Saturday, April 06, 2013

Combined Course2go and edX platforms will lead to hosting services


When MIT announced the creation of edX, they promised to open source their MOOC teaching platform.  Last September, both Stanford and Google open sourced their MOOC platforms, Course2go and Course Builder.

Stanford and edX have announced that they are merging their platforms.  Stanford's Course2go is now in maintenance mode and its features will be moved to edX by June.  I wonder what Google plans to do.

This is good news -- it means schools will be able to offer MOOCs without using the services of a commercial firm like Udacity or Coursera.  A school or a system like the California State University could host MOOCs using the edX platform.

The next step will be hosted services open to any teacher or anyone else who wants to teach a class -- MOOC or other.  A thousand flowers will bloom.  How will this affect course management systems like Blackboard and Moodle?

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Update, May 30 2013

The Stanford/edX MOOC platform source code will be posted tomorrow.

We have a few hints: developers have the source code for the edX learning platform, including code for its Learning Management System Studio, a course authoring tool; xBlock, an application programming interface (API) for integrating third-party learning objects; and machine grading API's.

That will be the second major open source MOOC platform -- Google's Course Builder is already open source (http://bit.ly/ZmhRyy).

Will this lead to the democratization of MOOC and MOOC module development? Are you planning to test either of these platforms? Will Google or edX make hosted versions available at some point in the future? Will someone else?

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