The State of Open edX

Meta

Date: April 27, 2022 10:00 am UTC+1, Auditorium

Presenters: Jenna Makowski • Edward Zarecor

• Guest Speaker: Sergiy (Last name?) from Raccoon Gang

tCRIL

• Dedicated to providing online and in-person learning

• Open edX is a large focus, tCRIL will be providing stewardship and encouraging engagement

• Technical Oversight Committee

• Open edX Core Contributors

  • 41 Core Contributor and counting

Laying Groundwork

• Platform - highway to AWS

• Content - infrastructure for content reuse and understanding

• Data

• Authoring

Ukraine - Raccoon Gang

• Government officials need education on Ukrainian language, students need to take assessments after finishing their high school career

• Open edX is the only reliable way to deliver solutions both at scale and customized to specific requirements

• Thousands of students who must take exam in a short 2 week period are able to do so with Open edX

• Using Starlink to deploy

• Supporting Raccoon Gang - Open edX

Q/A

• Do most students study from Ukraine?

  • 15% are studying from other countries in Europe

• What age groups are primarily served in Ukraine?

  • Primarily secondary schools, some universities do use Open edX

• Do we have a timeline for getting edX/2U into the core contributor program?

  • TBD, do not have a definitive timeline as of now

• In terms of roadmap, how are you encouraging users to contribute?

  • Join Product Working Group meeting!

The Future University: Pivot to Learner-Centricity

Meta

Date: April 27, 2022 11:00 am UTC+1, Auditorium

Presenters: Anant Agarwal

The Platform

• Most comprehensive learning platform in the work (We are the 5th education site in the world!)

• We want the personalization of 1-on-1 tutoring but at a large scale

  • Mass scale with mass individualized customization and personalization

  • We can do this be creating small groups of cohorts to still give the feeling of individualization

Lifelong Learning Path

• 2U has more degrees than any other platform in the world (200+)

  • They want to add MicroMasters to ALL of these

• 89% of MicroMasters learners have had a positive career advance (promotion, raise, job change)

How Covid has changed technology

• Since people have been online, it has become far more consumer centric

  • Movies → streaming, retail → delivery, doctor’s office → TeleHealth

• How do we change education?

• Four trends for learner-centric university

  • 1. Broad adoption of online, lifelong learning (74% of students prefer having online options)

    • Fun Fact: online education across time zones is accessed most commonly from 12pm-2am

  • 2. Growth of Modular, stackable learning

    • Some people want a masters, some people want a day long course

  • Shift to blended learning on campus

    • (person taking notes missed notes here because Anant posted a screenshot of our work in the presentation and I was excitedly slacking my team)

  • 4. Mapping learning to career-relevancy

    • 50% of employees will require reskilling by 2025

    • But 40% of workers could reskill in 6 months or less

• 70% of faculty think online learning is here to stay

Q/A

• Why are students not as excited as faculty about online learning?

  • Most online learning that students have been subjected to is not the same quality. “Death by Zoom”, no active learning with videos and exercises ''

• You talk a lot about stackable learning, what is your view on adaptive learning?

  • Big part of the future with personalized learning

  • Some math courses change path depending on the answers you give, Harvard developed tech that uses AI to track users project to recommend next courses/skills

  • Is it the answer to all our challenges? No, it does eliminate the team learning that can be very helpful to learners.

• What sort of affordance do you see for areas without consistent internet or electricity?

  • Studies that show in 2025 that every person will have access to data

  • Open edX in a box

• What kind of learner/instructor support are we looking for in the future?

  • Many teams are focused on writing training materials and training people as they come on the platform

  • 2U takes learner support to the next level, their bootcamps have an 80% completion rate

    • Mainly done with a large amount of individualized support with each learner

• How do you see AI play a role in the online learning world?

  • AI and ARVR and advances in cognitive science can take learning to the next learning

  • Already using it in edX, used machine learning for learner support,

    • Experimental: Discussion forums, personalized tutors, and virtual proctor system all using AI

• Given the “Death by Zoom” effect, what do you suggest to schools (maybe without a lot of funding) do to encourage teachers and professors?

  • Create short videos! Maybe look to the Green Brothers (John and Hank) for inspiration