Dear Larry,
Good to meet with Matthew today, who's now in Texas, soon to move to New Mexico, having moved from Sacramento CA with his wife not too long ago, - in getting on the same page about our developing edX & WUaS partnership, at some point to be signed.
While $350 per student per year is still the plan, and newly with prepayment, it seems not all of the 3,000 courses, or 2,500 courses in the edX spreadsheet, they say they offer are available to WUaS (see below, for example). With 2 prospective students' inquiries yesterday, to get the edX sign ups and grades for WUaS matriculated students, we'd have to prepay $10,000. For this amount, - and if we were initially to be able to get money from the federal government via Grants.gov - I think we'd need 30 students to make it worthwhile. 3 WUaS students taking edX courses cost us about $1,000 per year, so 30 students would cost us about $10,000; then we could access manually, as I understand it, their edX Dashboard for WUaS grades and signups. To integrate our emerging Learning Management program with the edX Dashboard, in an automated way, WUaS would have to prepay $50,000, so WUaS would need about 150 matriculating committed students. Other languages for edX courses (eg Spanish, Vietnamese) may be available on a limited time basis with their customer specialists.
Identity verification on their end consists of the student holding an ID from their country with their photo - doesn't have to be a governmental ID - up to the edX camera in their sign in process. WUaS could riff with and improve on this perhaps in our planned LMS, possibly in G Suite for Education in combination with our new WUAS Wikibase. installation.
It's Peter Norvig's birthday today, and he's the hypothetical programmer I might see coming into conversation with edX's Ned Batchelder to bring these 2 systems together database-wise - if we can get the initial monies and students. Glad WUaS has some somewhat stable dollar figure amounts now with which to begin to plan and budget.
I've inquired below if Zalmat might be interested in beginning a Ph.D. program this autumn, taking some WUaS undergraduate degree CS classes in our 2nd term - May - Aug 2021 - and am waiting for his response. If we can begin to sign on Depts of Education to our upcoming Learning Management systems, this would be great!
Thoughts, questions, ideas, suggestions?
Sincerely, Scott
Dear Zalmat,
Thanks so much for your email too. WUaS News and Q&A happens most Mondays at 10 am Pacific Time (from the SF Bay Area). Am not actively recording them currently, and I don't have much to share from today's, but it was great to meet at 1:30 pm with the edX representative for WUaS, in our developing partnership. While edX and WUaS are already emerging partners, for WUaS to get the grades and sign up information of our WUaS matriculated students from edX, WUaS needs to pay edX $10,000 dollars, and for this amount of money, WUaS would need to have 30 matriculating students, if we were already getting reimbursed from nation states' departments of education. We have neither these students yet nor the arrangements with countries' departments of education, - so please stay tuned. I asked our WUaS edX representative about your potential interest in a 7-year (average time to completion) Ph.D. and what courses at edX would be available for both preparing to apply for the WUaS Ph.D. program, as well as studying in the first year of a Ph.D. program at WUaS with edX courses. While edX does go to the Master's Degree level, newly I've found out, the MIT OCW into MITx courses they offer don't seem to be available to WUaS yet. CC-4 MIT OCW lists both undergraduate and graduate courses, and it's from these that WUaS is building. Also the NYU MicroBachelor's course of study and degree aren't available either, and WUaS isn't clear in our planning for a Ph.D. whether this new degree would prepare someone adequately like yourself to enter a CS Ph.D. program at WUaS either.
So if we could get 30 students for our term which begins May 1 - August 30, for a free-to-students' Bachelors degree, and you were to matriculate at WUaS and take edX courses to prepare you for our WUaS Ph.D. program then, it might be possible for you to matriculate for a free-to-students' Ph.D. degree program September 1, 2021. Would you be interested in such an opportunity? How might we best communicate about this further - and also with the Moroccan department of Education at the federal level even, in these regards? WUaS is in the process of developing our website and our Learning Management System for all of this, and this would inform, too, how your Ph.D. degree program would develop, after you completed the courses helpful for you to get into a Ph.D. program in CS at WUaS. Other possibilities exist in all of this so please let me know what you think, some of thoughts and questions in all of these regards.
Thank you, and my regards, Scott