That amount corresponds to 50% of the prize, which was granted at an award ceremony in Hong Kong, last December 10. Half of the $3.9M was in the form of a cash prize to the laureate (Mr. Agarwal), while the other was a project fund. "In the next three to five years, we want to utilize the proceeds to truly reimagine the undergraduate degree. We want to see anybody anywhere in the world to get undergraduate plus education," said Anant Agarwal during a conversation with Professor Larry Hedges, laureated also with the Yidan Prize, and Tom Blackwell, CEO at EM. [In the picture; also, see the video below]. Early this year, the edX organization started to analyze the viability of launching customizable digital bachelors' degrees, as IBL News reported. These credentials, registered with the name of "MicroBachelors", could be priced at $10,000. The MicroBachelors project, which started with a grant of $700,000 from the Lumina Foundation, mirrors MicroMasters’ successful initiative. The idea follows Anant Agarwal’s view of "education as a Lego." However, edX won't be the first MOOC platform to launch a Bachelor's degree. Coursera scored this achievement by releasing the Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of London earlier this year.
Project Jupyter reported today on its blog about this sudden breaking off, although it didn't disclose the cause. "We would like to thank the team at O’Reilly Media for partnering with us to offer JupyterCon 2017 and 2018. Their expertise in creating and managing complex events with hundreds of attendees was invaluable, and we learned a great deal from working with them," wrote. Project Jupyter management team is now organizing a committee to re-evaluate the situation and investigate different conference formats, including a lower-cost one, and explore new venues and locations. In addition to the annual conference, Jupyter has other local gatherings which will continue to proceed, such as Jupyter Days, Jupyter Community Workshops, and local code sprints and open studios.
Intended for thousands of working professionals with full-time jobs and family commitments who are unable to attend on-campus classes, this degree, offered at a tuition of less than $10,000, follows the groundbreaking online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS), and Online Master of Science in Analytics (OMS Analytics). Diploma, curriculum, content, rigor, and requirements are the same as the residential program. "It includes collaborative tools to enable learners to interact with each other, with their instructors, and with their course content, which is crucial to the online learner experience. The students build powerful learner communities and professional networks by collaborating on the official forum, as well as by using unofficial tools such as Slack or Google Forums." "These degrees offer more than content at-scale. They also offer networks at-scale that allow learners to build worldwide professional networks that they would not be able to build if they were in a traditional on-campus master’s program." "Our online degrees-at-scale can also open doors for new graduates that may normally be closed to them." Students in the on-campus M.S. in Cybersecurity are traditional graduate students, who recently completed an undergraduate degree, while the learners taking the OMS Cybersecurity are mainly working professionals. Ninety-seven percent of the applicants admitted to the OMS Cybersecurity program are already employed, and a third of them already have graduate degrees. They range from 20 years old to 72 years old and represent 27 countries. The majority of applicants come from the U.S. with a third of them coming from Georgia." "The main reason we’re able to offer this program at this price point is the massive online delivery technology that enables us to serve large numbers of qualified students from all over the world. Also, while there is no difference in the degree requirements or academic rigor between the on-campus and online degrees, we offer fewer elective choices in the OMS Cybersecurity to keep costs down. Another reason for the significantly reduced cost of the online degree is that online students don’t require the physical infrastructure and amenities needed by on-campus students." • Forbes: How Is Higher Ed Helping To Close The Global Knowledge Gap? • Georgia Tech: Online Master of Science in Cybersecurity • edX's Master's Degree in Cybersecurity
Dr. Charles Chen Yidan, Founder of the Yidan Prize, along with Mrs. Carrie Lam, the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, witnessed by 350 guests, presented the 2018 Yidan Prize for Education Development and Yidan Prize for Education Research, during a ceremony which took place on December 10. Anant Agarwal said: "We're really honored and fortunate to have won the Yidan Prize. We want to use the prize money to launch radical new efforts that would enable much younger learners, both at the late high school and college level, to get radically increased access and quality for their learning. edX today has 18 million students from every single country in the world, and I would love to see in the fullness of time, billions of students routinely accessing a quality education like this and education being affordable for everybody everywhere with a will to learn." Larry Hedges, renowned for his development of the statistical methods for meta-analysis (SMMS), said: "I am honored to be the Yidan Prize laureate and I'm going to use whatever I gain from this prize to try and increase the profile of evidence in education for the purposes of improving education. It's important that we avoid any mistakes that can be used to discredit education, to discredit evidence in education science, because there are people who would prefer to make policy decisions on the basis of preferences and superstitions and prejudices rather than on the basis of evidence." The Yidan Prize, the world's largest award in education, was established in 2016 by Chinese philanthropist and entrepreneur Charles Chen Yidan, a co-founder of Shenzhen-based giant Tencent. This year the prize saw around 1,000 nominations from over 92 countries. The Yidan Prize consists of two awards: the Yidan Prize for Education Research and the Yidan Prize for Education Development. The Yidan Prize Laureate receives a gold medal and a total sum of HK$30 million (around US$3.9 million). Half of this amount is in the form of a cash prize to the laureate, while the other half is a project fund, according to the official press release. To ensure transparency and sustainability, the prize is managed by Yidan Prize Foundation and governed by an independent trust with an endowment of HK$2.5 billion (around US$323 million). Corporate Announcements: • Asia One: Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Honors Two Outstanding Scholars for Their Contributions to Education Reform at Yidan Prize Award Presentation Ceremony • Asia Corporate News Network – ACN Newswire: Second Yidan Prize Summit Sets Forth Ideas for Future Over the weekend our CEO @agarwaledu accepted the @TheYidanPrize for Educational Development in Hong Kong. Thank you to Charles Chen Yidan and the Yidan Prize Foundation for this incredible recognition of @edXOnline and our work to advance access to education worldwide! pic.twitter.com/JJEuPmeMv0 — edX (@edXOnline) December 10, 2018
Sanjay Sarma, vice president for open learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the Board of Directors at the edX Consortium [in the picture], talks about it on an interview at edSurge. "Ninety-nine percent of our students will have seen the edX platform on campus regardless of whether they ever take it on edX because we have a private instance of edX on campus for our students. And what do professors do with it? They flip the classroom. They give instant feedback on exams. A lot of exams are going online." Mr. Sarma also talks about the need to smartly with data trove by doing intentional experiments. "So for example, I could be in a video and change my background to blue, and see if people like it more. That's an intentional experiment. But if I just take all the logs of this video, it's very hard for me to figure out whether people want blue." "When we started using edX, there was enthusiasm that somehow magic would fall out of the data. We did learn a lot. We learned, for example, the demographics. We learned about our users. We learned about their career choices. But it started plateauing some time ago. We stopped getting a lot of insights out of the data." • Edsurge: What College Professors Should Know About Learning Science
