Competencies in Context #5: Increasing the Value of Certificates from LinkedIn Learning

By Daniel Hickey and Chris Andrews

The previous post in this series explored LinkedIn endorsements and recommendations. Chris and Dan used those features to locate a potential consultant with particular skills and considered recent refinements to those features. We also explore the new LinkedIn Learning site made possible by the acquisition of Lynda.com. In this post, we explore how endorsements and recommendations might help LinkedIn earn back the roughly $300,000 that they paid for each of Lynda.com's 5000 courses. 

The First Instance of Issuing Open Badges in Open edX

By James Willis and Dan Hickey

We are happy to announce that our collaboration to build the first instance of open digital badges in Open edX is a success. This week the group presented the first digital badges in Lorena Barba's MOOC at the Open edX conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This collaboration features the hard work of Lorena Barba and her team, IBL Studios, Achievery, and the CRLT at Indiana University.

Collaboration with Lorena Barba's Python MOOC and Open edX

By James Willis and Daniel Hickey

In this post, we discuss a new collaboration between Dr. Lorena Barba and her team at George Washington University, Open edX, IU's Center for Research on Learning and Technology, and IBL Studios. This collaboration will implement digital badges in Dr. Barba's new MOOC, "Practical Numerical Methods with Python."

xMOOC, cMOOC, DOCC or BOOC: What's in a name?

Tomorrow is the official start of the Videogames and Learning Coursera MOOC developed by Kurt Squire and Constance Steinkuehler at University of Wisconsin Madison.  In this post I compare the pros and cons of Coursera's more expository "xMOOC" format with the connectivist "cMOOC" format  advanced by Siemans and Downes and show how the the more modest "big" format of IU's Big Open Online Course is turning out to be a useful interim context for design-based research of hybrid formats for future massive courses that can exploit the advantages of these very different formats while minimizing the negatives.