This session would review the University of Edinburgh’s strategy for online learning which has been developed over the past 5 years. The presentation reflects on the influence of successful online Master’s courses, Faculty engagement and the experience of growing MOOCS across 4 platforms. In order to make further progress we identify 7 key issues relating to learner behaviour in MOOCs which need to be resolved.
Principal and Vice-Chancellor, University of Edinburgh
Professor Sir Timothy O’Shea is currently Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh. He obtained a BSc in Mathematics and Experimental Psychology from Sussex and a PhD in Computer Based Learning from Leeds University. He then worked as a researcher in the Computer... Read More →
When running MOOCs, instructors, administrators, and designers alike often settle for shallow heuristics of success (such as retention rate) or overly specific data (such as percentage of learners who watch a certain video for a certain duration). Borrowing from the information sciences, learning sciences, and instructional design, UBC created a dashboard (VizIT) that focuses on day-to-day MOOC operations at the single- and multiple-course levels. VizIT emphasizes relationship between course structure and engagement, offers an intuitive understanding of learning in the course, and provides success metrics and actionable information.
The Open edX Insights Dashboard displays an ever-growing set of analytics data gleaned from learner activity in your courses. But what to do if you have data and reporting questions that the dashboard doesn't answer? In this talk, we will provide an overview of Insights and the Analytics pipeline, discuss the data that drives it. We'll present a use case from Harvard Kennedy School for their recent contributions to Insights and the Analytics pipeline. Finally, we'll discuss best practices for designing and contributing large changes to the Open edX platform.
How can you create digital learning that sticks? For online learning to yield tangible results, a number of elements need to be deployed in parallel and constantly adjusted throughout the learner’s journey. In this session we will examine the 7 key success factors which ensure that learners are not only engaged, but also transfer their learning into meaningful actions in their professional and personal contexts
What are the top ten mistakes people make when developing MOOCs? As a national platform which brings together courses from a wide range of academic institutions, Campus-IL has been able to identify the most common mistakes in MOOCs. In this highly practical session, attendees will learn how to avoid these errors and develop successful courses.
As the director of Israel’s national online education platform base on Open edX technology, Eran is nowadays establishing Israel’s MOOCs ecosystem with academia, government ministries and civil society. The establishment of the platform is an initiative of Israel’s National... Read More →
Researchers and course designers from Harvard, in partnership with Tutorgen, implemented an adaptive learning approach in the edX course, Super-Earths and Life. This session will discuss several technological and research components of our work: development of an LTI tool for adaptive sequencing of course components based on real-time activity, integrating resultant learner data with edX research data, and the general incorporation of adaptivity into course design. Results from our Super-Earths experiment will be highlighted in terms of learner outcomes and engagement.
Yigal's role as a Senior Research Scientist is providing day-to-day leadership and oversight of the VPAL research team, and conducting research on innovative approaches for learning and assessment. Adaptive Learning Open Source Initiative (ALOSI) and technology-enhanced assessments... Read More →
Presentation of a design solutions that improves competence and instigate real change in corporate online learning using the Open edX’s peer assessement and peer instruction.
IONISx is the online learning branch of IONIS Education Group, the leading private higher education group in France (20 schools, 23,000 students). IONISx began developing MOOCs in 2013. Starting in 2014, IONISx turned its focus to degree-granting programs, creating flipped classrooms for over 5,000 undergraduate engineering and business students and project-based learning for continuing education master’s degrees. Producing collaborative modular content in Open edX and carefully designing learning scenarios proved to be the keys to success. In our talk, we’ll look back on these experiences and show you some of the tools and methods we recommend.
“Lifelong Learner” is a concept embraced by most modern educational institutions and from the corporate sector - more and more enterprises encourage their employees to obtain new skills and knowledge. This talk will introduce how Open edX and edx.org are evolving to support increasing demand in this sector - the edx-enterprise (aka ENT) project.
Hosting an enterprise grade infrastructure for Open edX on Microsoft Azure is not only possible but straight forward and cost effective. Learn how the Microsoft Learning Engineering team achieved this, what thinking led to the design and configuration, and the resources and tools we're sharing with the community.
In this session we will introduce the project in which Fundación ONCE and UNED, the second largest university in Europe, have improved the accessibility of UNED’s Open edX Dogwood instance. One of the most relevant milestones of the project is the plan to contribute with the evidence-based findings back to the Open edX community.
Learning is an important attribute of the Microsoft culture and growth mindset and our business of learning supports our broader Microsoft mission by providing technical skills to enable every person to achieve more. Our work to support employee, partner and customer readiness and enable digital transformation leverages Open edX. We’ll share how we use Open edX to expand our reach through partners and to innovate Learning experiences for internal training for employees, for our partners and end customers.
This talk presents our findings about best practices for extending the use of Xblocks to accomplish certain goals in open edX courses while keeping your code clean, and maintainable through open edX releases.
We will go in deep into examples of extensions to the platform that use xblocks to create new course pages, that in turn access more than only the xblock scoped data. For example course grades and certificates information.
Type of questions this answers: what kind of info can I access in an xblock? what can I do when the info I want is not in the list? how to best cross the line in the xblock vs app discussion to access more data? requirements and consequences of crossing the line how to keep my codebase modular and extend the platform beyond the course content into the course pages? how to keep complicated extensions to the LMS through xblocks sane and easy to port to newer named releases?
I joined in this community in 2013, have attended all conferences since and have been a speaker in many of them. I Co founded eduNEXT one of the oldest service providers of professional Open edX services. I'm a beginner juggler, but every conference I become way better.
The LMS and Studio architecture has evolved in many ways over the last few years and we are actively developing its future.
We'll touch upon the evolution of: * our current technology-concerned monolith towards a business-centric monolith * django-independent xBlock runtimes to django-dependent xBlocks * decoupling of LMS and Studio via extensible Block Transformers * synchronous REST APIs to asynchronous message passing / batch processing * grades architecture * containerization of devstack
At the Open University we have taken an alternative approach and used Open edX to develop and deliver substantial, fully-online courses to students on degree programmes, rather than MOOCs. We have achieved a high degree of enthusiasm amongst academics for directly authoring in Open edX. This, in turn, has revolutionised the materials we have delivered to students and enhanced their learning experience.
I am the Senior Project Manager for an innovative technologies project at The Open University. I am responsible for reviewing our current working practices against how we work with the new technologies that we trial.
I believe change is constant and practice a systemic approach... Read More →
Academic at The Open University, UK. Passionate about preparing engaging and effective teaching materials. Experienced Earth scientist, with expertise in distance education, writing text books and leading and conducting teaching and scientific research projects. Led and authored the... Read More →
Learning Environments Specialist, The Open University
Dabbler newbie developer, game designer, composer, hat wearer.
Responsible for (amongst other things) training academic and support staff in using Open edX at the Open University in the UK as part of Project Minerva, a strategic project investigating new methods of curriculum... Read More →
Attendees will gain insight from leading Open edX practitioners about how they achieved their strategic business goals through innovative uses of the platform. This will include how they used Open edX to drive revenue, cost savings, customer engagement, and other goals.Panel discussion with organizations on the cutting edge of e-learning deployment exploring the Innovations they made to achieve strategic goals using Open edX. Panelists will provide:
Project description Top three lessons learned (success and failures) Strategic impact Revenue uplift Cost savings Other useful success metrics Projections for the next twelve months
I head up Customer Success for Appsembler. Let's talk about innovative ideas about how people are using Open edX to accomplish their strategic goals. Attendees will gain insight from leading Open edX practitioners about how they achieved their strategic business goals through innovative... Read More →
Teach First is a social enterprise registered as a charity which aims to address educational disadvantage in England and Wales. Using Open edX we have developed a series of courses to deliver professional development across the whole of the UK.
This is an update to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy specifically for an Open edX world which attempts to account for the new behaviours and actions emerging as technology advances and becomes more ubiquitous.
Bloom's Revised Taxonomy describes many traditional classroom practices, behaviours and actions, but does not account for the new processes and actions associated with advances in technology.
Vice President of Marketing and Communications, edX
Sasha Norkin is vice president of marketing and communications for edX, leading edX marketing initiatives and partnerships. Prior to joining edX, Sasha was vice president of marketing at Barnes and Noble for five years, launching the NOOK digital reading brand and responsible... Read More →
When the time comes to setup an Open edX deployment that needs to achieve 99.99% uptime, you're on your own. In this relatively high level talk, we'll discuss a variety of solutions for solving common operations problems when running a Highly Available Open edX deployment.
Our research demonstrates practical, scalable techniques that close persistence and completion gaps for marginalized learners by creating a psychologically welcoming learning environments. Specifically, we experimentally tested brief social psychological interventions in two MOOCs (total N = 3,451), which effectively closed persistence gaps by reducing social identity threat. These interventions require less than ten minutes for learners to complete and can be delivered at scale with high fidelity in almost any online learning environment.
Sr. Director, Evaluation & Research, Stanford University
Andy Saltarelli, PhD helps to establish and maintain campus-wide initiatives that evaluate the appropriate use of learning technologies, spur innovative methods of assessment and feedback, and leverage learning analytics for student success. Andy's disciplinary background is in educational... Read More →
University of Notre Dame recently announced their first online masters degree program and it will run on Open edX. ExtensionEngine, an edX partner, is customizing Open edX to create a branded experience that supports the program's pedagogy. Furqan Nazeeri, partner at ExtensionEngine, will discuss the program and how Open edX is being customized and deployed to support it.
Furqan Nazeeri is a Partner at ExtensionEngine, a consulting services firm that specializes in online education platform and course content development. With a team of over 200, Furqan has worked with universities, corporations and other learning organizations including Harvard... Read More →
In this talk, we would like to share our experience using Open edX for blended learning at MIT. We will talk about the tools we use to accomplish this, how we support our faculty, course teams, and students, and then present examples of innovations in teaching.
Is there any functionality or tool you are currently missing in Open edX or edX.org? This talk will show you how organizations using Open edX collaborate, to ensure the functionalities they need get developed and contributed to the project -- quickly, and at a fraction of the total development cost.
Xavier Antoviaque is an Open edX core contributor and board member of the Open edX technical committee (TOC). He is also the founder of OpenCraft, which is the largest contributing organization to Open edX besides edX/2U, as a provider of development and hosting services on the Open... Read More →
Hi there!
we @ Digital Israel (Israel's National Digital Bureau) are building Campus.gov.il, our national online learning platform (based on open edX).
The open edX con is a wonderful place to hear, learn and share ideas about the future of online education, roadmaps ,and discuss... Read More →
As the director of Israel’s national online education platform base on Open edX technology, Eran is nowadays establishing Israel’s MOOCs ecosystem with academia, government ministries and civil society. The establishment of the platform is an initiative of Israel’s National... Read More →
Here at Appsembler, my job is to make it easy for organizations to launch iPhone and Android applications for their course websites. Today, I’ll tell you a bit about what pieces we’ve simplified so far and what we’re doing next, to make it even easier.
In this session we will review the most recent functionality course authors can use to assess their learners. These features will enable course authors to add more rigor to their assessments, and help guard against dishonesty.
Topics include: - Peer Instruction - Drag and Drop - Prerequisite Subsections - Timed Exams - Content Libraries
Ben Piscopo is a learning designer at edX. He has over 10 years of experience in both academia and industry, building a diverse resume that includes lecturing at international colleges, authoring a series of innovative phonetic textbooks, and consulting for the British Council on... Read More →
We are creating a distribution of Open edX, for providing a hybrid learning experience, including an integrated facility for face-to-face video interaction between groups of learners and respective mentors. This distribution will be built on Open edX as the core, will incorporate configurable microsites, and will enhance assessment framework through XBlocks. This talk deals with extending and integrating the platform. It will benefit those attendees, who wish to offer such courses and wish to use the extended platform, with useful enhancements providing required features.
The distribution will contain: 1. Configurable Drupal Microsite to act as Open edX Frontend Configurable CMS for creating and modifying information and promotion pages for Open edX platform. Content Managers can configure, add, modify, view and delete information pages. It comes along with handbook with simple changes to Open edX settings to integrate with Drupal. It will mostly work independent of Open edX platform releases. 2. MIS Interface for Local Monitoring - Microsite In a hybrid offering, a local teacher/mentor wishes the learners to learn from both, the MOOC offering and the face-to-face interaction. An online interface where the mentor tags his/her cohort and views the progress of cohort members in the MOOC. The interface will contain information for course team on how various cohorts are progressing. These cohorts can be defined over and above the cohorts that exist in the Open edX courses. 3. Enhancement of assessment framework The assessment framework is being enhanced to meet the needs of those courses where assessment cannot be done through conventional means. These include cases requiring assessments of correct usage of tools and techniques, measurement of precision, unconventional modes of submission of assessment responses such as audio clips, videos or photographs, or customization of the assessment environment.
We will look at available approaches to theming Open edX sites and how the approaches have been changing over the history of Open edX. We will look at motivations, benefits, and drawbacks of each technique with a focus on the most recent ("comprehensive theming") approach.
In this session we will cover the newest Studio functionality that supports learner enagement. These features enable course authors to create focused discussion areas for learner collaboration, and to differentiate content for different audiences' needs through cohorts and content groups.
- Teams - Cohorts - Content Groups - Peer Instruction
Ben Piscopo is a learning designer at edX. He has over 10 years of experience in both academia and industry, building a diverse resume that includes lecturing at international colleges, authoring a series of innovative phonetic textbooks, and consulting for the British Council on... Read More →
