ExtensionEngine Blog

Online teaching is not face-to-face teaching. It provides a different, not always superior and not always inferior, experience for teachers and learners. The sooner faculty, staff, and administration come to this opinion, the better off students will be.

Beyond a college’s faculty, its lifeblood is its student body. This is built, piece-by-piece, by a series of applicant pools that yield matriculated students. Thus, better applicant pools will, over time, result in a better student body.

For many colleges the point at which it differentiates itself is the quality of its faculty and its curriculum. Historically, the only way for a college to expose its alumni to its faculty was to get the alumni back to campus on homecoming weekend.

While the MOOC hype stage is definitely over, we have clearly moved into the productive stage where companies and higher ed are just quietly using the tool productively. Not only are MOOCs gaining in acceptance, the Open edX platform is a freely available open source learning platform for any organization who wants to create their own courses. What might you do with it?

As lead sponsor for the Open edX Conference 2015, we were thrilled at the turnout and the energy from such a diverse attendance — global attendance, higher ed & industry, IT consultants & internal IT staff. Clearly there is much excitement and activity around the Open edX platform.

At ExtensionEngine, we see lots of RFPs. MOOCs (and online classes, generally) are what we do, so we thought a few guidelines would help these organizations put together an RFP that covers what needs to be covered. Here are our top 10 recommendations …

Here at ExtensionEngine, we are quite excited about the Open edX platform, the community of developers and users, and our role in both. In case you don’t know, Open edX is a free and open source course management system (CMS) originally developed by edX as a joint venture between Harvard and MIT.

Earlier this week The EvoLLLution posted an interview with Furqan Nazeeri, a partner here at ExtensionEngine. The site describes itself as “an online newspaper exclusively for and by those who understand higher education best.”

Here is their summary of the article:

As we recently described, Open edX recently launched the Adaptive Learning Working Group. All of its members are tasked in the next couple of weeks to put together a set of use cases for adaptive learning within the Open edX platform (and, thus, at edX.org) …

Yesterday we had the kick-off meeting of the Open edX adaptive working group. Given the topic, the group was unsurprisingly large and diverse including participants from around the globe and from both academia and industry.