[IIAB] [XSCE] Massive -Offline- Open Courses

[Sameer Verma]

On Jul 25, 2013 8:16 AM, "Anish Mangal" <anish at activitycentral.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 5:44 PM, Anish Mangal <anish at activitycentral.com>
wrote:
>>
>> FWIW, I played around with the edx source code a bit yesterday night,
and was able to get the edX studio (for course creation) and edX platform
(for students) up in a VM fairly easily... Some thoughts...
>>
>> * It looked like quite the resource hog. I'm not sure how many users can
a decently fast ARM support simultaneously.
>> * It uses youtube videos for the "video part". This is a blocker. I hope
we could find another way around this, but would require digging into the
codebase.
>> * Installing it on an XSCE would probably be a fairly complex endeavor
because of all the dependencies and configurations.
>>
>> OTOH
>> * "Better classroom integration" has been a big demand with XS and XO's
over the years. Teachers want the technology fit to their way of teaching
might find MOOCs beneficial.
>> * Teachers want easier content creation capabilities. (for reference,
easier than Moodle).

I think there's a fair but of myth around the "difficulty of moodle" in the
OLPC/Sugar context. I use moodle at work every semester, and it's still
hard to beat when it comes to learning management systems. Honestly, I
don't think projects and people have put a sincere effort into using moodle
beyond the usual XS admin. Sadly, this includes staff on OLPC's payroll as
well.

My opinion is that going the edx route will only satisfy the "not invented
here" problem.

Sameer

The edX platform is pretty intuitive when it comes to that (and much more
dynamic).
>> * Anyone who's used edX before will know that it's pretty awesome at
fostering collaboration, discussion, and not just dumb video delivery. (and
it's getting better at it day by day).
>>
>> So,
>> * Need a careful analysis of whether edX can really run on low power,
ARM servers (and how many users can the realistically support).
>> * Need a rough analysis of how much work would it be to install it on an
XSCE. Can we get around the youtube issue.
>> * I feel the value being added by having such a platform justifies
atleast a reasonable effort to find the answers to the above two questions.
>> * If anyone wants to tag along in this adventure, please let me know! :-)
>
> * I didn't actually test whether the portal runs well on an XO-1/1.5/1.75
(as a client).. oops... will do that today.
>>
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Anish
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 4, 2013 at 12:19 AM, Sameer Verma <sverma at sfsu.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jul 3, 2013 at 10:33 AM, Braddock Gaskill <braddock at braddock.com>
wrote:
>>> >
>>> >> On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 6:19 PM, Seth Woodworth <seth at sethish.com>
wrote:
>>> >>> If the decision is non-constructivist or do it all yourself, I
would go
>>> >>> with non-constructivist curriculum.
>>> >
>>> > I am very interested in bulk distribution of online course material
with
>>> > Internet-in-a-Box, in addition to the 4,000 Khan Academy videos we
already
>>> > provide.
>>> >
>>> > The Internet-in-a-Box project is focused on useful resource curation
and
>>> > distribution and not collaborative or constructivist activities.  If
our
>>> > distribution of bulk materials can be combined with, for example, a
School
>>> > Server module which allows a more interactive experience with the
course
>>> > material that would suit us well.
>>> >
>>> > -braddock
>>> > http://internet-in-a-box.org
>>> >
>>> >
>>>
>>> For all the TED videos that we have in Bhagmalpur
>>> (http://bhagmalpur.wordpress.com), we used metaTED. Here's a
>>> description. http://www.olpcsf.org/node/120
>>>
>>> For IIAB, MP4 -> OGV may be optional, although most major browsers now
>>> play OGV (Theora codec) natively
>>> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video).
>>>
>>> cheers,
>>> Sameer
>>> --
>>> Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
>>> Professor, Information Systems
>>> San Francisco State University
>>> http://verma.sfsu.edu/
>>> http://commons.sfsu.edu/
>>> http://olpcsf.org/
>>> http://olpcjamaica.org.jm/
>>
>>
>
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