Category: Platforms | Tech

Over 300 developers, educators, and industry leaders participated in the sixth Open edX Conference, celebrated at UC San Diego — “the largest Open edX conference ever”, as Anant Agarwal stated during the opening keynote.

The event ran smoothly and was well organized by a team of a dozen edX staffers, who worked on the conference for seven months.

New Open edX providers from countries like Argentina and the Netherlands attended for the first time, “to catch up with the community and learn about the future trends”, as Esteban Etcheverry, co-founder of AulasNeo told IBL News.

The reach of @OpenEdX has significantly grown, @agarwaledu announces at #OpenedX2019, “the largest Open edX conference ever” pic.twitter.com/uv8yspPfld

— IBL News (@iblnews) March 27, 2019

Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX, disclosed that there are over 2,400 instances using this software, with more than 25,000 courses and 45 million learners in 70 countries.

Robert Lue, Professor at Harvard University and director of LabXchange, stated that “Open edX is the largest open source learning platform in the world, with 60+ million learners and 1,300 organizations.”

Robert Lue presented the most innovative project on the Open edX universe: an extension of the platform, called Blockstore, which will allow to create personalized pathways.

This tool, developed with a grant of $6.5 million from Amgen Foundation, notably enhances the edX platform’s user interface. It will be released in September 2019.

Breaking news: Anant Agarwal, @agarwaledu, announces that edX is launching its own OPM. It will be a “lean OPM”, and university will have more control, he says. #openedx2019 @OpenEdX pic.twitter.com/SvYO2lcLbh

— IBL News (@iblnews) March 27, 2019

In the software field, Ned Batchelder, Software Architect at edX, presented the ninth version of the platform, called Ironwood.

One of the relevant announcements of the conference was related to the edX consortium’s business strategy: the determination to offer its services as a “Lean OPM” (Online Program Manager). “We are doing it differently from other OPMs. We give universities more control, and we are the only non-for-profit OPM”, said Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX.

The main value of the edX (and Coursera, too) offer in this area is the cost of acquisition per learner. Usually, with 2U and other traditional OPMs the cost of getting a student goes beyond $5,000, experts told IBL.

.@OpenEdX ninth version of the platform is fully launched. In the last year, we’ve seen only one release #openedx2019 pic.twitter.com/mpAMencaey

— IBL News (@iblnews) March 27, 2019

All of the talks and conferences were live streamed and recorded via YouTube.

At the end of the event, it was announced that the 2020 Open edX conference will take place in Cascais, Portugal.

Also, the edX architecture team disclosed that the 10th Open edX release will be named Juniper.

• YouTube Channel with the talks

The University of California San Diego announced yesterday the release of the Open edX Caliper Feed feature, a data solution that allows for the real-time collection of course activity to flow into an analytics tool.

The project, developed by the university’s IT Services department along with Arbisoft and Amass, started when the institution found incompatibilities between campus analytics applications and the data format of test scores and other metrics on its 90 edX courses with 3.4 million students. The university had no effective way of using data, and it needed to find a workable solution.

The complete code is available for free at: https://pypi.org/project/openedx-caliper-tracking.

Caliper is a standard format for capturing and presenting measures of learning activity. Access to real-time reporting helps instructors and course designers more effectively design classes and boost student success. For example, some students react better to auditory content, while others prefer visual or video-driven methods.

Karen Flammer, Director of the Center for Digital Learning, at UC San Diego, said, “It’s a tremendous development; it’s not easy to see what parts of a course students are spending time on, what they are concentrating on and where they are struggling. From a practical standpoint, we’ll be able to use this data to assess and improve learning pathways. Obtaining access to this data supports delivering customized resources and activities tailored to the unique needs of each learner.”

 

• UC San Diego News Center: UC San Diego Updates edX Platform to Improve Online Learning Experience

The GCFLearnFree.org learning platform and its sister sites in Spanish and Portuguese (GCFAprendeLibre.org, and GCFAprendeLivre.org) have reached 35 million users.

This number ranks this MOOC platform as the second largest in the world, right behind Coursera (37 million registered users in 2018), and ahead of edX (18 million) and Udacity (10 million).

Supported by the Goodwill Community Foundation, GCFLearnFree.org has a strong base of learners on Microsoft Office-related courses, which come with certificates of completion and continuing education units (CEUs). The success of this initiative lies in its ability to provide practical knowledge to get good jobs. It helps unemployees, and assists with the necessary skills to increase salary and job satisfaction.

Goodwill is constantly changing its curriculum by adding new free MOOCs intended to enable people to maintain a relevant skill set.

 

The latest Open edX version of the platform, Ironwood, was quietly released today, March 21, five days before the annual developer’s conference.

This version, Ironwood.1, is based on the code of January 17, 2019, and is available on GitHub.

Ironwood is the ninth release of the Open edX platform and includes improvements over the current Hawthorn.2 version.

One of the most notorious improvements involves the login process. Now logging in to Studio is done by redirecting the user to the LMS to log in, and then redirecting back to Studio.

Another remarkable feature is called “Public Course Content”, which allows users to access materials and components without registration or enrollment.

Shelby Stack, Product Manager at edX, recorded this following 5-minute video detailing the new features in Ironwood.

• Release Notes: Features and changes
• Announcement on Google Groups (March 22)
• edX Getting Help
• News about Ironwood at IBL

The upcoming Open edX release called “Ironwood” will include an option to make course content public. It allows users to access it without registration or enrollment (although discussions, problems, and exams won’t be visible).

This feature, called “Public Course Content”, has been sponsored by Cloudera and developed by OpenCraft in collaboration with the edX Architecture and Product teams.

It can be seen in action in these seven free courses of the Cloudera OnDemand training platform, based on the Open edX software, and designed to teach how to accelerate the ROI of Cloudera deployments.

• HDP Overview: Apache Hadoop Essentials
• Preparing for Cloudera Certification
• Introduction to Cloudera Manager
• Deploying and Scaling Cloudera Enterprise on Microsoft
• Cloudera Director: An Introduction
• Cloudera Essentials for Apache Hadoop
• Using Cloudera Navigator

In a blog post, edX explained that “you can decide which courses, and which parts of those courses, you want to to make public. For example, you can:

• Make just the course outline public.
  The course outline will show without any links to internal course pages, giving potential learners an overview of what they will see when they enroll.

• Make the entire course public.
  Anyone visiting your course outline can follow links to visit internal course pages, and freely navigate HTML and Video course content and handouts.

• Show different content blocks to public learners vs enrolled learners.
  You can create content tailored to the public view, while still supporting the needs of your enrolled audit and paid learners.”
  

This functionality allows not only existing learners to browse your public course to see if they want to enroll, but is beneficial for SEO purposes, since Google and other search crawlers can index your public courses. As a result of it, the visibility of courses would increase and boost enrollments.

Currently, only HTML components, Video components, and course handouts have a “public” view. Unenrolled learners will see a message requesting that they sign in/register and enroll to see more complex content types like discussion forums, problem blocks, randomized content blocks, exams, Open Response Assessment, and other XBlocks.

• Open edX Blog: Public Course Content: in Ironwood
• Instructions to enable “Public Course Content”

 

FutureLearn, the UK-based MOOC platform which competes with Coursera and edX, has launched a new pricing plan to access most of its course catalog: one payment of $199 for one year.

This unlimited enrollment, which will increase to $269 after May 11, includes access to all short courses which offer a Certificate of Achievement. Courses not included are premium, program assessments, degrees (although open taster courses are), and classes which offer a Statement of Participation. Certificates of Achievement will be kept indefinitely regardless of whether the user renews the yearly subscription.

With this recurring revenue strategy, FutureLearn introduces a new pricing model, Pluralsight style, and moves ahead of Coursera, edX, and Udacity.

From the learner perspective, it is a drastic price reduction because for the same price as four-course upgrades, they are able to access a catalog of around 1,000 courses.

• FutureLearn announcement
• Class-Central analysis

What is the future of Coursera, edX, Udacity, FutureLearn, MiriadaX and other MOOC platforms?

Robert Ubell, a renowned online learning guru and consultant, has a clear view:

“MOOC platforms will provide full credit programs for a fee.”

“MOOCs proposition was destined to die because there was no finance in how to continue. This is why they had to find a transformative approach,” he adds.

“Programs from Georgia Tech and the University of Illinois are good examples. Their offering is connected to their revenue stream.”

In the interview below, conducted during the SXSW EDU conference this week in Austin, Mr. Ubell also highlighted the examples of UMass, University of Southern Florida Central, and University of Arizona State University.

 

XuetangX, China’s first MOOC-platform, has reached 16 million users –sources told IBL News. The exact number is 16.3 million learners. Last year XuetangX, which is based on the Open edX codebase, reported an audience of 14 million.

This number puts this platform in the third position, right after Coursera (37 million) and edX.org (18 million).

Founded in October 2013 by Tsinghua University, XuetangX has over 1900 quality courses from Tsinghua University, Peking University, Fudan University, MIT, Stanford University, Berkeley and other first-class universities, covering 13 subjects.

Additionally, XuetangX hosts innovative initiatives, such as:

• AI Xuetang, a personalized learning platform for K-12 education. It works as a channel, research exchange, and application of the Ministry of Education’s Online Research Center.It includes online assessments, micro-degrees, and question banks. “It helps local primary schools to complete continuous innovation inside and outside the classroom, and give children the best learning experience,” explains the organization.

 

• AP courses at Moocap.org.cn and XuetangX, with over 300 high school members, and over 400,000 enrolled learners. Intended for middle school students, there are 10 free, four-week courses, mostly covering STEM subjects (Calculus, Linear Algebra, Probability Theory, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and others). Their credit is accepted by many universities and colleges, including Tsinghua University, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Renmin University of China and Central China Normal University.

 

• Micro-Degrees. Jointly developed by XuetangX and Chinese universities. Main courses are IBA, AI, IoT, Network security, Big Data, Accounting, UI design, Radio and Television Editor, Internet Education, Internet Finance, and Cross-Border e-commerce.

 

• Rain Classroom, an app designed to be used in a blended learning model, with 7 million users. This free tool allows students to interact with their teachers in class and out of class using their smartphones.

 

• XuetangX Cloud, a teaching platform to use on campus, and connected to Rain Classroom.

 

• AI virtual teacher Xiaomu. “As soon as students start a course, Xiaomu predicts where they each have problems and answers their questions in the form of text, pictures, videos, etc. Students can always ask him more until they fully understand the concept. In talking to Xiaomu, they avoid occupying the teacher’s time.” (…) “When users are watching videos, Xiaomu actively asks students related knowledge questions to help them learn how to deal with error-prone and confusing content.” (…) “He will constantly monitor students’ progress and provide advice and encouragement at different stages. Even after a user finishes a course, Xiaomu will design and recommend other courses according to the user’s preferences in order to help individual students to learn effectively.”

 

• SIELE Test, a system that allows to electronically certify the degree of mastery of the Spanish language.

 

• News about XuetangX in English

Top MOOC platforms significantly increased their revenues in 2018, after adding new paid models and experiencing an increase in users.

According to Forbes, Coursera’s revenuefor 2018 is $140, up from $100 million in 2017.  Udacity’s revenue will grow by 25 % to $90 million, and edX will be at around $60 million — a smaller increase.

In terms of users, Coursera leads with 37 million, followed by edX (18 million), XuetangX (14 million), Udacity (10 million) and FutureLearn (8.7 million).

Class-Central estimated that 900 universities launched 2000 new courses to the list this year. [See the graphic above] The total number of online degreesis 47, up from around 15 in 2017.

One of the most successful cases has been Coursera for Business, which grew300% and increased its portfolio to over 1,500 customers globally.