Category: Platforms | Tech

EdCast, a learning platform whose corporate LMS is powered with Open edX technology, announced last week that it closed an additional $33.6 million of funding.

“Investors include Softbank, REV Venture Partners, The London Fund, Crescent Enterprises,  and Mistletoe, among others, with participation from previous investors, including SSGA, Stanford University, and Cervin Ventures,” said EdCast in a press release.

This Mountain View-based educational provider also claimed that “it has surpassed two million paid users across hundreds of enterprise and public-sector customers, including HPE, Dell EMC, Schneider Electric, ANZ Bank, Jefferson Health, Mars, Anglo American, PVH, Genpact, ICICI Securities, India’s NASSCOM and the World Economic Forum.”

[In the picture above: Karl Mehta, CEO at EdCast]

The edX organization has implemented a new revenue model on its catalog, based on charging to access graded problems. Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX, made the announcement today on the official edX blog.

Audit learners (free learners) will continue to access the core course content, including videos, resources, discussion forum, and practice problems, but they will need to upgrade to the “verified learner status” and pay a fee (usually $50 to $100) to unlock graded assessments.

Additionally, after the free course ends, users won’t be able to access content unless they upgrade into the paid option. This time limit feature will be set on most of the existing courses.  “Existing audit track enrollments will not be affected. Learners will be able to access all content in any course(s) they enrolled in prior to December 17, 2018,” edX explained.

With this model, edX expects to generate a 30% increase in its overall revenue, which will be split with partners, as sources told IBL News.

This change, aligned with the business practices of Coursera, Udacity and other competitors, comes after several months of exploring different revenue models and is part of edX’s strategy to become sustainable. Particularly, edX’s paywall will be similar to FutureLearn’s upgrading feature. Coursera was the first to charge for graded assignments three years ago.

During the testing time prior to the implementation, edX claimed that it didn’t receive negative feedback from learners, although some university partners complained about it during the last Global Forum conference in Boston last month.

“We have decided on a model that we feel will best drive edX forward while staying true to our mission,” explained Anant Agarwal. “We wanted to strike a balance of moving edX towards financial sustainability while maintaining a robust level of free access.”

Also, MITx shared his view. “We support edX in its mission and path. We are working to ensure we maintain the integrity of the learning experience for all learners under this updated model. Materials for over 2,600 MIT courses will continue to be available for free to all learners on MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW).”

Dhawal Shah, founder of Class Central, said “that edX’s paywall will now be higher than Coursera’s, especially since Coursera has born the brunt of criticism about restricting access to MOOCs, which many attributed to pressure from Coursera’s VC investors.”  “Strangely enough, with this change to edX, Coursera is now the MOOC platform that allows free users to go furthest before hitting a paywall.”

• edX Blog: Updates To Our Platform: Achieving Long-Term Sustainability
• Inside Higher Ed: EdX’s Struggle for Sustainability

Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, and Larry Hedges, Chair of the Department of Statistics at Northwestern University, were honored this week in Hong Kong and respectively received the 2018 Yidan Prize for Education Development and 2018 Yidan Prize for Education Research, which comes with a gold medal and a whopping amount of $3.87 million (HK$30 million) for each.

Dr. Charles Chen Yidan, Founder of the Yidan Prize, along with Mrs. Carrie Lam, the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, witnessed by 350 guests, presented the 2018 Yidan Prize for Education Development and Yidan Prize for Education Research, during a ceremony which took place on December 10.

Anant Agarwal said: “We’re really honored and fortunate to have won the Yidan Prize. We want to use the prize money to launch radical new efforts that would enable much younger learners, both at the late high school and college level, to get radically increased access and quality for their learning. edX today has 18 million students from every single country in the world, and I would love to see in the fullness of time, billions of students routinely accessing a quality education like this and education being affordable for everybody everywhere with a will to learn.” 

Larry Hedges, renowned for his development of the statistical methods for meta-analysis (SMMS), said: “I am honored to be the Yidan Prize laureate and I’m going to use whatever I gain from this prize to try and increase the profile of evidence in education for the purposes of improving education. It’s important that we avoid any mistakes that can be used to discredit education, to discredit evidence in education science, because there are people who would prefer to make policy decisions on the basis of preferences and superstitions and prejudices rather than on the basis of evidence.”

The Yidan Prize, the world’s largest award in education, was established in 2016 by Chinese philanthropist and entrepreneur Charles Chen Yidan, a co-founder of Shenzhen-based giant Tencent. This year the prize saw around 1,000 nominations from over 92 countries.

The Yidan Prize consists of two awards: the Yidan Prize for Education Research and the Yidan Prize for Education Development. The Yidan Prize Laureate receives a gold medal and a total sum of HK$30 million (around US$3.9 million).

Half of this amount is in the form of a cash prize to the laureate, while the other half is a project fund, according to the official press release. To ensure transparency and sustainability, the prize is managed by Yidan Prize Foundation and governed by an independent trust with an endowment of HK$2.5 billion (around US$323 million).

Corporate Announcements:
• Asia One: Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Honors Two Outstanding Scholars for Their Contributions to Education Reform at Yidan Prize Award Presentation Ceremony

• Asia Corporate News Network – ACN Newswire: Second Yidan Prize Summit Sets Forth Ideas for Future

Over the weekend our CEO @agarwaledu accepted the @TheYidanPrize for Educational Development in Hong Kong. Thank you to Charles Chen Yidan and the Yidan Prize Foundation for this incredible recognition of @edXOnline and our work to advance access to education worldwide! pic.twitter.com/JJEuPmeMv0

— edX (@edXOnline) December 10, 2018

Harvard University –with 100 MOOCs featuring 26,000 videos, problems and text pages on edX.org– continues to experiment with technology to allow broad reuse of edX content for its on-campus Canvas platform.

Its new technical solution is called DART: Digital Assets for Reuse in Teaching, a system that allows any Harvard instructor to utilize HarvardX edX content in their on-campus courses via the Canvas LMS using the LTI standard interoperability tool. [See a screenshot above].

“Content is discoverable through search and recommendation interfaces, and the embed process is reduced to a few clicks. The initiative is well aligned with the envisioned NGDLE (next-generation digital learning environment), focusing on platform interoperability (edX to Canvas) and microservices (small isolated coding blocks) that appropriately isolate development to allow for quick iteration,” explained Daniel Seaton, a product owner for the DART project at Harvard University, in an article on Inside The Higher Education.

Mr. Seaton recommends to the edX Consortium –which hosts 2,200 courses– to explore the possibility of extending these interoperability technologies to others members, creating a sharing economy for MOOC content. “When so many institutions have committed to open online courses, it’s natural to ask how these materials can be used to explore new pathways in both existing and nascent learning settings,” he says.

MicroMasters programs on edX won the Nurturing Employability Award Category at Friday’s QS Reimagine Education conference in San Francisco (29-30 November). edX made this announcement on its blog.

Pioneered by MIT and launched by edX in 2016, MicroMasters were created to bridge the knowledge gap between higher education and the workplace.

With subjects ranging from Data Science to AI, MicroMasters’ credentials have been valued by top companies and linked to employability outcomes. Within two years, edX has launched 51 MicroMasters programs from 30 global institutions.

“MOOCs are dead,” claimed edX’s CEO, Anant Agarwal, last month during the private Global Forum conference in Boston. Some partner universities aligned with the goal of openness in education were shocked.

Additionally, the announcement that edX.org will soon (this month) start charging for graded assessments made some uncomfortable.

“MOOC is a philosophy of education; it has never been a business model. We signed up on edX following this principle,” said a member of one participating university.

This new reality goes against that dream. edX, like Coursera, Udacity, and FutureLearn, needs to be either financially sustainable or profitable. Therefore, revenue-generating solutions are required. A successfully emerged idea is MOOC-based degrees, developed in partnerships between universities and the aforementioned platforms.

The problem is how to split the revenues. Coursera and edX require a 50 percent split, because of the technology and marketing costs. Not all of the institutions are ready to take this deal. They believe that their brands, along with low prices, are powerful enough to make their online degrees successful. Regarding the technology, there are several solutions, including Open edX, which is a community-based, open source software (edX.org uses this code, plus an additional 10% of proprietary software).

With revenue sharing or not, the fact is that these types of online degrees, wrongly called MOOCs, are on the rise. Designed to operate on a larger scale, they feature lower prices than on-campus online equivalents and offer more flexible criteria for admissions. Around 47 online degrees have been announced so far, and many more are planned.

This is the recent history of how these Master’s and Bachelor’s online degrees have unfolded:

• The first program was Georgia Tech’s groundbreaking online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program, launched in 2014 on Udacity with support from AT&T. The course, with a $6,800 tuition, attracted approximately 10,000 students. [Faq]

• Two years later, the University of Illinois and Coursera started a Master’s program in Business, branded as an iMBA, consisting of six specializations, for $22,000. [Learner perspective; analysis]

• In March 2018, Coursera announced its first fully online Bachelor’s degree, targeting both students who are pursuing their first degree as well as those who already have a Bachelor’s. It was a 3-4 year Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, developed by the University of London. The program costs approximately $13,300 to $23,500, depending on the student’s geographic location.

• In parallel, Coursera reported the development of six new Master’s degrees: a Master of Computer Science from Arizona State University, a Global Master of Public Health from Imperial College London, a Master of Computer Science from the University of Illinois, a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of London, a Master of Applied Data Science from the University of Michigan, and a Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan. Coursera revealed plans to offer 20 online degrees by 2019, becoming a kind of OPM (Online Program Manager) who helps colleges build online degree programs. [The story at IBL News]

• In August 2018, Georgia Tech announced a new online master’s degree in Cybersecurity for less than $10,000 on edX.org. This OMS Cybersecurity (Online Master of Science in Cybersecurity) will be launched on January 7, 2019, with 250 students and will scale over time. OMS Cybersecurity was Georgia Tech’s third at-scale online degree program. It followed the success of the mentioned 2014 Master of Science in Computer Science, as well as the Online Master of Science in Analytics (OMS Analytics), launched in 2017 on edX with support from AT&T and Accenture. [The story at IBL News]

• In October 2018, the edX organization achieved a milestone on its expansion strategy by announcing the 2019 launch of nine online Master’s degree programs for a “disruptive price” between $10,000 and $23,000. The average Master’s degree ranges between $30,000-$120,000. These programs, in areas such as Data Science, Cybersecurity, Computer Science, Analytics and Supply Chain Management, will be developed by Arizona State University, Curtin University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Indiana University, University of California San Diego, University of Queensland, and the University of Texas at Austin.  [The story at IBL News]

In other words, MOOCs are enjoying a second life.

LinkedIn Learning will let companies and colleges add content, following its goal of becoming the front door for employees looking for professional development-oriented courses.

So far the Microsoft-owned platform plans to work with five partners:

• Harvard Business Publishing.
• getAbstract: 18,000+ book summaries as well as TED talks
• Big Think: 500 short-form, actionable video lessons.
• Treehouse.
• CreativeLive For Business: Expert-led classes on creativity, innovation, design thinking, emotional intelligence, entrepreneurship (and many more).

“We’re creating a single place for your employees to discover and access all of your organization’s learning content,” LinkedIn announced on Friday. “We will be adding additional integration partners in the future, and plan to make the integrations available on the platform next year.”

Similar destinations for enterprise learners who compete with LinkedIn Learning include Coursera, edX.org, Udacity and Pluralsight.

Excited to partner with @YouTube on their innovative #YouTubeLearning initiative. https://t.co/FyTcCx95jX

— anant agarwal (@agarwaledu) October 22, 2018