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EdX Online Classroom Code Going Open Source, Uniting With Stanford
The edX project today announced that they are joining forces with Stanford and releasing the source to edX on June 1st. As part of the platform going Free, Stanford will be integrating features from their Open Source Class2Go project. From Stanford: "Mitchell said that Stanford's Class2Go platform development team has been in contact with the edX team for a number of months, and that much code is already synchronized so that the collaboration between the two platforms will be a smooth one. The advantage will then be 'a larger team building one strong open source platform, rather than two competing open source platforms, which we think will be more desirable for universities around the world,' Mitchell added."
One thing I noticed about edX, coursera, and a few others with similar aims, is that technically their websites seem very exclusive to the latest and snappiest version of any tool that might be used to try and view them.
I have frozen one browser, crashed another, trying to look at their contents without success yet.
Ok 'open' refers to the liberated character of the software, but how open is this at user-level? Did their designers never hear of backwards compatibility? Or do they just want to exclude access by anybody without the latest gizmos?
I've tried a couple of edX courses, and they are far better than expensive online offerings from other universities. Not only is the technology better, but so is the depth of instruction. (Too many universities seem to believe that an online course is a page for news, another page to submit assignments, and a forum.)
I'm using the edX system at SJSU for an electrical engineering class. I am amazed that this system cost millions to build, because it's broken in many, many ways. For example:
- Problems where you enter equations have no tips about which symbols are accepted and have no way to enter mathematical symbols (compare to MasteringPhysics which has this solved elegantly years ago) It takes a lot of blind guessing and checking to make the input formatted correctly because you have no idea what the system expects to see.
- Frequent typos and misspellings.
- Circuit simulator has unresponsive text boxes and the settings reset every single time you check an answer, which is frequently.
- Many links don't work and tech support is reluctant to fix anything. Some sections have had nearly every single tutorial link broken, and they still are broken months later.
- Many lectures fail to play back at speeds other than x1.0. Transcripts frequently have errors. Transcripts can't show mathematical symbols or subscripts/superscripts, which are used all the time for an EE course The YouTube based video player doesn't remember volume settings between videos (they are _loud_). Videos are at a low resolution even if you choose a higher one.
- Homework and labs sometimes and sometimes do not have positive confirmation of answers being submitted. Clearly they developed it one way, changed it later, and never went back to change the old forms. Very long multipart problems have a single check button so you have to go through and re-enter all your old correct answers along with the current problem you are working on.
- All discussion forms and collaborative options do not work. I've been told by the previous semester students that they never worked.
What I do see is a lot of effort on presentation. Scrolling lists, flashy UI graphics, etc. What they didn't put effort into was usability, making it load quickly on slow computers or machines with poor Internet access, etc. It looks great, it performs poorly.
The system has potential but it needs a LOT of work. Given the time and money put into edX, and how lackluster the results are, I don't see it maturing any time soon. I think the developers of it must have a complete disconnect with the students and instructors. It's very flashy, and that's about it.
As a student it's been nothing but trouble. In this day and age its surprising they'd roll out such a clearly beta product and expect people to use it.
I've been into the online teaching thing since it went mainstream, almost 2 years ago now. I've taken courses from all of the big online players, and "tasted" several others.
In terms of functionality, they're all pretty good. Where they fall down miserably is in presentation design and logistics.
The edX presentation emphasizes soft colors, rounded corners, italic serif fonts, and such. At the same time, small areas of information are buried within blankets of surrounding style.
For an example, check out the ongoing 802.x discussion forum, and note how much blank screen space there is. In order to get this much blank space, the presentation reduces the list of topics to 10 and hides it behind a slider. The underlying slider data is 15 topics (more or less, depending on the subject length) with the option to "load more" at the bottom.
The overall feel is that you're reading a newspaper through a greeting card with holes cut in the front. Most of the text is hidden, you have to move the card around the page to get all the information. Pretty, but time consuming.
The logistics are a bit uneven, but to be fair most of the players are experimenting with this right now. For the 802.x course ("Electricity and Magnetism" by Walter Lewin) , hour[ish]-long lectures are broken into segments, with a quick quiz between each segment.
It's impossible to get really "into" the lecture as one would get "into" an interesting movie. You'll watch a segment and it's fascinating, you want to see what happens next - Prof. Lewin is a great lecturer - and suddenly you have to stop, break out a calculator, do some calculations, check it twice, do some research on the net, enter the answer and hope you didn't typo a digit or something (the quizzes form part of your grade). Now back to the lecture, pick up where it left off.
Switching gears back-and-forth like this makes it hard to keep track of what's going on in the lecture - sometimes you get less than 5 minutes of watching before you have to stop and calculate some result. The system won't let you go to the next lecture without answering the quiz, and you are scored on the first try. You can't preview the lectures to get an overview, and you can't download them for offline viewing (there are work-arounds though).
Maybe in a couple of years these aspects will be more polished and useful. Throwing the code out as open source will only help, because other players can try different approaches and perhaps better methods of presentation.