SEEK Australian Jobs Marketplace Acquires 50% of FutureLearn for $64M

FutureLearn, the fourth largest MOOC platform (after Coursera, edX, and Udacity) announced today, through its CEO Simon Nelson, that SEEK is taking 50 % of this educational portal for $64.6 million (£50 million). "This is big news for us. SEEK adds experience and expertise in the employment sector, a good fit for the education sector as more people look for a return on the time and money they invest in learning," stated Simon Nelson. "We will still be offering access to courses for free but the investment means we can do more, more quickly. For example, we’ll continue to invest to ensure our platform remains extremely user-friendly and enjoyable to use on mobile, desktop and tablet. We’ll also remain focused on the courses we bring you so look out for more courses in terms of new subject areas, more degrees, and bite-sized stackable courses for learners keen to develop a particular skill for the workplace." SEEK invested another $50 million on a minority stake in Coursera last week. • Press Release: The Open University secures £50M investment in social learning platform FutureLearn • IBL News: Coursera Raises an Additional $103 Million – Closer to an IPO?  

“Finding a Positive Synergy between MIT’s MOOCs and Learning on Campus”

"At the End of the Day, We Reflect the Voice of the Learner", Says Anant Agarwal

Coursera Raises an Additional $103 Million – Closer to an IPO?

Up-skilling for Today’s Workforce: a Perspective from Lisa Stephens, SUNY

Zoe Mackay, Mikel Amigot | IBL News Online learning provides the opportunity for lifelong education catered to career professions who want to stay up to date, she says, and for traditional universities to fill this space and provide these programs. “There are a lot of people who need to up-skill in order to stay current and competitive in the job market… I think there is a huge opportunity for continuing and professional education, and MicroMasters and stackable credentials in particular.” The SUNY system is a pioneer in open education resources (OER) production, such as their open textbook initiative, which she says leads to a “natural extension to then look at online education and opening up education in general.” SUNY is interested in “data science, providing degree-based and continuing education.” Recently, the SUNY system launched a pilot instance of Open edX at the University of Buffalo — “we are experimenting and we are learning.” In the process of experimenting with their pilot instance, Stephens finds that “there is an opportunity within [Open edX] for customization that we don’t see available to us in other platforms. Of course with that ability to be open and to be customized comes with it a lot of responsibility.”   Watch the full interview with Lisa Stephens in the video below.  

"Transparent AI Will Revolutionize Online Learning"

Zoe Mackay, Chris Dowhan | IBL News Walter Bender, the Chief Learning Architect at Sorcero and the founder of Sugar Labs and One Laptop One Child, shared with IBL News how transparent AI will revolutionize online learning following his talk at the Open edX conference last month in San Diego. The main goal, he posits, is “to leverage what makes us human to become part of the learning process.” His talk, “Beyond the Black Box: How Transparent AI can Transform Learning,” focused on the strides that Sorcero is making with AI and online learning. With his extensive experience in academia and accessible and open online education, he says his experiences were “a case study for transparency, for providing tools and a framework.” The natural extension from this was to switch gears and talk about AI, the “tool du jour in machine learning these days.” One of the largest issues with machine learning, says Bender, is that “it’s completely opaque. The people using these tools don't know how they work, they don't know the consequences of what they are doing and there is no way to really relate to these tools.” At Sorcero, they are taking a different approach, he says, by building “a hybrid AI that uses natural language processing in a much more structured way that is more similar to the way people understand the language… When it fails, it fails in a very human way…as opposed to having some strictly statistical model.” He exemplifies the benefits of Sorcero’s approach while discussing the tools they’ve built for learner’s to ask questions. The AI first attempts to understand the questions, which may include a back and forth between the learner. If the question can be answered by the AI, it will answer, but if it cannot, it will consult the subject matter expert. “One of the things that have happened repeatedly in our pilots is that the subject matter expert will say, ‘well why are they asking that?’ Well, they’re asking that because that’s the question that [the student] got, and that’s not what you taught them. So maybe you should think about teaching them that because that’s the kind of thing that they are bumping up against. So it is exposing these gaps. It’s providing some structure, feedback, and guidance to the SME as well in the mentoring process.” A great benefit, he adds, is that “it’s really easy to drop into Open edX and use outside of Open edX as well.” Watch the full interview with Walter Bender in the video below.     • Open edX Conference 2019 "Beyond the Black Box"

A 10-Year Contract Means Signing Away Your Digital Future, Says Extension Engine OPM

Starting in Online Learning: How Rochester Institute of Technology Navigates

View: Few Impactful AI Developments On Education At Scale

Harvard's Blockstore Technology Will Enable Personalized Learning on Open edX

Robert Lue, the Faculty Director and Principal investigator for LabXchange at Harvard has envisioned an advanced way to create personalized learning paths through community engagement on Open edX with the upcoming release of Blockstore. “The hope is that what Blockstore on Open edX will allow us to do is truly create an environment for learning that is extremely flexible,” he said. LabXchange, which launches in September 2019, “represents a real effort to see if we can move Open edX to the next stage of evolution where we’ll be able to create much more flexible learning experiences that can be personalized.” Personalized learning started with MOOCs, and while there are vast libraries of open educational resources, these learning assets are locked within specific learning sequences — or courses. This is the issue LabXchange wants to fix, by proposing a single dynamic repository called the Blockstore. “Instead of [learning assets] being locked into courses, they are broken up at the asset level — to individual videos, problems, text documents, HTML pages, etc,” which are meta-tagged and searchable. Lue shows how you will be able to build a new learning pathway, by utilizing individual learning assets, remixing them and creating customized content. “What we’ve done is created a new environment where content can be used in a variety of different ways…this allows, for the first time, the ability to remix it and issue it with a unique URL that let’s say a teacher can share with her class free of charge.” LabXchange has also created a learning network to share “what [people] have learned from,” which allows others to share the learning pathways that can be built, have personal profiles, and the ability to mentor. “The hope is that what Blockstore on Open edX will allow us to do is truly create an environment for learning that is extremely flexible, that will [allow people] to work with an entirely different set of data around how content is used and reused by instructors, by learners, how are things clustered, how that aligns with performance, how that aligns with building proposals, to solve problems and what sort of networks can now form on a platform that allows you to network through learning and trying to solve problems.” LabXchange will launch in September 2019, and Blockstore plans on being rolled out over the next two releases of Open edX. Watch the Robert Lue’s full talk at the Open edX conference in the video below.  

Open edX | April 2019: A Successful Conference, NVIDIA, MIT, UC San Diego, Ironwood…

  APRIL 2019 – NEWSLETTER #15 | More breaking news at IBL News   STRATEGY • A successful Open edX conference in San Diego. 2020’s will be in Portugal • edX says that it's committed to advance mass personalization • edX plans to change the economics of customer acquisition and retention in the OPM industry   COURSES • NVIDIA's DLI reaches 120,000 learners and launches new courses on Data Science • MIT's 'Intro to CS Using Python' on edX reaches 1.2 million enrollments • NYU Engineering offers a MicroMasters in Integrated Media on edX   SOFTWARE • The Open edX platform will allow accessing course content without registration • UC San Diego announces its Caliper Analytics integration with Open edX • The Open edX Ironwood version is out • Jupyter Cloud XBlock for Open edX via Google Colab   COMMUNITY • "We are moving towards a more inclusive, comprehensive Open edX community" • Open edX starts a series of podcasts interviewing leaders in online education   2019 UPCOMING EVENTS • Education Calendar – APRIL | MAY | JUNE | JULY | AUG – DEC 2019     This newsletter about Open edX is a monthly report compiled by the IBL News staff, in collaboration with IBL Education, a New York City-based company that builds AI analytics-driven, revenue-oriented learning ecosystems, and courses with Open edX and other educational software.