Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eCampus News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

New edX MOOC portal to empower women

edX and Saudi Arabia collaborate on a new MOOC portal to empower women and the disadvantaged

online-learning-saudi-arabiaedX, a nonprofit online platform affiliated with Harvard and MIT, provides open source software for anyone in the world with an internet connection. The courses are free and many countries have adopted edX including China and France.

In November 2013, edX and the Queen Rania Foundation launched Edraak, the first massive open online course (MOOC) portal in Jordan to “open up a world of possibility for intellectually hungry Arab youth,” according to the Queen.

With a booming youth population and rising unemployment, edX is capitalizing on a growing interest in information and online media among Arabic speakers by launching a new initiative with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Labor. This new Arabic online learning platform aims to empower women and the disadvantaged with critical 21st century skills.…Read More

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University establishes flipped learning training center for faculty

Students in SJSU’s blended learning pilot program had a high completion rate.

San Jose State University, known as the public university serving Silicon Valley, will be home to a program that will train faculty members from across California in how to administer a blended course using a massive open online course (MOOC) platform.

SJSU, which last fall became the first institution to test incorporating edX’s online content into a campus-based course for credit, announced April 10 that the university would open a Center for Excellence in Adaptive and Blended Learning for educators from across the state interested in offering edX’s electrical engineering course next academic year.

The public announcement included details on an expansion of SJSU’s edX pilot program that will make the edX engineering class available to as many as 11 of the 23 California State University system schools, reaching thousands of students across the state.…Read More

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Colleges will soon have free access to the edX platform

MOOC advocates applauded edX’s decision to make its source code available to the public.

Colleges and Universities on June 1 will have access to the source code for what has been dubbed the “Linux of learning” after not-for-profit educational enterprise edX teamed up with Stanford University in making available a host of open-source online learning tools.

edX, launched by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), announced April 3 that programmers worldwide would have no-charge access to the web-based learning platform in June, as Stanford agreed to integrate parts of its Class2Go platform into edX.

The source code will eventually be available at https://github.com/edX.…Read More

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Opinion: Charging for knowledge is antiquated

Coursera, in less than six months, has enrolled 740,000 students.

Free universal knowledge is the most valuable resource in the world. Knowledge is an economic good that becomes more valuable as more people “consume” it.  The distribution of knowledge is in the process of transitioning from a scarce resource to a commodity.

The impact of this change upon the value of human capital in the world is nearly unimaginable. This change to free distribution of knowledge has the potential to dramatically improve lives and economies around the world. We are on the threshold of a global revolution in education that could make this one of the most exciting times in human history.

Sal Khan, founder and faculty of one of the Khan Academy, had a vision in 2009 of “educating the world.” With the Khan Academy now educating 1 million students a month, his vision is becoming a reality. This initiative has been followed by edX, the partnership of MIT and Harvard, which has a mission to educate 1 billion people.…Read More

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Experts: UVa.’s Coursera partnership far from an embrace of online learning

More than 680,000 students have taken a Coursera class.

The University of Virginia will make four of its courses available for free online in 2013 after the campus’s governing board last month cited a lack of web-based courses in its controversial ouster of President Teresa Sullivan.

But advocates for online education said the university’s partnership with for-profit internet learning site Coursersa—which announced partnerships with 12 universities July 17—should be seen as a tepid embrace of nontraditional courses, not as a momentous shift toward a new learning model.

UVa. will post courses in physics, history, and philosophy to Coursera, part of the massive open online course (MOOC) movement that includes other free educational websites like edX, Udacity, and the Khan Academy.…Read More

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