Google is joining the Open edX platform

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2013/09/we-are-joining-open-edx-platform.html#!/2013/09/we-are-joining-open-edx-platform.html

by RougeFemme • 13 years ago

129 20 13 years ago

googleresearch.blogspot.com

byoung23• 13 years ago

As a developer, I have the know-how to create a course with Google's Course Builder or with edX, but are there any tools for creating MOOCs that are as easy to use as, say, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook? I think there is a lot of room for easier tools that don't require expertise with AppEngine or VirtualBox as Course Builder and edX do. Teachers should be able to focus on the teaching part, not the programming part.

jontas3• 13 years ago

It hasn't been released yet (still in development), but that is exactly what my employer (Knewton) is working on. It is still mostly under-wraps, but you can sign up to stay informed here:

http://learn.knewton.com/join

byoung23• 13 years ago

I'm guessing it won't be free?

unreal37• 13 years ago

Thanks for the link. Am very interested in this space.

lcbiazon• 13 years ago

The guys from 'Learning Creative Learning'[1] course argue that you don't need anything besides P2PU, youtube, wikis, gdocs and etc. to have one of those courses.

From their about page:

"Check out our shiny new platform

Actually, don’t, because we didn’t build a shiny new platform. Our platform is the web and we like things distributed and open. We also wanted to create a model that is easy to replicate for anyone. We use off-the-shelf Google+ tools, like Hangouts and Google+ communities; and open source software like the Mechanical MOOC (github). You have no excuse not to build a course like this yourself!"

[1] http://learn.media.mit.edu

wbillingsley• 13 years ago

Impressory -- which I happen to be working on at NICTA -- only requires you to be able to post and tag.

It has a few other goals -- it supports live interaction in-class as well as online, social content, and is part of a push towards disaggregation and content re-use. It's also much smaller and easier to set up if you want to run your own server than edX's software.

It's a work-in-progress, though it is live on a course at The University of Queensland. Though that is an on-campus course rather than a MOOC. This iteration of the course is, anyway ;)

At the moment, Impressory only deals with the content and interaction side, not assessment and marking. Though that will follow. We figured that lecturers tend to have more freedom in how they do content delivery than in how they do assessment, so social content and live interaction would be a better starting point than assignments and marking.

(Initially at UQ, we created a separate tool, Assessory, for group based peer critiques in the course. But we only even started using that ourselves on Monday.)

Our UQ course is up on a server at http://impressory.com

Though we're not running that as a public service yet -- it's very alpha -- we are interested in early adopters trying it out. But please ask first.

Docs (very incomplete) for Impressory are going up at http://impressory.github.io

Code (essentially an alpha) is at http://github.com/impressory/impressory

Part of the aim of this is that whereas Open edX is something rather large that only institutions with significant IT teams would run, this is something that it's viable for you to run yourselves, on your own server. WordPress to their Blogger, if you like.

The software is approved for release under the MIT licence. The licence file will be pushed shortly. Contributions are very welcome indeed. You've just met the development team ;)

ngoel36• 13 years ago

This is a goal that we're striving towards at Bitcast (http://www.bitcast.io). Of course, we don't have a full-blown course editor as of yet, but we've been initially focused on video-based courses targeted towards developers.

"Teachers should be able to focus on the teaching part, not the programming part." This resonates with us deeply, and it's one of the top pain points we've heard from teachers. Rudimentary platforms such as YouTube or blogging sites are not enough to effectively teach (and/or monetize content if desired).

I personally believe that this space will explode over the next 10 years as education continues to move online and the college loan bubble begins to burst.

gtaylor• 13 years ago

Check out Pathwright - http://www.pathwright.com. We handle the boring technical details, student registration/billing, and other drudgery, leaving you to worry about your content.

A few examples of the platform in action:

* http://lpg.pathwright.com * http://connect.ligonier.org * http://newjournalism.towknight.org/

johnhess• 13 years ago

There are. edX has an authoring tool called Studio. It's part of their open source platform, usually hosted right alongside their LMS, and pretty straightforward for non-technical users. Of course, the farther you go into building custom problem types (e.g. an autograder to run on student-submitted code), the harder it is to do things in that basic wysiwyg interface. Still, it's very powerful and opens up all the basics (video, text, simple questions) plus some very rich experiences like peer and ML grading.

The original courses that edX hosted were authored in a rather tricky XML format. Authoring and QA in that system was time consuming for developers and borderline impossible for non-technical users.

martindale• 13 years ago

This is the exact space that we're building Coursefork [1] in. We'll be launching in the coming weeks, but have been iterating heavily with a few hundred educators and engineers alike in our private alpha.

I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to use this comment as a reference in the future to further back our "this is something people want" story. I couldn't have written anything better myself.

http://coursefork.org

brackin• 13 years ago

http://www.zaption.com does some of this

dylanpyle• 13 years ago

We're working on that problem at Versal (http://versal.com)

peter-fogg• 13 years ago

edX's Github repo, for those interested: https://github.com/edx/

lebronj• 13 years ago

It's very comforting to see how the MOOC space is growing and garnering a lot of attention. I've always been one to prefer to learn on my own and do research so it's great to see a lot of these tools popping up. I wish I had these in college!

NamTaf2• 13 years ago

Hell yes, edX is the best-designed of the lot of them so I'm glad Google's chosen to throw their lot in with them. It puts Coursera to shame, for sure.

ethanazir• 13 years ago

My impression is that the edX codebase is not so good; google intends to fix that.

NamTaf2• 13 years ago

Clarification: Best-designed from an end-user UI standpoint. I agree that the code is probably pretty bad, given that it slows to a grinding crawl when it's nearing the due date of a big assignment for a subject. Page load times tend to skyrocket and everything bogs down.

I have a feeling that those sorts of things can be optimised though. On the other hand, the UI is more concrete, because it's what people are used to.

Google is joining the Open edX platform

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