The Open edX community has registered an increase of 77 % since October 2015 in the number of sites and 105 % in courses. Today there are more than 3,700 courses, 250 public sites and 5.5 million of learners, as Joel Barciauskas, Open edX community manager, revealed during the edX conference. "We are just getting started. We are seeing a world-wide accelerating adoption of the platform, a wider variety of organizations showing interest, and an ever larger scale problems being solved",  Mark Haseltine, CTO at edX, stated during the 2016 Open edX Conference at Stanford. "The Open edX platform goal is to be the standard for scalable delivery of educational content in order to foster education efforts worldwide, allow a broad array of organizations to participate, relieve burden of platform development on content providers, promote interoperability of courseware and encourage reuse of proven course models", Mr. Haseltine added.
By Michael Amigot MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are about to lose the M and O of their name and just be OCs or Online Courses. Courses intended for academic credit are the new trend, and in the edX universe we will see an explosion of offers, especially around the "MIT's Micro-Masters" idea. Those who successfully complete the MOOCs –or the OCs– with a verified certificate ($50 to $150 per course), will earn a Micro-Masters credential and be able to apply to master's programs on campus. The Micro-Masters credential will count as a semester's worth of work. Another turn is online courses as a professional development tool. Coursera has registered over 7.5 million enrollments in their sixty professional development-oriented courses. Overseas, FutureLearn has recently announced that students taking some of its MOOCs will be able to earn course credits toward degrees, MBAs and professional certifications. In this way, higher education will begin the unbundling process. All of it, in the U.S. and overseas, signals the end of the free MOOC model and the beginning of the freemium model, following the goal of bringing revenues to non-profit and for-profit educational organizations alike. As MIT's Prof. Dave Pritchard said last month on the MOOC Maker Workshop in Cambridge, MA, educational organizations consider that "it's time to recover some cash, by charging for certificates and developing branded degrees" (see his explanatory slide above).
This recently posted video from McKinsey Academy shows the features used by this organization within its heavily customized Open edX platform. Additionally, it gives a glimpse on how learners are equip with the skills and mindsets to achieve organizational impact.
The CS50x course from Harvard University –the most popular course on edX with over one million enrollments– will incorporate virtual reality this Fall 2016 in order to improve the student experience. See a sample above, click and drag to look around, or watch it with Google Cardboard or Samsung Gear. Experts say that virtual reality will transform online learning. The director of the VR lab at Stanford University, Professor Jeremy Bailenson explained it during a recent talk. https://youtu.be/JfbVg41mDV0
"Introduction to Programming with Java", developed by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) on edX.org under a Creative Commons license, has achieved the milestone of 200,000 learners –as his coordinator, Prof. Carlos Delgado Kloos, disclosed to IBL. This course, one of the ten most successful on edX.org, is divided into three five-week parts; the estimated time that learners need to dedicate is eight-to-twelve hours per week. It is designed to prepare learners for the Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science A exam. Java is one of the most-in-demand programming languages designed to work across multiple software platforms.
