Group items tagged

"To better organize and direct the efforts of our open source community, and to ensure that every contribution gets handled appropriately, edX is forming the Open edX team. This team will always have at least one person who is employed by edX (the company), but may also contain individuals who work on the edX codebase without working for edX the company."

Excerpt: "Now Stanford is looking to reclaim some leadership in the MOOC movement from the private companies down the street. For some of its offerings it has started using Open edX, the open-source platform developed by edX, an East Coast nonprofit provider of MOOCs. And Stanford is marshaling its resources and brainpower to improve its own online infrastructure. In doing so, the university is putting its weight behind an open-source alternative that could help others develop MOOCs independently of proprietary companies."

But... I understood that Open edX does not exist yet? I thought Open edX was the result of the marriage of (the currently only betrothed) edX and Course Builder. I suspect this is just sloppy journalism, but if Stanford has fast track access to Open edX, can we get it too? Something to check with Michel?

Needs keeping an eye on, as much as anything else in view of Coursebuilder/EdX collaboration points made by Peter Norvig during telco in April.

The edX open source platform software is now publicly available on GitHub.

Just saving this to log the commitment "In the future, we will provide an upgrade path to Open edX and MOOC.org from Course Builder"

"In the future, we will provide support for users of the most recent version of Course Builder to import their courses into the Open edX or MOOC.org format. If you aren't running the latest version of Course Builder, we advise that you upgrade in order to align with Google App Engine updates."

As an interview this is a bit of a thin brew, but it is worth at least scan reading.

I think this is a cannier- than-many assessment of the MOOC platform situation.

Short article hinting at the broader gameplan behind/beyond Open edX

"This document captures edX's product direction, as we see it today. As things get closer up and more concrete, we'll add more detail, link to specs. We try to describe the roadmap in terms of the problems that we'll be trying to solve, instead of just in terms of features that implement particular solutions. "

Philip Guo presents preliminary research about video usage in some edX MOOCs. Strong evidence for keeping them short.

My instinct is to beware of research findings that purport to be universal and context-independent. But since the context here is MOOCs, broadly defined, this research on the optimal length of instructional videos may be relevant to us.

I hadn't come across OpenMOOC before, though it seems to have been around for at least a year. Not an alternative for us, but a model to compare against our open...?

Ufi Trust Trustee comments on the emerging MOOC provider landscape.

This is a long shot, but might the IMF want to encourage some of its learners with limited maths competence/confiden to do our course first?

This piece by Keith Devlin and this one by distance learning stalwart Terry Anderson http://terrya.edublogs.org/2013/11/19/all-moocs-dont-work-for-all-students-are-you-surprised/ between them provide the most constructive and well-reasoned reactions to Udacity's recent change of tack. Alex Usher's "Udacity has left the building": http://higheredstrategy.com/udacity-has-left-the-building/ is also worth reading, though I think he considerably underestimates Coursera's long term profit-making prospects.