After reaching more than 500,000 students on its first course, "Intro to Linux", the Linux Foundation has announced the "Introduction to Cloud Infrastructure Technologies" MOOC for June 1, which will be also offered through edX.org. Registration is now open. Students may take the complete course at no cost, or add a verified certificate of completion for $99. Understanding cloud technologies tops the list of most important skills for any developer, sysadmin or emerging DevOps professional. "With with course anyone can begin learning the fundamentals of building and managing some of today's most pervasive software, giving professionals a strong position in the IT talent market," said Jim Zemlin, executive at The Linux Foundation. "Introduction to Cloud Infrastructure Technologies" will cover next-generation technologies like Docker, CoreOS, Kubernetes and OpenStack.
IBL Studios has released a new version of its IBL Campus iOS app, which is based on the codebase of the Open edX platform.
Educational apps are mostly games and classroom tools today. The largest student-oriented apps (Duolingo, Quizlet and PhotoMath) only serve a tiny part of students' needs, leaving huge potential for new entrants. "Smartphones can give learners superpowers so they can learn more things, more deeply, on their own." "If you’re building a social product, be thoughtful about whom students want to share with." "It’s clear that there are billions of people around the world who want to learn, and smart phones could go a long way in making learning more accessible." Google’s Primer app is a good example of an innovative app. — Download IBL Campus' iOS app to take courses online and offline!
edX announced an agreement with Kiron University, a crowdfunded, German online startup, to help Syrians and other refugees in Europe (59.5 million in 2015) access college courses and earn their degrees. Under this arrangement, to be started in April 2016, Kiron will add 300 edX courses to its learning platform and edX will issue free verified certificates for specific courses that can translate to college credit with Kiron's university campus partners. Participating universities include edX partner RWTH Aachen University, German universities of applied sciences and other European and American colleges.
Deploying Insights Analytics on Open edX is an extremely complicated issue. Several teams within edX and the consultancy OpenCraft have started a collaboration "to address some of the pain points around Insights Analytics setup, deployment, maintenance, and deployment". Plans have been outlined on this Google document. This is a summary of all of the difficulties from the Analytics Team: Maintaining jobs on the scheduler is a highly manual and rather difficult process Jobs fail periodically, we should identify all common causes and resolve them Schema changes are very painful (see the process above) The AWS configuration is rather complex and difficult to replicate The pipeline should be installed like every other component in the edX infrastructure. Currently it is not. We should seriously consider deprecating edx-analytics-configuration and just merging it into the edx/configuration monolith. The analyticstack (devstack) lags behind quite a bit and takes some manual intervention to generate new versions of. It also doesn’t support Elasticsearch 1.5, which is used by currently-in-development features in Insights. We’d like to move this into Docker. Centralize event collection. We should probably be using Kafka or something similar. Non-AWS configuration is rather complex and difficult to setup, which is very painful for the open source community. From OpenCraft Lack of documentation Problems setting up edX Analytics Devstack (process took a long time, was impossible to complete for one team member; overall complexity of the stack made it difficult to distribute work to additional team members as needed) Problems with Hadoop version conflicts (fixed at the time via a couple of PRs: #128, #127), not really an issue anymore No (straightforward) way to run acceptance tests for edx-analytics-pipeline Using Analytics in production: Many steps required to install the stack (partly due to Ansible scripts making assumptions about, e.g., AWS regions) Many steps required to configure Jenkins (manually creating jobs and setting parameters/interval for each Analytics task, etc.) The number of PRs required to implement major changes slows work down (these types of changes often require PRs in four different repos; see "Dependencies" in this example) Not being able to merge PRs implementing work done for clients; having to maintain changes separately Deciding where to add different types of functionality (instructor dashboard vs. insights) was not straightforward in some cases – Related post: Insights Analytics installed for the first time at GW's Open edX instance. Success! Our #OpenEdX instance has a fully functional #analytics pipeline. Who else has come this far? @OpenEdX pic.twitter.com/meRTy9jJ4R — Lorena Barba (@LorenaABarba) December 3, 2015
