The George Washington University

The George Washington University

“I’ve been working with IBL for four years now and they’ve been the greatest partners to try innovation with digital technologies in education. I’ve had the opportunity to recommend IBL to other people trying to do exciting projects with education. I will recommend them again because our projects are always on time, they’re always what we expect them to be, and they are a pleasure to work with as well.”

Lorena Barba, The George Washington University

Meet GWU.

GWU is praised as one of the best universities in the U.S. Lorena A. Barba, a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at GWU, is an advocate of open source education initiatives, and deployed the first Open edX course offering outside of edX and Stanford University.

The Challenge.

As an immense supporter of open source education, Barba aimed to expand her “Practical Numerical Methods with Python” course on a global scale, utilizing Open edX. Barba has been working with Jupyter, a set of open source tools for interactive and exploratory computing.

At the center of these is the Jupyter Notebook, a document format for writing narratives that interleave multi-media content with executable code, using any of a set of available languages (of which Python is the most popular).

The Solution.

Partnering with IBL Education, Barba’s course was released on the GWU Online learning ecosystem. Professor Barba and Miguel Amigot II, CTO of IBL Education, presented their integration of Jupyter to the Open edX platform at the Open edX Conference.

Two new edX extensions (xBlocks) were presented:one for pulling content into a course from any public Jupyter notebook (from its URL), and the other to integrate auto-graded assignments based on Jupyter notebooks, and the nbgrader Jupyter extension.

The Results.

Barba’s course has been exceptionally successful and utilized as a blended technique in her own classrooms at GWU. Her new course instance has amassed over 10k users.

One of the factors in choosing an Open edX learning ecosystem to host her courses was the significant reduction in cost compared to pricing models for a license on a standard learning platform.

By partnering with IBL Education and creating a personalized Open edX ecosystem, GWU owns their own platform and is in full control of their content.

Open edX platforms are tried and true, with over 26M learners and integrated education at scale. In terms of cost, it is negligible in comparison to a standard learning platform (less than 10%).