John G. Paul | IBL News

Coursera, with fourteen MOOC-based degrees in its catalog, is seeing slow progress in this modality. “They are growing slower than we expected,” revealed Dil Sidhu, Chief Content Officer at Coursera, at the EMOOCS 2019 conference, which took place last week at the University of Naples Federico II, in Italy.

Dil Sidhu, who started his work at Coursera at the beginning of this year, provided during his talk an interesting piece of data: “62 percent of those who take an online degree [in Coursera] started with a MOOC”. “MOOCs are the gateway to online degrees,” he stated. (See the graphic above).

This executive provided a snapshot of what lies ahead for Coursera: “Inclusion of Behavioral Sciences to help learners succeed. Data analytics to help identify content and learners habits. Help partners succeed (…). Social impact: Coursera for refugees, veterans, and incarcerated populations”.

During the same session at the University of Naples Federico II, Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX, and Simon Nelson, CEO at FutureLearn, stressed the impact of in-demand MOOCs on up-skilling and re-skilling employees as well as setting up lifelong learning habits.

Simon Nelson, whose company received a recent investment of $64 million, announced that FutureLearn will invest money in creating high-quality content. So far the three big MOOC providers have not invested in content, relying instead on universities’ and industry partners’ offerings.

The CEO of FutureLearn also disclosed that his organization is working, along with some other European MOOC providers such as France Universite Numerique (FUN) and Spanish Telefonica’s MiriadaX, in a common microcredential framework, recognized for credit by leading employers. This new credential will be provided after 100 to 150- hour classes. (See the screenshot below).

Mikel Amigot | IBL News (San Diego)

The new standard of LTI 1.3 and LTI Advantage is here.

These two open industry standards by IMS Global provide secure connections between learning platforms and the digital edtech ecosystem.

On May 15, the IMS Global Learning Consortium, specializing in edtech interoperability, announced the availability of Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) version 1.3, a significant update to the core standard, along with three new services that comprise LTI Advantage.

This technology, which enables interoperability of grades and assignments and other data transfer, was in the center of the conversation of those of us who attended the Learning Impact Leadership Institute this week in San Diego, around six hundred professionals in total.

There are some early adopter LMS’s and portals achieving IMS certification, including Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas, Sakai, Cengage, Tsugi, Kaltura, McGraw-Hill and VitalSource. They were all prominently featured during the conference [see the picture above].

LTI Advantage, built on LTI 1.3, deep links and enhances the integration by provisioning usernames and roles, and exchanging the assignments and grades.

During the conference several LTI Advantage bootcamp sessions took place.

Participants saw demonstrations, were immersed about Caliper Analytics and proctoring specifications, and learned how to migrate LTI 1.x implementations to LTI Advantage.

LTI has long been the gold standard in interoperability for edtech, enabling secure plug-and-play integration of learning systems.

Dr. Charles Severance, who invented this tool, told IBL News that LTI 1.3 is making a real difference and LMSs without it could be out of the market.

Many attendees showed their excitement around the new standards and mentioned the alignment between K12/Higher Education and the industry.

An example was Terry O’Heron, Director of Operations at Penn State University, who highlighted how LTI and open standards expedited the integration process at his institution, which uses CanvasLMS.

 

 

[IBL News was one of the three media sponsors of the 2019 Learning Impact Leadership Institute Conference]

 

Mikel Amigot | IBL News

Sebastian Thrun, Founder and CEO at Udacity, is not shy when he claims, in a recent post, that his company will become the “University of Silicon Valley”. “Every student will now have technical mentors, expert reviewers, career coaches, and personalized learning plans on their side, in every Nanodegree program,” he writes before welcoming everyone “to the future of e-learning”.

Class Central criticized Sebastián Thrun’s missteps with its restructuring plan, initiated in late 2018, with three rounds of layoffs of 40% of its employees, and offices around the world closed or downscaled. In addition, Vishal Makhijani stepped down as CEO and the Founder stepped in at the company he created in 2012. The startup, with over $90 million in revenue, now employs 300 full-time equivalent employees and about 60 contractors.

Sebastian Thrun, 52-years old and born in Solingen, Germany, is a tough entrepreneur, who completed his Ph.D. in computer science and statistics in 1995 at the University of Bonn. He taught computer science at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford University and worked at Google as VP, founding Google X and Google’s self-driving car team. He led the development of the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2015 DARPA Grand Challenge. Thrun is also the CEO of Kitty Hawk Corp, a flying-car startup. He is known for his work on probabilistic algorithms for robotics. At the age of 39, he was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in DC.

He describes himself as “a scientist, educator, inventor, and entrepreneur”. What Sebastian Thrun doesn’t highlight, however, is the fact that he is running a company with the iron rod of a Wall-Street CEO –which isn’t that cool in elitist Academia. Instead, he claims that his “mission is to democratize education by providing lifelong learning to millions of students worldwide.”

A scientist whose company has achieved the status of a unicorn of $1 billion is certainly not an easy sell in higher education. Being a billionaire and a genius scientist only happens in a Hollywood play. And superheroes as Tony Stark in Iron Man, are fictitious.

What everyone we talked to agrees on is that Sebastian is a relentless innovator in online learning.

He is convinced that more support results in improved outcomes for students and helps them to find better jobs.

“Only 4% of students ever complete a MOOC. At present, our Nanodegree programs have a 34% graduation rate, thanks to the tireless efforts of the hard-charging Udacity team. When paired with our new personalized mentorship programs in past experiments, cohorts have commonly exceeded 60% graduation rates.” (…) “For our Nanodegree Plus pilot, an independent accounting firm verified that among our career-seeking and job-ready graduates, 84% found a new, better job within six months of graduation. And for that 84 %, the salaries went up, by an average of $24,000 per person. So much that on average, those students recouped their entire Udacity tuition fee in just three weeks.” (…) “No other online learning platform provides this level of end-to-end personalized mentorship.”

Along with tutoring and mentoring, another signature area of innovation at Udacity is credentialing.

Sebastian Thrun states that Udacity’s Nanodegree program –with 75,000 graduates and 200 industry partners– is “the new fourth degree”, beyond “the three common university degrees — the Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD.”

“The Nanodegree program is well on its way to becoming a de-facto standard for hiring and corporate training in the tech industry. This is in no small part because partners like Google, Amazon, Facebook, AT&T, IBM, Mercedes, and so many others help us develop our curricula, and hire our graduates. If Udacity was an actual university, we would be “accredited by industry.” Who would know better what it takes to get a job at your dream company than our own corporate partners?”

Grand statements. It would be interesting to know what Stanford University, and other elite schools and platforms like Coursera and edX think about all of this.

Mikel Amigot, Zoe Mackay | IBL News

Dr. Charles Severance, Clinical Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and world’s #1 Python teacher, spoke with IBL News about OPMs and UMs upcoming online MOOC-based degrees.

Online program management (OPM) companies are on the rise, but in Severance’s view, there are good OPMs and bad OPMs. “The best way to describe the difference between [them] is that good OPMs take less of your money than the bad OPMs. The bad OPMs like to take more than 50% of the revenue.”

edX and Coursera are good OPMs, says Severance, “in that they bring a lot to the table, the market, they do things globally that no school will ever be able to do. The University of Michigan could never have the global reach, no matter how many people we hired, that we get by being part of edX and Coursera.”

This he sees as a value, where edX and Coursera have changed the world positively, which is worth investing in further.

As one of the most successful MOOC universities today, the University of Michigan is starting MOOC-based degrees with their own unique approach. The Online Masters in Applied Data Science will launch in the fall of 2019. It encompasses 36 credits, where every class is 1 credit and 4 weeks long. “We are envisioning [full online degrees] very differently,” he says, “it is it’s own disruptive idea.”

“The idea of an online MOOC-style degree fills a gap. Individual MOOCs are wonderful, specializations and micromasters are wonderful, but online full degrees are a completely different thing. And the key difference is the pace.”

“With actual online degrees, with online support, we can move you through material that after a year or two years, you are truly transformed and you truly know a lot of things you didn’t know before.”

 

The Future of UMs Online Degrees and How to Innovate

The Online Masters in Applied Data Science, coming in the fall of 2019, will be offered for the price of in-state tuition, regardless of where students live. Severance and his team would eventually like to lower that cost.

“That’s one of the things I like about Georgia Tech, they actually reduced the cost to reflect some of the reduce costs to produce.”

The University of Michigan School of Information aims to expand rapidly but start small, says Severance, “I think it could easily get to 600 students per year,” from their current 100-150.

“I’m seeing a pattern between how we’re doing this and how the open university does their teaching at scale and that is that they have a faculty that creates the content and then they have a smaller ratio of mentor faculty that stay close to the student and that scales up pretty well.”

Severance’s hope is that the teaching assistants will scale up nicely, with a ratio of 50-100 to 1, and the faculty with a ratio of 100-200 to 1. While the Online Masters in Applied Data Science is breaking the traditional mold of online degrees, he finds that MOOC platform vendors have not shown they listen when universities ask for new features.

“If you want to do something bold, you have to find an integration point like learning tools interoperability or xblocks and plug in what you’re going to do. It is folly to hope that OPM providers will change their platform to meet your needs.”

 

Watch the second part of the interview with Dr. Chuck Severance in the two videos below (the first part of the interview is here).

 

Part III

Part IV