansions.