Chris Caplice, executive director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics [left on the picture], received the award for his work on the MicroMasters Program in Supply Chain Management, which includes five 13-week courses and mirrors what MIT does in on-campus classes. Caplice is praised for his “dedication to creating a high-quality learner experience both in the courses and beyond, and his work to ensure the value of the credential through a rigorous assessment.” Justin Reich, executive director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, was selected for his work on 11.154x (Launching Innovation in Schools). This six-week course encourages educators to apply the learning in a collaborative environment. The two instructors were selected from a pool of individuals who made significant contributions to the MITx MOOC coursework offered on edX.org in 2017. The prize, in its second year, is part of MIT's effort to encourage content developed with new methods and technologies intended to engage online learners. MIT’s Open Learning site
These courses follow the success of "Introduction to Computer Science from Harvard", better known as CS50, the largest course on Harvard campus and edX.org, with more than 1 million learners worldwide. Particularly interesting is the 13-week course on React for mobile apps, a popular framework chosen by Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb and SoundCloud as their preferred choice for development. Harvard University's Professor David J. Malan, a star teaching online computer science, will be the lead instructor in the three courses. He is the author of the entire series of CS50, which now includes seven courses.
Jupyter Notebook Viewer XBlock—from any public Jupyter Notebook (e.g., in a public repo on GitHub), pull content into a course learning sequence using only the URL, and optional start and end marks (any string from the first cell to include, and the first cell to exclude).This allows course authors to develop their course content as Jupyter Notebooks, and to build learning sequences reusing that content, without duplication. It also has the added benefit that the development of the material can be hosted on a version-controlled repository. (Open edX, itself, doesn't provide version control of course content.)[See IBL's post about the XBlock, and the code repository—the XBlock is open source under a BSD3 license.] Graded Jupyter Notebook XBlock—create an assignment using the nbgrader Jupyter extension, then insert a graded sub-section in Open edX that will deliver this assignment (as a download), auto-grade the student's uploaded solution, and record the student's score in the gradebook.The XBlock instantiates a Docker container with all the required dependencies, runs nbgrader on the student-uploaded notebook, and displays immediate feedback to the student in the form of a score table.[See IBL's post, and the code repository—the XBlock is open source under BSD3.] Prof. Barba has been teaching with Jupyter for the last five years. Her first open teaching module using Jupyter was "CFD Python", released in July 2013. In 2014, Barba developed and taught the first massive open online course (MOOC) at the George Washington University: "Practical Numerical Methods with Python." The course was written entirely as Jupyter Notebooks, and it was self-hosted on a custom Open edX site (where it amassed more than 8000 users over 3 years). Jupyter is a set of open-source tools for interactive and exploratory computing. At the center of them is the Jupyter Notebook, a document format for writing narratives that interleave multi-media content with executable code, using any of a set of available languages (of which Python is the most popular). The work presented at the conference is the brainchild of Prof. Lorena Barba, implemented by her tech partners at IBL Education. Lorena A. Barba group: Jupyter-based courses in Open edX: Authoring and grading with notebooks
“The launch of Michigan Online will make it easier for people on and off campus to navigate the rich and growing content that is Michigan,” said James Hilton, U-M vice provost for academic innovation. “Michigan Online further extends U-M’s ability to provide high-quality learning opportunities for learners at all levels,” added James DeVaney, U-M Associate Vice Provost for Academic Innovation. This portal offers users a chance to browse an extensive library of online experiences developed by faculty and instructional teams. Users can look for courses by subject, duration of the course and type. Course and teach-out subjects include biology and life sciences, arts and humanities, social sciences, business and finance, education and teacher training, physical science and engineering, data science, computer science, health and safety, and design. Michigan News: Online portal helps learners find U-M digital learning opportunities in one place
