MicroBachelors Could Be Next for Higher Ed

The online education provider edX has developed 45 MicroMasters degrees, online programs that provide a pathway to admission into a full master’s program. Now, the company is turning its attention to MicroBachelors.

“Education in five to 10 years will become modular, will become omnichannel, and will become lifelong,” edX CEO Anant Agarwal said during a recent higher-ed innovation summit hosted by the U.S. Department of Education. “We are going to make it so. It’s not going to happen by itself, we’re going to make it happen. Modular is good because it can create new efficiencies and new scaling and new bundling of components.”

MicroBachelors are viewed as a low-cost, low-risk online way for students to start an undergraduate education. EdX, which won a $700,000 grant from the Lumina Foundation for the project, is already working with Arizona State University on its Global Freshman Academy, a precursor to MicroBachelors.

One issue that could provide an obstacle is mounting evidence that online education is actually detrimental for some students.

“Online education is still in its youth,” Susan Dynarski, professor of education, public policy, and economics at the University of Michigan, wrote in a column for The New York Times. “Many approaches are possible, and some may ultimately benefit students with deep and diverse needs. As of now, however, the evidence is clear. For advanced learnings, online classes are a terrific option, but academically challenged students need a classroom with a teacher’s support.”

edX Survey Charts MOOC Growth

At the end of last year, Isaac Chuang, senior associate dean of digital learning, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and professor of physics at MIT, and Andrew Ho, professor of education and chair of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning Research Committee at Harvard University, released one of the largest surveys of massive open online courses (MOOCs) to date. Their report, HarvardX and MITx: Four Years of Open Online Courses—Fall 2012-Summer 2016, draws on 290 courses, 245,000 certificates (both free and paid), 4.5 million participants, and 2.3 billion events logged online on edX, the MOOC platform established by Harvard and MIT.

The survey revealed that the typical participant in an edX MOOC is a 20something male from outside the U.S., who already has a bachelor’s degree and is taking the course for certification. The number of participants has grown steadily since edX launched in 2012, with more than 1,500 people registering for a course every day.

While the median number of participants in an edX course is about 7,900, only 500 end up becoming certified. The report noted that not all courses offer free certificates and not all participants sign up in pursuit of certification.

The complete report is available on publisher Elsevier's Social Science Research Network site.

MicroMasters Advance Careers, Learning

The nonprofit online learning provider edX launched a new category of master’s-level courses aimed at bridging the gap between higher education and the workplace. The new MicroMasters program offers credentials and a pathway to earn college credit.

The aim of the courses is to provide high-quality education from top universities to help students advance their career or work toward earning their master’s degree. Subjects in the program range from artificial intelligence to project management.

Certificates earned in the program represent a quarter to half of the requirements for a traditional master’s degree, according to a report in eCampus News. Textbook publisher Pearson is collaborating with edX on the program, offering MicroMasters courses at its learning centers and providing in-person support.

“As part of our mission to attract the best talent, we understand the importance of providing multiple pathways to degree programs,” said Sanjay Sarma, vice president for open learning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. “MicroMasters broadens our admissions pool and also allows learners to demonstrate their abilities through a series of online courses. All who pass earn a credential valued by the marketplace; those who excel may apply and complete their master’s with an additional semester’s residence.”

ASU, edX Team on Freshman MOOCs

Arizona State University and online learning platform edX are working together to offer massive open online courses (MOOCs) to cover an entire freshman curriculum. The Global Freshman Academy will launch this fall with three courses. Those will be increased by two courses per semester until reaching a full 12-course catalog.

Students will be able to participate in the classes for free, but required to pay a $45 identity-verification fee to gain credit. Students will be able to take proctored exams for credits, which will cost $200 each. The estimated cost to students in the program will be around $6,000 for a full year’s tuition.

The fees fund administrative services, including transcription assistance. ASU plans to add details in course descriptions about which classes will be helpful for certain majors.

“It is in our minds to eventually reduce tuition,” said Adrian Sanier, chief academic technology officer at ASU. “Once we are running at full volume, we believe we’ll be able to lower the cost to students.”

EdX, DOJ Reach Accessibility Agreement

A compliance review by the U.S. Department of Justice has led to an agreement with edX to make its massive open online courses (MOOCs) more accessible to people with disabilities. EdX agreed to make its website, mobile applications, and learning management system fully accessible within the next 18 months.

As part of the settlement, edX will provide guidance for course creators on best practices in creating accessible online courses, hire a web-accessibility coordinator, and develop a web-accessibility policy. The settlement acknowledges that edX has taken steps to improve access, but needs to do more.

“We were very aware in 2012 or so about the emergence of MOOCs and the importance, or the potential importance, that they offer to students who have distance barriers and cost barriers to getting good educational content,” Eve L. Hill, deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “And they offer a potentially really good avenue for students with disabilities.”

Details of what was wrong with the edX platform were not provided, but Hill told The Chronicle that common website accessibility problems include videos without captions and pop-up windows that can’t recognize screen-reader applications used by the visually impaired. 

Microsoft Offering edX Courses

One of stated the missions of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology. Now, the company Bill Gates founded, Microsoft, has partnered with the online learning initiative edX to offer courses focused on coding, cloud computing, and assessment.

The massive open online courses (MOOCs) taught by Microsoft experts on edX will help students understand front-end web development and programming language. Additional courses are being offered in cloud computing, data platforms, and Office 365.

The courses, offered for free at edx.org, will begin at the end of March. A verified certificate of completion is available for a fee.

EdX, Microsoft Partner on Office Mix

Office Mix is an application to the Microsoft Office platform that makes it easier for users to create PowerPoint presentations. EdX, the massive open online course (MOOC) provider, collaborated with Microsoft on the project, which it’s betting will make online learning more interactive for student and easier to use for instructors.

The initiative allows developers to create new learning courseware for the online learning platform. Office Mix includes a software development kit using the XBlock platform that allows instructors to include editable audio and video, hyperlinks, white board-style writing, animation, and clip art into lectures.

Through the app, course creators can embed programs into their presentations, such as quizzes and polls, and applications in support of concepts being taught. An analytics feature provides instructors with insight on how the course keeps students’ attention, allowing for quick changes when necessary.

The focus is on keeping things simple for teachers, letting them create lessons one slide at a time while giving them the ability to update as needed. In addition, the courses can be shared on the Office Mix website and published on edX.

“The motivation and action for the Office Mix project was that we believe online and blended learning will be big, and we want to create tools that will be used to enable new scenarios for students,” said Anoop Gupta, a Microsoft scientist who worked on the project.

Don't Count Out MOOCs Just Yet

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have gone through a period of being “The Next Big Thing” and weathered various degrees of criticism. Now, the concept may be ripe for a new era, according to Anant Agarwal, computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and CEO of the nonprofit MOOC platform edX.

The optimism is based, in part, on edX enrollment figures that have doubled over the past year, as well as studies that have shown students taking an MIT online physics class learned as effectively as students who took the traditional classroom course.

“We’ve been growing as others are throwing in the towel,” Agarwal told Wired.

As the model transforms, edX has found that traditional classroom work is beginning to take advantage of MOOCs. The content is now showing up in flipped-classroom settings to allow students to view it on their own while the teacher uses class time for hands-on work. EdX has even launched A/B testing so faculty can experiment with different teaching styles and compare student outcomes.

“It's how a professor can learn what’s working and what’s not working and have a process for improving the course,” Agarwal said.

New MOOCs Target High School Students

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have always been available to anyone interested enough to take them, but edX is working on new courses aimed at preparing high school students for college. The firm created 27 courses to get students ready to for college-level studies and ensure they're less likely to need remedial courses, according to a report in eSchool News.

The High School Initiative is designed to help students prepare for college and advance-placement exams and provide teachers with new course materials. All courses are free, but some have an option to earn a verification certificate for a fee.

Student progress will be tracked on a page that features a student’s overall score, along with assignments and scores. However, the courses are not eligible for high school credit since they are not yet endorsed by any accrediting agency and most states require that students be taught by a state-certified teacher.

Google, edX Partner on MOOC.org

Google is jumping onto the massive open online course (MOOC) bandwagon in a partnership with edX to create an open-source learning platform to be called mooc.org. The companies will work together to develop the Open edX learning platform for professors to use to conduct courses online and will make it available to students, teachers, institutions, businesses, and governments worldwide.

The partnership allows Google to expand on its Course Builder open-source platform for creating online courses that it launched last year. The site is expected to go live early next year.

Google also announced a partnership with Udacity to form the Open Education Alliance, a project focused on teaching skills needed to find jobs in the tech industry.

These partnerships could signal a Google move into the education market.

“We support the development of a diverse education ecosystem as learning expands in the online world,” Google Director of Research Dan Clancy wrote in a blog post. “Part of that means that educational institutions should easily be able to bring their content online and manage their relationships with their students. Our industry is in the early stages of MOOCs, and lots of experimentation is still needed to find the best way to meet the educational needs of the world. An open ecosystem with multiple players encourages rapid experimentation and innovation, and we applaud the work going on in this space today.”

Boston Teams with edX on BostonX

Development of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is taking a new direction with the creation of BostonX, a partnership between the City of Boston and edX to offer free online courses available at community colleges and libraries throughout the city.

The partnership would make MOOCs more available to residents of and visitors to Boston, providing courses for those who don’t have high-speed Internet connections or computers at home by creating mini campuses throughout the city. Mayor Thomas Menino is also hopeful BostonX will increase the city’s standing in the nation and world as a leader in education innovation.

“Higher education is at a point of transformation, and our city should be at the center of that,” Menino told Boston Magazine. “Colleges and universities are tackling the big questions of cost, of quality, and of how to make use of a wave of new technology. In Boston, we have always led in higher ed, and we should lead to its reimagination.”

Boston could be considered a logical starting point for the initiative because of the many colleges and universities already in and around the city, including Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both founding members of edX.

MOOCs Go Primetime on The Colbert Report

As president of edX, Anant Agarwal is something of an evangelist for massive open online courses (MOOCs). He recently took the message to Comedy Central with an appearance on The Colbert Report. Once onstage, host Stephen Colbert told him that if he owned a shoe store and Agarwal was an employee who wanted to give away product for free, “I would fire you and throw shoes at your head.”

EdX Opens Source Code to Entice Developers

EdX released the source code of its XBlock software in March. Now, the massive open online course (MOOC) consortium has made its full source code available to developers in an effort to quicken the pace of advances to the platform.

“We want contributors,” said Rob Rubin, vice president of engineering, in an Information Week article. “We’d welcome any company’s contributions and any people’s use of the edX platform. We’re in the very early days in the development of the technology to support learning and research about learning. Let’s all contribute to the open-source effort to be able to rapidly evolve that for the benefits of the student.”

EdX had planned to release the code later this year or early next year, but moved it up because some of its members wanted to contribute code. For instance, Stanford University had code for real-time chat and bulk e-mail ready to go, while the University of California contributed forum and automated grading system software.

The move could also lead to MOOCs being scaled down into SPOCs (small private online courses), according to an eCampus News report.

“We want to encourage that,” Rubin said. “We are committed to improving accessibility and we think that’s a great application.”

The early release also helps edX keep pace with competitors such as Coursera, which just announced a partnership with 10 university systems to offer free courses on its platform.

SJSU Launches Blended Learning Training Center

Last fall, San Jose State University became the first institution to try incorporating edX’s massive open online course (MOOC) content with the teaching concepts of a flipped classroom. Now, the university is opening its Center for Excellence in Adaptive and Blended Learning, a program to train faculty members in the California State University (CSU) system to use flipped learning in their classrooms.

The university also announced it will expand its edX pilot program to as many as 11 of the 23 schools in the CSU system. The effort is being driven, in part, by the completion rates from the pilot program started last fall. Nine of 10 students completed the blended engineering course offered, while just six of 10 finished the traditional course.

The center will show CSU faculty members how to run a flipped course, which allows students to watch online lectures and take quizzes outside of class. Classroom time is used to provide students with assistance on the material covered in the videos and homework.

“We’re placing the instructor front and foremost, rather than facing the blackboard [with their back to students],” edX President Anant Agarwal told eCampus News. “The real value is in helping students learn and helping students process information.”

The program is also seen as a possible way for universities in the state to speed up degree completion while keeping costs under control.

“These digital natives cannot be educated like we were educated,” said Lt. Gov. Gavin Newson during the SJSU press conference. “The old system has run its course, like the industrial age has run its course.”

EdX Introduces Automated Grading Software

The latest news from edX is that the massive open online course platform, founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, is introducing automated software that will grade essays and short answers from students on exams.

The assessment tool is free on the web to any institution that wants to use it. The process begins with human teachers grading 100 essays or essay questions, with the software using artificial intelligence to train itself to grade essays automatically.

The software assigns a grade depending on the scoring system started by the teacher. It can also provide feedback and allows the student to revise the work immediately for a better grade.

“There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” said Anant Agarwal, president of edX, in an article in The New York Times. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant feedback.”

Coursera and Udacity are also trying to develop automated assessment because of the value of instant feedback, while the Hewlett Foundation sponsored two $100,000 awards for improving software that grades essays. More than 150 teams competed for each prize, with one of the winners landing a job with edX to design its assessment software.

Of course, not everyone is so sure an automated grading system is a good thing. Les Perelman, a researcher at MIT, is among a group of educators who have drawn up a petition against the software. The group, called Professionals Against Machine Scoring of Student Essays in High-Stakes Assessment, has already collected nearly 2,000 signatures in opposition.

Part of the group’s statement says, “Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring. Computers cannot ‘read.’ They cannot measure the essentials of effective written communications: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy or evidence, good sense, ethical stances, convincing argument, meaningful organization, clarity, and veracity, among others.”

EdX Releases Its Source Code

EdX was launched to offer massive open online courses (MOOCs) to a worldwide audience at no cost. Now, anyone can develop independent course components on the edX platform.

The nonprofit, founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made the source code that support the edX course content available to all with the release of its XBlock SDK.

XBlocks are the application programming interface for combining edX courseware components, such as video players and learning sequences. The source code, available for download at github.com/edX/XBlock, allows developers to create collaborative learning tools and online laboratories by combining independent XBlocks.

“When we released our XBlock code last week, it represented the first step toward our vision of creating an open online learning platform that mirrors the collaborative philosophy of MOOCs themselves and leverages global community developers to deliver the world’s best and most accessible online learning experience,” Anant Agarwal, president of edX, told Technapex.  “We believe that the open source path is the right one to help us achieve that goal because it allows us to tap the brainpower of the entire world’s developers to constantly enhance and improve the edX platform.”

Making MOOCs Earn Their Keep

EdX may be a nonprofit organization, but it still has to pay its bills. It’s too early to tell exactly how the massive open online course (MOOC) provider which started with a $30 million investment from Harvard and MIT, will actually make money, but The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on the platform's plans to create revenue moving forward.

The first approach, called the university self-service model, will allow schools to use the edX platform for free as long as edX is paid a portion of the revenue any course generates for the institution. EdX would collect an upfront fee and then would receive a 50% cut of any revenue above the threshold.

In the second plan, called the edX-supported model, the company serves as a consultant and design partner for any course developed. EdX gets more upfront cash in this model, but allows the university to earn 70% of revenue the course generates after that. Schools can also choose a payment method on a course-by-course basis, according to the agreement.

The edX agreement also provides the company with all net profits from any third-party contract, such as book sales and proctoring services. EdX already has a deal with Pearson Vue to proctor MOOC examinations. It is also considering charging students for certification from those proctored exams, charging publishers for referring students to related textbooks, and for referring students to employment services.

Caesar Aims for Faster Feedback to MIT Students

An issue facing online education is students getting feedback on assignments and tests from instructors in a timely manner. The crowdsourcing system Caesar is providing a solution for some students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“The students in our programming courses write a lot of code and it takes a long time for a small staff of human graders to read and grade,” said MIT professor Rob Miller, who developed Caesar through the MIT computer science and artificial intelligence lab, in an article for eCampusNews. “The old way, it might take a few weeks to get feedback about what they’d written, and in that time they’ve written more programs—often repeating the same mistakes over and over.”

Caesar prioritizes submitted assignments and sends them to teaching assistants, course alumni, and computer-science students for review. Multiple reviewers are sent the assignments and all are able to offer comments and advice on the work, generally within three days and well before students have finished their next assignment.

The system is being expanded to other MIT programming courses and could be adopted by edX, the massive open online course platform founded by MIT and Harvard University. Miller also believes Caesar will work for more than just computer programming classes.

“The essential idea of crowdsourced review—dividing student work into smaller pieces and distributing those pieces to a mixed crowd of reviewers who comment on and discuss them—is likely to be applicable to many kinds of courses, including liberal arts, business, and social sciences, not just technical [courses],” he said. 

Good Start to Fall Semester for edX

The fall semester is off to a rousing start for edX.

Harvard University, which teamed with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to found the nonprofit online education start-up last spring, announced that about 100,000 students signed up for its first free online courses on computer science and an adaptation of the Harvard School of Public Health classes in epidemiology and biostatics.

Free online offerings at MIT and the University of California Berkeley, which joined the project over the summer, are attracting similar interest, according to edX President Anant Agarwal in an article in The Boston Globe. In fact, MIT attracted 155,000 students for a course in circuits and electronics last spring.

The platform uses discussion groups and forums to engage students, who can enroll in as many edX courses they like. Certificates of completion are available to those who show they have mastered the course.

“We view this as an incredible opportunity for us to ask deeper questions about how people learn and how we as a university help people to learn,” Harvard Provost Alan Garber said in The Globe article.

More good news for edX followed as Bloomberg reported that the University of Texas, Austin, plans to spend up to $5 million to join the venture.

“The UT System’s partnership with edX is great news for Texas and exactly the type of effort I hope more schools will consider as we aggressively pursue the goals of improving graduation rates and making a college education more accessible and affordable,” said Texas Gov. Rick Perry in the statement announcing the plan.