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Effective use of Video in your Open edX® Courses

6/25/2016

Our client Teach for India was featured at the Open edX® Platform conference at Stanford University in June 2016 as an example of effective video usage in an Open edX® Platform course.

The speaker uses an instructional video from Teach for India as an example of effective video content in courseware. The video itself was shot on-site in India, in the same environment where teacher training is carried out. The passionate teacher discussing her teaching method successfully conveys the message, assisted with synchronized captions as the speaker in the video is making their point.

Subtitles help comprehend the content with ambient noise in the environment. The conference speaker also mentions how the Youtube caption feature can be accessible to people who speak different languages in different parts of the world.

Interestingly, some of these techniques are stated to be as effective as possible with just plain video, before the conference speaker begins their segment on Virtual Reality content for education.

You can register an account and see for yourself here.

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The Power of Open edX® Platform: Assessments

6/20/2016

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We all know the Open edX® Platform is powerful out-of-the box. Here's a list of assessments it comes built-in with, ready?

● Annotation Problem
● Calculator Tool
● Checkbox Problem
● Chemical Equation Problem
● Circuit Schematic Builder Problem
● Conditional Module
● Completion Tool
● Custom JavaScript Problem
● Drag and Drop Problem
● Dropdown Problem
● External Grader
● Full Screen Image Tool
● Gene Explorer Tool
● Google Calendar Tool
● Google Drive Files Tool
● Google Instant Hangout Tool Rich Diversity of Assessments
● Iframe Tool
● Image Mapped Input
● LTI Component
● Math Expression Input
● Molecule Editor Tool
● Molecule Viewer Tool
● Multiple Choice Problem
● Multiple Choice and Numerical Input Problem
● Numerical Input Problem
● Office Mix Tool
● Open Response Assessments
● Oppia Exploration Tool
● Peer Instruction Tool
● Periodic Table Tool
● Poll Tool
● Problem with Adaptive Hint
● Problem Written in LaTeX
● Protex Protein Builder Tool
● Qualtrics Survey Tool
● Randomized Content Blocks
● Recommender Tool
● Survey Tool
● Text Input Problem
● Word Cloud Tool
● Write-Your-Own-Grader Problem
● Zooming Image Tool
● MathJax

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Open edX® Platform 2016 Conference: Day 1 Run-down

6/15/2016

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Despite previous conferences being held in a New England autumn, The edX® Team decided to change things up with a decisive move to Stanford University in the sunny Bay Area. From June 14th to 17th, hundreds of innovators arrive in Palo Alto to discuss, innovate, and celebrate how far the Open edX® platform has progressed. Perpetual Learning was proud to be a Friend of the Open edX® platform conference sponsor, our second one running.

Anant Agarwal kicked off the conference, covering topics like how credentialing is evolving on edX®, from Course completion in the early days to the new trend of Micro Masters becoming the word of the day.

Anant also covered Academic Integrity tools, including virtual proctoring, a topic very close to Perpetual Learning as we’ve worked to enable proctoring on FunMOOC using ProctorU’s services.

He also recited an anecdote of how an Indian student Akshay Kulkarni recognized him on his trip to India, and had come up to Anant and thanked him for edX®, which he attributed as the main catalyst towards eventually landing a job at Microsoft.

Photo of slide on stage, excuse clarity

Following this, Jono Bacon, Director of Community at Github, keynoted on Building a Community Exoskeleton. He provided key insights and frameworks to help further develop and structure the Open edX® platform community, very timely as the Open edX® platform community is reaching a critical mass requiring some organized collaboration, which we are seeing with the adoption of tools like Slack. Jono rightly pointed out that achieving the underlying collaboration workflows is more critical than the tool used to solve this challenge.

Joel (Dev Manager), Mark (CTO) and Eddie (Chief Architect) from the edX team spoke about the state of Open edX® platform and Development and Architecture priorities and initiatives. The sheer number of (known) Open edX® platform sites out there is accelerating each month.

Photo of slide on stage, excuse clarity

Eddie presented a clean and structured multi-tiered representation of the Open edX® platform architecture, which was developed in time for the conference thanks to ‘Conference Driven Development’ as Eddie noted.

Lunch in the courtyard of the Lathrop Library was another highlight of the day, with the sun hitting the spot after the morning session indoors. While the selection of the food was quite delectable, our personal favorite was the lemon tart not to mention the supply of fresh lemonade through the sunny day.

We got back to attending several interesting sessions in the latter half of the day. Regis Behmo from Funmooc demystified the Open edX® platform source code in his session Open edX 101: A Source Code Review. Steven Burch from StanfordX spoke about dogfooding Open edX platform, with a few often over-looked and very pragmatic soft aspects of testing and building good software. The team from Applied Materials discussed the usability of Open edX® platform in a corporate environment and highlighted the gaps and how they’ve been able to work through them. We enjoyed particularly the talk from TokyoTech, who showed one of the best applications of edX insights as we gained truly deep insights into learner engagement.

There were several more engaging talks and ‘birds of a feather’ sessions, a more detailed run-down of the schedule here.

We ended the day sipping summer wine under the canopy of (Dogwood?) trees exchanging ideas, planning, dreaming. And with this just being day one, we can't wait to see what the rest of the event has in store.

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Effective use of Video in your Open edX® Courses

The Power of Open edX® Platform: Assessments

Open edX® Platform 2016 Conference: Day 1 Run-down

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