These courses, taught by Microsoft experts, are now open for enrollment. Programming with C#, the widely-used programming language for.NET developers. Introduction to TypeScript, a design-time language that enables JavaScript programmers to manage projects on any platform. This course is co-authored by Anders Hejlsberg, creator of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, and TypeScript. Introduction to Bootstrap, an open-source UI framework created by Twitter to enable the creation of responsive, mobile-first web pages. Bootstrap has become a de facto standard for web design. Querying with Transact SQL, the structured query language for SQL servers. Building Cloud Apps with Microsoft Azure. This is part one of a three-course series. Introduction to Office 365 APIs. This course teaches common APIs to access Office 365 data from your applications. Windows PowerShell Fundamentals. This self-paced course has a fee of $200 because is offered as part of the edX Professional Education series. Microsoft has already developed an Xblock to enable course creators to embed Office Mix lectures into their edX courses. The software giant plans to continue investing on edX and Open edX ecosystem through new software developments.
Open edX doesn't natively support the SCORM standard, and the developers' community has been analyzing solutions without any clear outcomes for months. Nate Aune, founder of Appsembler.com, has described and suggested a solution by using a third party service called SCORM Cloud. This company wraps content that can be embedded into Open edX as an LTI component. For 3,000 registered students the price is $1,000/month. Here is a detailed guide on how to add SCORM packages to Open edX.
Wake-up call for schools who are not offering captions for their MOOC content. MIT and Harvard University are facing two federal class action lawsuits filed by the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) and four deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, claiming the universities failed to caption a vast array of online content, including MOOCs. The cases, filed in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, assert that MIT and Harvard violate the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act by denying deaf and hard of hearing people access to thousands of videos and audio tracks that each university makes publicly available for free. "This lawsuit is part of our battle for full access to online media content," explained Howard A. Rosenblum, NAD's Chief Executive Officer. (Watch above's video). The non-captioned content includes campus talks by President Barack Obama and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, educational videos made by MIT students for use by K-12 students, “self-help” talks, entire semesters’-worth of courses and regular podcasts such as the “HBR IdeaCast” by the Harvard Business Review. With this lawsuit the message to large universities is loud and clear: you should make accommodations for people with disabilities and online course material should be accessible. Entire groups of people cannot be excluded.
Through its new venture, McKinsey Academy, McKinsey & Co has started to offer a series of courses ("the McKinsey Management Program") designed to provide participants with specific skill-sets in business. Courses, taught by McKinsey practitioners and external business leaders, are designed to provide rising professionals with a practical, interactive and real-time learning experience. Many of the technical innovations showcased at the Open edX-powered McKinsey Academy platform will be integrated into edx.org. "McKinsey Academy is one of many important partners helping us improve our core platform and the learning experience for the entire edX community", explained edX. Some of them, like Polls and Surveys, are already being open-sourced. Learn about McKinsey Academy's view in the video above, filmed on November 2014 during the Open edX Conference in Cambridge.
EdX has set a target date for Birch's official release: Tuesday, February 24. David Baumgold, the edX engineer in charge, noted that "if a significant number of changes are added to the release candidate branch, a new release candidate will be created and the release date will be pushed back, to give people time to test the new release candidate". The "Birch" version is now on its RC3 (Release Candidate) phase. Bugs will continue to be fixed until the target date.
