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The Open edX Technology

Discover a universe of possibilities to empower online education

about open edx

Open edX is an online platform for creating, delivering, and analyzing online courses.

It is an open source platform created by the MIT and Harvard University.

why open edx

Education technology
like no other

Developed by edX, MIT, and Harvard University, and now governed by Axim, this open-source software platform is the choice made by thousands of Universities, corporations, NGOs, and online learning initiatives to deliver innovative, high-quality online learning experiences in 35,000 courses to more than 100 million learners around the world.

Open edX is currently being used by nine out of ten of the highest-ranked universities in the world. Thanks to its scalability, and the dozens languages supported, Open edX has emerged as the LMS trusted by more than 20 governments and countless universities to provide education at a large scale.

Over 100 Million learners reached
Used by 9 of 10 highest ranked
universities
35.000 courses deployed around
the world
53 Languages supported
Trusted by more than 20 Government organizations and University consortiums to deliver education on a national scale.

Open edX main applications

The Open edX platform, far from a monolithic application has a number of different applications that are generally referred to under the umbrella name “Open edX”. These applications can or not be integrated into an online learning initiative.

Open edX LMS

Open edX LMS

The Open edX Learning Management System, is where learners sign up for the site, log in to enroll, access and complete their courses. 

Open edX Studio

This is the content management system where authors create, configure, and manage their courses and course libraries. 

Open edX Mobile Apps

Native Android and iOS apps for mobile devices.

Open edX Insights

Data analytics tool designed to provide staff members with valuable information about enrollment dynamics, learner demographics, student aggregated activity and learning performance in each course.

eCommerce

A complementary application used to process transactions and discounts when selling course seats, or course upgrade paths.

Xblocks

A Xblock is a modular component that extends the Open edX platform core in order to provide a way to incrementally add features to the course experience. There are native Xblocks that are included in the standard Open edX releases, and also third party Xblocks, created and maintained by trusted members of the Open edX community, like edunext.

Course Discovery Service

A service that collects and stores metadata about the online courses in order to share it efficiently among all the Open edX applications.

edX Enterprise

This is an additional application built to add some capabilities to the platform in order to serve an enterprise customer.

XQUEUE

This is an interface for the LMS to run asynchronous tasks, which allows for example to communicate with external grading services.

Publisher

This is a service that helps collect and organize the information during the publication of the courses and it’s meant to be used along with a more complex marketing website.​​

Gradebooks

This is an additional service that allows for a more centralized management of student records and also for transferable learner records.

ID verification service

This is a service that allows an identity verification based on the analysis of the student's photo and a photo identification document that are uploaded to the system.

edX Proctoring

An additional service used to provide a verification service during the taking of the exams. This capability currently relies on third party services.

Highlights

Technology

Build with cutting edge technologies for web and mobile applications, such as python, django and React js.

Licensing

Released as Open Source under the GNU affero license and commited to remain Open Source and freely available.

i18n

High internationalization standards and locallization in over 50 different languages.

Accesibility

Compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (“WCAG”) 2.1 AA

Data privacy

Functionality and application design capable of being compliant with GDPR as well as with other data protection regulations. 

List of features

Extensive functionality for enabling authors to build the best and most engaging learning experiences and to run high quality online courses at scale.

Community powered

A thriving community of contributors engaged in driving the functionality and capabilities of the platform forward.

Continous innovation

Uninterrupted development and improvement to the codebase to continue evolving and providing a growing range of functionalities for learners, instructors and Authors.

Extensibility

Designed to be improved, extended and customized via multiple extension points.

Custom xblocks

 Create rich and engaging online courses, with the combination of components from a variety of sources. XBlock, which is edX’s component architecture, makes this possible

Custom plugins

Customize your Open edX platform with a variety of plugins that allow you to optimize, enrich learning experiences.

IDA

independently deployed applications to extend and optimize the Open edX platform

List of extensions

a searchable list of features that will let you quickly figure out the kind of functionality that is available.

Learner Demo

The Open edX demo site provided by eduNEXT features most of the basic and advanced functionality in the Open edX LMS and e-commerce applications and its open to be experienced from the learner’s perspective.

Author's Lab

The Author’s lab is a pre configured place to experiment as an author or instructor and play around with lots of powerful features.

Create your own site

You can also provision your LMS site from scratch with edunext’s cloud subscriptions to experience all of the site configurations, management options, as well as creating your own courses and course catalog and start building the main components of your initiative.

Documentation

Open edX 'latest' Official Documentation

Documentation for Open edX users who are following the master version of the platform.

Open edX API Documentation

This interactive documentation documents, and lets you interact directly with the different APIs and endpoints.

FAQs Open edX

What is the latest version, and how do releases work?

Open edX is a fast moving technology and platform. In order to keep innovating, and still have a common ground to operate, support and collaborate from, there is and a system of releases in place and the work is organized around each of those, which in average come out every 4-6 months.

What languages are supported?

The Open edX platform and all related documentation are released in English only, but it is always built with high internationalization standards, which allow it to be localized in many other languages. The translations of thousands of strings into each language are done by and reviewed by volunteers from the Open edX community in a collaboration platform called transifex.

What is the open edx community?

Open edX has a growing and active community of enthusiasts, developers, learning experts, service providers, translators and more, that contribute in different ways their time and efforts to this open source project.

Video Guides

Have a better understanding of the Open edX platform and take advantage of functionalities to create great online courses.

edunext's exclusive complementary applications

In addition to the Open edX applications, you can increase the capabilities of the site by integrating some specific external applications.

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eduNEXT Control Center

A powerful management tool with a wide range of features to help management teams navigate the complexities of configuring and running an open edX platform.

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WordPress - Woocommerce Integrator

Using a WordPress plugin created by eduNEXT, an external website can be configured as the main website destination, where the initiative will have web content management capabilities to host its promotional content, or any web content needed to describe, promote and operate the initiative.

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edunext ebook open edx