Category: Platforms

The average salary of a blockchain engineer in Silicon Valley is $158,000, while blockchain-related jobs are the second fastest growing in today’s labor market, with 14 job openings for every blockchain developer.

Responding to this demand of blockchain talent, UC Berkeley is releasing on July 9 at edx.org a 6-week Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies course, as the first online class of the Blockchain Fundamentals professional certificate program.

This program, one of the most popular at the UC Berkeley campus and intended for students with no background in computer science, provides an understanding of how the blockchain and systems that are built on it, like Bitcoin, work.

Research shows that learners who actively engage in a forum achieve better results. However, only 5 to 10 % of MOOC learners use forums. With this evidence in mind, the University of Queensland (UQ) in Australia is developing technological tools intended to bridge the gap.

Among those developments, UQx, the digital unit of the university, has built several open source LTI tools for the Open edX platform, intended to encourage decision-making, enhance learners’ sense of community, improve critical thinking and reflection, and facilitate the co-creation of knowledge.

Its director, John Zorning, director at UQx, described these developments in a talk during the 2018 Open edX Conference in Montreal. (Video; Slides)

The code is available at https://github.com/UQ-UQx.

The University of Queensland is one of the most active members of edX and Open edX. To date, it has produced 53 MOOCs, and 4 MicroMasters, with an audience of 2 million learners.

HarvardX has created three new, free CS50 courses, which will start on July 1 at the edX.org portal: Web Programming with Python and JavaScript, Introduction to Game Development, and Mobile App Development with React Native.

These courses follow the success of “Introduction to Computer Science from Harvard”, better known as CS50, the largest course on Harvard campus and edX.org, with more than 1 million learners worldwide.

Particularly interesting is the 13-week course on React for mobile apps, a popular framework chosen by Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb and SoundCloud as their preferred choice for development.

Harvard University’s Professor David J. Malan, a star teaching online computer science, will be the lead instructor in the three courses. He is the author of the entire series of CS50, which now includes seven courses.

Prof. Lorena Barba, from GW, presented on May 30 at the Open edX Conference two software extensions (XBlocks) to better integrate Jupyter into the Open edX platform:

1. Jupyter Notebook Viewer XBlock—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).This allows course authors 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. (Open edX, itself, doesn’t provide version control of course content.)[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—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.]

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 work presented at the conference is the brainchild of Prof. Lorena Barba, implemented by her tech partners at IBL Education.

• Lorena A. Barba group: Jupyter-based courses in Open edX: Authoring and grading with notebooks