ExtensionEngine Blog

We believe that organizations with a mission to do great things, things that really matter, can advance their strategy and mission through learning. But we think most learning, especially online learning, fails at this. It’s boring. It doesn’t stick. It’s antiquated. It’s hard. It all looks the same.  

We're excited to sponsor the 2016 Open edX Conference at Stanford University from June  14-16.

On Tuesday, Inside Higher Ed published an article discussing the impact of rising discount rates across higher education institutions. The article hinges on the data shown in the chart below. It indicates discount rates now average 48.6% for first-time freshman and 42.5% for all undergraduates. These rates are at all time highs.

Higher education institutions, corporations, and non-profits are all investing heavily in online education. In fact, the online program management sector alone, the industry for providing services to enable online education (e.g., student retention, enrollment management, online learning delivery and student support services) is growing at an estimated 35% annual rate and is expected to be a $1.5+ billion domestic market in 2015.

In a previous post, I outline what it takes for an organization to move beyond the filmed movie stage of online learning to the point at which it is creating distinctive online learning experiences. To quote from that article: An online university class should not be the educational equivalent of a filmed play. It should deeply integrate new technologies for …

One of the things we think a lot about at ExtensionEngine is creating new and improved mechanisms for authentic assessments in online learning. Traditionally, online learning hasn’t done authentic assessment well due to limited faculty time, costs, and the limitations of machine grading. We are proposing a Microsoft Office Mix xBlock for Open edX (and eventually edX itself) that would address these limitations and, thus, increase the ease of deploying such assessments.

Evolution of film making vis a vis online learning

Many early movies were simply filmed plays. Early producers simply applied a new technology to an existing cultural construct. The excitement, lasting for a short period of time, was the simple act of watching a play …

When I was a professor (not all that long ago), designing a class was not much more complicated than “figure out what you want to teach, and then talk about that and give an exam.” Moving a course online within an online or hybrid program requires, shall we say, a bit more insight and planning. To give you …

By now we have all heard of edX—one of the major organizations who make MOOCs available to anyone who wants to take them. Courses on edX run on a codebase that is highly related to that of its two other platforms, one called edX Edge and the other—an open source version of the codebase—called Open edX.

We help organizations create online learning experiences with no headaches and no revenue sharing. We are not an OPM provider (such as 2U) because we are not in the business of running your admissions program or sharing your revenue...but we do make your visions of an amazing online program …