IBL News

Category: Top News

  • Bitnami's Open edX Image: For Small Scale Deployments

    EdX explained this week that Bitnami’s powered Open edX image is “based on a simplified version of the Open edX Birch release” and it is oriented “for those users interested in trying out their first Open edX deployment, for evaluation or small scale usage”.

    This pre-configured image lacks the CodeJail feature, which comes installed by default in any Open edX image. “Additional work will be needed to get CodeJail up and running on your Bitnami instance“, writes this week Sarina Canelake, an edX engineer, on the Open edX community portal.

    “The Open edX package, powered by Bitnami, provides a basic version of the Open edX platform that, with just one click (and acceptance of license terms), installs easily on AWS, and supports Internet scale deployments that can host thousands of courses for hundreds of thousands of learners,” was written on a press-release issued on June 25.

    As edX states, “installing and setting up the Open edX platform on your own is not an easy process. While over a hundred organizations have set up their own Open edX instances, there has been a longstanding need to make the Open edX technology stack accessible by individuals and institutions with less technical expertise. The ability to get up and running quickly will help smaller groups utilize the Open edX technology, and give larger institutions an easy way to evaluate the technology”.

  • Top Universities Profit From MOOCs

    Do you still think that MOOCs are an unprofitable investment for your college?

    In addition to the benefits coming from innovations and improvements in course design, you can build a sustainable revenue model. Top schools are doing so.

    There are at least four revenue models, coming from:

     

    • Offering for-credit online courses that students pay for.
    • Receiving grants to support research on new online pedagogy and course delivery.
    • Using MOOCs as a recruiting tool for pre-matriculated students.
    • Generating donations from the alumni community.

    Our colleagues from Extension Engine –an Open edX dedicated company based in Boston– have analyzed data from 136 colleges and universities and detected sustainable revenue models. A white paper available for free download (after you leave your email) highlights how schools pursue income through MOOCs.

    whitepaper
    In other words, joining the MOOC-wagon is worth it.

  • Open edX: The LMS for Non-Profits and Corporations (and One of Them Has Attracted 14,000 People)

    Guest Post: Nate Aune, CEO of Appsembler | 07.10.2015

    This post originally ran on VentureBeat.com on July 2015

     

    Open edX: The open source learning management system for corporations and non-profits


    By Nate Aune

    This month marks the third birthday of edX, the online learning platform developed jointly by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In that short time, usage of the edx.org site has exploded. Over 4 million students have taken one of the hundreds of free online courses provided by dozens of prominent universities. Individual courses have had tens of thousands of enrollees in a session.open-edx-mooc

    And usage of the term “MOOC” (Massively Open Online Course) has gone through the roof, too, as this Google Trends chart illustrates.

    Less well known, though, is that in 2013 edX released its open source software to the world, allowing anyone, including for-profit companies, to use it. Rather than contributing courses to edx.org, others can now create their own instance of edX. Within the same instance of Open edX, they can launch SPOCs (Small, Private Online Courses) or EPICs (Enterprise Private Internet-enabled Courses, essentially a MOOC within their company).

    And launch those courses they have. Companies such as McKinsey, Johnson & Johnson, InterSystems and medical device manufacturer Ethicon are using edX to educate employees, customers, partners, and prospects, as well as in their recruiting.

    MongoDB was one of the first companies to adopt Open edX as a corporate MOOC, and invested in university.mongodb.com where it offers free online courses and certifications in its core product.

    Whereas before MongoDB could only train 1,800 people per year with in-person training, with its Open edX-powered site, the company had 14,000 persons take its online courses in the same time period.

    And MongoDB University is no longer a cost center; it’s a revenue generation machine because it is now the #1 sales lead generator for the company.

    And Open edX enables an even greater possibility. We know of at least one major, global corporation that is working on creating an online course catalog for its worldwide workforce consisting of courses it has developed — plus licensed courses from other corporations using Open edX and major universities on edx.org. That kind of curated “best of the best” courseware offering was not possible before Open edX came along.

    The majority of corporate training is now delivered as either an online course or a blended course with both online and classroom sessions; solely instructor led courses are a declining share of training. Learning management systems (LMS) alone are a $2 billion industry. LinkedIn recently paid $1.5 billion to acquire online training site lynda.com.

    Open edX is a worthy competitor to more established LMSs such as SumTotal (a part of Skillsoft), Saba, and academic LMSs such as Blackboard and Moodle for a number of reasons.

    First, with those millions of students, edX has shown that it can scale to the needs of even the largest companies.

    As a new platform it provides a fresh and intuitive UI for building courses with. Let’s face it: almost all software ages and, if it doesn’t die, it usually seems increasingly clunky to use. It’s just too difficult for most software companies to radically update their software and overturn the expectations of their existing user base.

    And as an open source platform, Open edX benefits from the software contributions of dozens of universities and major companies including Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm. They’re constantly contributing new features related to course management, problem assessments, analytics, mobile and other areas.

    The Open edX software is far from perfect, of course. Accessibility, responsive design and interoperability are just three areas that the Open edX community is currently focused on improving.

    However, for any company or non-profit interested in online training and education, Open edX is an online courseware platform that’s worth a serious look.

  • The Polling and Survey XBlocks Will Be Installed by Default in Open edX's Cypress Release

    polls

    survey
    The new Polling and Survey XBlocks, contributed by McKinsey Academy to the Open edX codebase, will be installed by default in the Cypress release –to be issued by the end of this month.

    These new XBlocks enable course teams to create simple polls or complex surveys to engage their learners and obtain feedback. They can also foster greater connectivity among members who participate in cohorts by sharing results.

    In McKinsey Academy’s “Women & Leadership” course, launched in May 2015, polls are inserted at key points throughout the course as a way to prompt users to think about their own perceptions of the topic, while input from participants on questions is collected.

  • "Learning Management Systems' Analytics Model Is Inadequate"

    Guest Post: Prof. Lorena A. Barba, Ph.D | 07.08.2015

     

    This post originally ran on PyData on July 8, 2015

     

     

    Data-driven Education and the Quantified Student


    By Lorena Barba

    Education has seen the rise of a new trend in the last few years: Learning Analytics. This talk will weave through the complex interacting issues and concerns involving learning analytics, at a high level. The goal is to whet the appetite and motivate reflection on how data scientists can work with educators and learning scientists in this swelling field.

    Higher education has used analytics for a long time to guide administrative decisions. Universities are already adept at developing data-driven admissions strategies and increasingly they are using analytics in fund-raising. Learning analytics is a newer trend. Its core goal is to improve teaching, learning and student success through data. This is very appealing, but it’s also fraught with complex interactions among many concerns and with disciplinary gaps between the various players.

    Faculty have always collected data on students’ performance on assessments and responses on surveys for the purposes of grading and complying with accreditation, sometimes also for improving teaching methods and more rarely for research on how students learn. To call it Learning Analytics, though, requires scale and some form of systemic effort.

    Some early university efforts in analytics developed predictive models to identify at-risk first-year students, aiming to improve freshman retention (e.g., Purdue’s “Signals” project). Others built alert systems in support of student advising, with the goal of increasing graduation rates (e.g., Arizona State University’s “eAdvisor” system). Experts now segregate these efforts out of learning analytics, proper, because retention and graduation are not the same as learning. The goal, in that case, is to improve the function of the educational system, while learning analytics should be guided by educational research and be aimed at enhancing learning.

    To elucidate what is learning analytics, it looks like we first need to answer: what is learning? What is knowledge? And can more data lead to better learning? That is perhaps the zeroth assumption of learning analytics—and it needs to be tested. There are assumptions behind any data system that go as far back as selecting what to track, where it will be tracked, how it will be collected, stored and delivered.

    Most analytics is based on log data in the Learning Management System (LMS). This “learning in a box” model is inadequate, but the diverse ecosystem of apps and services used by faculty and students poses a huge interoperability problem. The billion-dollar education industry of LMS platforms, textbook publishers and testing companies all want a part in the prospect of “changing education” through analytics. They’re all marketing their dazzling dashboards in a worrying wave of ed-tech solutionism. Meanwhile, students’ every move gets tracked and logged, often without their knowledge or consent, adding ethical and legal issues of privacy for the quantified student.


    Lorena A. Barba is an Associate Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at The George Washington University (GW) and PhD in Aeronautics from Caltech. She is also in charge of GW’s Engineering Open edX platform and Open edX Universities First Symposium, to be celebrated on November 11th 2015 in Washington DC. In addition, Lorena A. Barba is member of the Board of Directors of NumFOCUS and IBL’s top advisor.

     

  • Microsoft Launches the "File Storage" XBlock to Embed into Open edX Files from "One Drive for Business"

    msfile

    Microsoft will contribute to Open edX’s new “Cypress” release by adding Office 365 authentication functionality into edX’s single sing-on system as well as a new XBlock, the “File Storage” XBlock, which allows to insert or embed files from One Drive and other providers.

    [Disclosure: IBL worked under contract with Microsoft in this development].

    This year Microsoft announced a new set of edX courses, along with the Office Mix XBlock.

    Read More: Open edX + Microsoft Office 365: Better Together

  • New Hints and Feedback Feature on Problems Contributed to Open edX by Stanford's OLI

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    EdX has introduced to the Open edX codebase the ability for instructors to write feedback that it associated with each answer option for both correct and incorrect answers. This feedback is presented to the learner when the answer is submitted.

    The code is present on the master branch of edx-platform, and will be included in the codebase of the upcoming Cypress release.

    This hinting and feedback feature allows professors to construct richer, interactive activities that allow students to engage directly with concepts and receive immediate formative feedback in ways that are difficult or impractical in traditional classroom instruction.

    • It is possible for learners who are having difficulties with a problem to request help in the form of one or more hints.
    • For some problems, a single hint may be sufficient.
    • In more difficult problems, several levels of hints can be provided.
    • This kind of help is especially important in free-form questions such as text input or numerical input. In these types of questions, learners are not able to guess at the answer and may struggle to find the path to the problem solution.

    This feature has been contributed by the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Stanford University, a grant-funded organization that collaborated with edX and Open edX community.

    Find out more about how to use these new features:

  • The First XBlock that Allows Badges on Open edX is Released

    IBL Studios Education released on this week the first Xblock that allows digital badges to be awarded from an online course using Open edX.

    The IBL OpenBadges XBlock connects any Open edX code-based platform to any badge-issuing server, including the open source BadgeOne server.

    This software has been developed by IBL Studios with conceptual and feature design by Lorena A. Barba and Michael Amigot as well as financial and technical support from edX.

    It was used in Prof. Barba’s open online course “Practical Numerical Methods with Python”, which started on December 2014. General consultancy on the principles of open digital badges in education was provided by Prof. Daniel T. Hickey and his team at Indiana University during the fall of 2014.

    These are the features:

    1. The badges can be awarded from a “Graded Sub-section” in a course in Open edX. The instructor sets the minimum score for the eligibility of the badge, and configures the badge component with the data of the badge service, badge ID, custom messages for the user, etc.
    2. Once it’s added to a Graded Sub-section, the open-badges XBlock will automatically check the user’s score in that sub-section (when the user enters the sub-section).
    3. While the user does not have a high-enough score for eligibility, the XBlock will display a custom message indicating that this is the case.
    4. Once the user has a high-enough score, the XBlock will reveal the badge image and the input fields to claim the badge.
    5. The user fills the claim form, entering URL fields providing evidence of her learning, etc.
    6. Once awarded, the badge becomes privately available in the user’s account on the badge service. The user then “claims” the badge to make it public (this is the normal operation of open-badge services.)

    IBL OpenBadges XBlock is available for free download and installation at GitHub.

     

  • Bitnami Launches a Pre-Configured Image for Open edX on Amazon EC2

    bit
    Bitnami.com, a well-known cloud hosting company, has created a pre-configured image to run Open edX on Amazon EC2, based on the Birch release and Ubuntu 14.04.1.

    Details are here. And docs, here.

    The fact that Open edX is available in the AWS Marketplace has been highlighted by edX in a recent press release.

    However, it is worth remembering that pre-installed images have been provided by edX on Amazon.

    Some users in the developer community have noted that Bitnami’s solution is “disappointing, not responsive and no-go for clients”. Ubuntu 14.04.01 on Open edX is truly experimental. “Regular installations are full of problems, so who needs to experiment with a new Ubuntu”, said David C.

  • EdX Highlights the Importance of Summer Learning Offering a Selection of 60 Courses

    summer

    EdX has partnered with the National Summer Learning Association (NSLA) to offer a special selection of high-quality, free courses to combat summer learning loss and avoid returning in the fall with atrophied skills.

    This offer includes more than 60 courses from top institutions in core subjects such as math, science, and language as well as skills-based courses in software development, computer science and innovation.

    These courses are ideal for career-minded high schoolers (who are dealing with their AP exams and college admissions), college-age students, and working professionals.

    These courses include: