IBL News

Category: Platforms | Tech

  • Opinion: Why is Blockchain So Important? A 1-Min Reading for Beginners

    Opinion: Why is Blockchain So Important? A 1-Min Reading for Beginners

    By Mikel Amigot

    It’s not just a buzzword. Blockchain is a true technological advancement that will transform the financial, medical, legal, and software services industries.

    This week I attended the 2018 Finovate conference in New York and noticed how many high-profile banking and supply-chain executives were paying extreme attention.

    For sure, blockchain-based networks, decentralized apps, and distributed ledgers are quietly changing the world. When the concept was introduced in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, an unknown person or people who later developed the bitcoin digital currency, no one predicted this upcoming revolution.

    Why is this so relevant?

    A blockchain is a secure and distributed database, which maintains a growing list of ordered and encrypted records, called blocks. Each block has a link to a previous block, a timestamp –the date and time when the record was created– and the history of every file. Users can only edit the parts of the encrypted blocks that they “own”, as they possess the needed, cryptographically created private keys to write to it (obviously, these private keys, which are a few lines of data, can be stolen; but also they can be secured at almost no expense).

    In addition to this immutable ledger that the network maintains, a blockchain has another primary component: a decentralized, autonomously managed, peer-to-peer network. This makes blockchain excellent for recording every digital transaction, exchange of goods and services, medical records, contracts, electoral voting, identity management, and private data. Naturally, it opens the possibility of mass disintermediation of transaction and trade processing, eliminating any “middleman”. Also, the usefulness of blockchain extends to storing any kind of digital information, including software.

    In other words, it’s a new Internet of value, a transformative technology of the second digital age.

     

            Mikel Amigot is the Founder of IBL News and IBL Education (Open edX)         

  • Free Online Content from Harvard Faculty on edX to Enrich Classroom Experiences

    Free Online Content from Harvard Faculty on edX to Enrich Classroom Experiences

    Harvard University’s cutting-edge and free 100 courses on edX.org –covering topics from calculus and climate change to Shakespeare and Stravinsky– are a good tool to enrich a face-to-face classroom experience and enhance professional development-oriented skills.

    HarvardX has suggested four approaches:

    1. Use online courses to deepen your content knowledge and learn new teaching strategies. For example, the course CS50x: Introduction to Computer Science includes new and effective instructional strategies.
    2. Allow students to virtually interact with other course participants, so they can learn the views of other people and collaborate with them.  In the Practical Improvement Science in Health Care course, students feel connected and realize that others around the U.S. are on a similar journey and their voices matter.
    3. Enroll and connect with a global community of teachers. Leaders of Learning, a course which examines theories of education and leadership, allows for this kind of collaboration.
    4. Earn certificates of participation that can be used to apply for professional development credit at the state or school district levels. This page details how to work with continuing education credits.
  • Anant Agarwal Wins the Yidan Prize for His Work with the edX Platform

    Anant Agarwal Wins the Yidan Prize for His Work with the edX Platform

    The Yidan Prize Foundation granted this month the 2018 Yidan Prize for Education Development to edX CEO, Anant Agarwal. Mr. Agarwal was recognized for making education more accessible to people around the world via the edX online platform.

    The Yidan Prize judging panel, led by former Director-General of UNESCO Koichiro Matsuura, invested six months to consider over 1,000 nominations spanning 92 countries.

    Simultaneously, Larry V. Hedges of Northwestern University received the Yidan Prize for Education Research for his groundbreaking statistical methods for meta-analysis.

    Founded in 2016 by Charles Chen Yidan, the Yidan Prize aims to create a better world through education.

    The Yidan Prize for Education Research and the Yidan Prize for Education Development will be awarded in Hong Kong on December 10, 2018, by Mrs. Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-Ngor, chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

    Following the ceremony, the laureates will be joined by about 350 practitioners, researchers, policymakers, business leaders, philanthropists, and global leaders in education to launch the 2018 edition of the Worldwide Educating for the Future Index (WEFFI), the first comprehensive index to evaluate inputs into education systems rather than outputs, such as test scores.

    Dorothy K. Gordon, chair of UNESCO IFAP and head of the judging panel, commended Professor Agarwal for his work behind the MOOC  movement. “EdX gives people the tools to decide where to learn, how to learn, and what to learn. It brings education into the sharing economy, enabling access for people who were previously excluded from the traditional system of education because of financial, geographic, or social constraints. It is the ultimate disrupter with the ability to reach every corner of the world that is internet enabled, decentralizing and democratizing education.’’

    Vice President for Open Learning Sanjay Sarma praised edX for creating a platform “where learners from all over the world can access high-quality education and also for enabling MIT faculty and other edX university partners to rethink how digital technologies can enhance on-campus education by providing a platform that empowers researchers to advance the understanding of teaching through online learning.”

    In the past six years, edX built a community of over 17 million learners from around the world; partnered with more than 130 prestigious universities, institutions and corporations; and continue to make the edX platform available for free as Open edX open source software.

    The Open edX platform has been adopted by 1600 sites, where over 20 million additional people learn every day.

     

     

     

  • Opinion: A Surprisingly Powerful Teaching Tool

    Opinion: A Surprisingly Powerful Teaching Tool

    By Mikel Amigot

    Jupyter Notebook is a surprisingly powerful teaching tool.

    If you are an educator, engineer or scientist and haven’t heard about Jupyter, you should take the time to learn about it.

    Tim O’Reilly said that Jupyter is “the next big thing.”

    This technology received the 2017 ACM Software System Award.

    Essentially, Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application to create and share documents with live code, equations, visualizations, and text.

    Currently, it is mostly used for Data Science and Machine Learning, but it goes far beyond. Its tools are easily extensible – e.g., you can play mp4 movie files.

    In education, Jupyter opens a new pedagogical model. It is also a new genre of OER.

     

            Mikel Amigot is the Founder of IBL News and IBL Education (Open edX)         

  • Opinion: The Time of Micro-Credentials

    Opinion: The Time of Micro-Credentials

    By Mikel Amigot

    In parallel with the need for continuous learning, we need to showcase our new knowledge to employers. This is the time of digital micro-credentials.

    For a fraction of the price of a classic Master’s degree, a growing number of institutions and schools are starting to offer short-form certificate programs.

    These offerings are an opportunity to learn and help update specific, career-enhancing skills.

    Beyond traditional colleges, Coursera, edX, Udacity and Pluralsight are convenient educational platforms to acquire micro-credentials.

    To grant non-credit certificates, Coursera offers Specializations; edX, MicroMasters; Udacity, Nanodegrees; and Pluralsight, certificates of completion.

            Mikel Amigot is the Founder of IBL News and IBL Education (Open edX)         

  • Opinion: Who Has the Time to Enroll in College Programs?

    Opinion: Who Has the Time to Enroll in College Programs?

    By Mikel Amigot

    With the job market changing so rapidly, our current knowledge is becoming outdated more quickly.

    Innovation in AI, data sciences and technology requires refreshed skills.

    When you work 60 hours per week, who has the time and energy to enroll in traditional college programs?

    Taking well-designed, learner-oriented online courses is the answer – throughout our lifetime.

    Stanford University’s vision for Higher Education in 2025 points to an interesting model: students take a few courses to gain skills and fill a job, and later return to school to add needed skills, following a continuous cycle until retirement.

    We will subscribe to college like we access Netflix or Amazon Prime.

     

            Mikel Amigot is the Founder of IBL News and IBL Education (Open edX)         

  • United Nation’s Sustainable Development Courses on edX.org

    United Nation’s Sustainable Development Courses on edX.org

    SDG Academy, an initiative of the United Nations Sustainable Development Network (SDSN), will release 13 of their existing courses on edX.org this September, after joining the edX consortium.

    These free, graduate-level courses on sustainable development address the challenge of how people, communities, governments, and companies coexist, cooperate and collaborate in order to save the planet.

    Classes are taught by experts, under the leadership of Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, from Columbia University. Most of the courses start on September 10 as part of the SDG Academy Fall semester.

    One of the notable courses revolves around Pope Francis’ Laudato Si encyclical. It raises the ecological crisis that humanity has created and issues a moral clarion call for urgent action to protect the earth. Its introductory video, below, is narrated by Bono. The course lasts for less than two hours.

    https://youtu.be/sW5rwlQPRrE

     

    Presentation video of the 10-week “Sustainable Food Systems: A Mediterranean Perspective” course:

    https://youtu.be/owMaxgwGclU

     

     

     

  • Opinion: Knowledge with Expiration Date

    Opinion: Knowledge with Expiration Date

    By Mikel Amigot

    Our technical knowledge has as an expiration date. To secure our competitive advantage, we must focus on continuous learning.

    Past success doesn’t guarantee future achievement. We need to set a learning mindset and drive towards change. Market transformation is speeding up, alongside our competitors.

    Experts suggest that 40-60 percent of jobs will be lost by 2030 due to automation and new technologies. And by 2020, 40 percent of the workforce will be independent contractors, according to Harry Elam, Senior Vice Provost for Education at Stanford University.

    In this scenario, we are required to be life-long learners.

     

            Mikel Amigot is the Founder of IBL News and IBL Education (Open edX)            

  • The 2018 Jupyter Notebook Conference Highlighted the Success of this Tool in Education

    The 2018 Jupyter Notebook Conference Highlighted the Success of this Tool in Education

    The 2018 Jupyter Notebook conference, which took place last week in New York, dedicated this year roughly 20 percent of its talks to education (11 talks in total), a significant increase from 2017 when only a keynote and off-program session were scheduled.

    Professor Lorena Barba, from the George Washington University, set the tone, with a talk alongside Robert Talbert, from Gran Valley State University, about the flipped learning experiences with Jupyter. Prof. Talbert described it as “a new pedagogical model, where the instructor is a guide”, while Prof. Barba said that “Jupyter is a new genre of OER”. Also, “it is about discovering activities by working through structured computational software”.

    Scholars from Berkeley University explained how the institution successfully uses Jupyter Notebook on edX online classes, with 1,000 students in data8, plus 10,000+ in a free online edX version. Rob Newton, from Trinity School, advocated the use of Jupyter “for every schooler”, especially in Statistics and Calculus courses. In a passionate keynote, Carol Willing, from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, highlighted that “Jupyter creates value and connects people”. Quoting Walt Disney, she said, “if you dream it, you can build it”.  Jessica Forte, from Jupyter [in the picture], praised the IBL Education work by integrating Jupyter into the Open edX platform and pointed the audience to the code on Github.

    The future of Jupyter in education was unanimously considered as extremely promising, and speakers agreed on the characterization of Tim O’Reilly –who was seen at the conference– on Jupyter, which this year received the ACM Software System Award, as “the next big thing”.

    At the beginning of the conference, Fernando Perez, Paco Nathan, and Brian Granger, who chaired the conference, summarized speakers, sponsors and attendants’ view with the sentence “Jupyter makes us successful”.

    Jeffrey Poore described in his blog Jupyter’s possibilities:

    “Jupyter is a powerful tool that should be a part of almost anyone’s toolbox. It might seem like it is a tool that is focused on Data Science and Machine Learning, but in actuality, it is way more than that. It can be a teaching tool, a code IDE, a presentation tool, a collaborative tool, and much much more. With tools like Jupyter Lab that are easily extensible, there is almost nothing that you couldn’t do directly in it.” 

    “Another example allowed you to play mp4 movie files. A third extension let you browse GitHub repositories. Extensions are written in NodeJS and can use UI technologies like ReactJS. If you can build it for a standalone website, you can build it to run inside a Jupyter Lab instance. This opens up possibilities for dashboards, applications, monitoring tools, and more. You could literally run your entire business through Jupyter Lab.”

     

    This is a selection of tweets:

     

  • Open IBL Jupyter Notebook: New Distribution of Open edX on AWS’ AMI Community

    Open IBL Jupyter Notebook: New Distribution of Open edX on AWS’ AMI Community

    IBL Education is launching today a Jupyter Notebook – ready Open edX distribution. Open IBL Jupyter Notebook is built on the Ginkgo.2 version of Open edX. This release is free and is ready to go from the AWS (Amazon Web Services) AMI community.

    In June, the IBL engineering team launched Open IBL, an easy-to-handle, production-ready distribution based on Open edX’s Ginkgo.2, which was equipped with a command-line builder. These two screencast videos explained the installation and configuration process. (Video 1, Video 2)

    This week, in parallel with the Jupyter Conference in New York (Aug 22-24), and also as a contribution to the educational community, IBL launches another version of the Open IBL distribution which includes the two recent Jupyter Notebooks-related Xblocks:

    1. Jupyter Notebook Viewer XBlock. It allows from any public Jupyter Notebook (e.g., in a public repo on GitHub), pull content into a course learning sequence using only the URL, and optional start and end marks (any string from the first cell to include, and the first cell to exclude). As a result of it, course authors will be able to develop their course content as Jupyter Notebooks, and to build learning sequences reusing that content, without duplication. It also has the added benefit that the development of the material can be hosted on a version-controlled repository. [See IBL’s post about the XBlock, and the code repository—the XBlock is open source under a BSD3 license.]

    2. Graded Jupyter Notebook XBlock. It allows to create an assignment using the nbgrader Jupyter extension, then insert a graded sub-section in Open edX that will deliver this assignment (as a download), auto-grade the student’s uploaded solution, and record the student’s score in the gradebook. The XBlock instantiates a Docker container with all the required dependencies, runs nbgrader on the student-uploaded notebook, and displays immediate feedback to the student in the form of a score table. [See IBL’s post, and the code repository—the XBlock is open source under BSD3.]

    This Open IBL Jupyter Notebook distribution has been created with the strategic and pedagogical support of Lorena A. Barba group, from The George Washington University.

    DEMO of Open IBL Jupyter Notebook

    Prof. Barba has been teaching with Jupyter for the last five years. Her first open teaching module using Jupyter was “CFD Python”, released in July 2013. In 2014, Barba developed and taught the first massive open online course (MOOC) at the George Washington University: “Practical Numerical Methods with Python.” The course was written entirely as Jupyter Notebooks, and it was self-hosted on a custom Open edX site (where it amassed more than 8000 users over 3 years).

    Jupyter is a set of open-source tools for interactive and exploratory computing. At the center of them is the Jupyter Notebook, a document format for writing narratives that interleave multi-media content with executable code, using any of a set of available languages (of which Python is the most popular).

    The two mentioned XBlocks, a brainchild of Prof. Lorena Barba and implemented by her tech partners at IBL Education, were presented at the 2018 Open edX Conference last May 30 in Montreal, Canada. Prof. Lorena Barba, from GW, and Miguel Amigot II, CTO at IBL Education, presented those two software extensions, intended to better integrate Jupyter into the Open edX platform.

    Barba, Lorena A.; Amigot, Miguel (2018): Jupyter-based courses in Open edX: Authoring and grading with notebooks. figshare. Presentation: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.6553550.v1