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As with any Open source technology, there are some challenges that developers, users, and organizations might come across — the biggest of these being that it is freely available for the community to use and modify.
As experts in the Open edX platform we have overcome many of these challenges and we wanted to take advantage of our learning curve and make our customers’ lives easier, by creating a complete tool that can help them to manage and sort many of the difficulties with the platform .
First of all, what is a Control Center? What does Control Center have to do with Open edX software? What problems does it solve for an Open edX platform administrator ? Well, plenty! Read on to see what, why, and how you can begin leveraging this next-generation system management technology.
Let`s see
The ECC is a management-oriented tool, that we created to boost the Open edX learning management system ,but then we converted in to a tool for our customers to centralize ,locate and control all the details of their subscription with our services in Edunext , so they can manage many things including the Open edX instance(s), their learners, courses, and everything in between, regardless of whether the platform is running on an Edunext’s cloud, or in a stand-alone instance.
What's the story, anyway?
In this article, we’re going to dive into some of the main advantages of the Control Center tool. Before we get started, though, let’s jump into some basics .
Edunext Control Center is the result of a project combining over 9 years of Edunext experience running production workloads of e-learning initiatives at scale with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the Open edX community.
But in hard concrete terms, what problems does it solve for an Open edX administrator, and why would you want to use it?, ok so few years ago, when Juan and Felipe, the owners of Edunext , were receiving a lot of complaints about how difficult was for the administrators of the Open edx instances to manage different aspects such as: the branding and look and feel of the platform, to register the users, to manage the billing of their account, etc. Then they came up with the idea to create a management-oriented tool that lets the customers easily create and deliver powerful and rich learning experiences in a more beautiful way, and guess what, they make it!.
Have you experienced problems when managing your Open edx instance?
If you are currently building and running courses with the Open edX platform, you might have already experienced how challenging it is to coordinate a team to perform all the configurations and run the day-to-day operations required to optimize performance and ensure efficient operations.
Both the Open edX LMS and the STUDIO platform are great tools, but they have limited capabilities for some of the management operations that are needed, so Control Center simplifies the way for you to automatically and more efficiently manage your LMS across your server instances. You can easily access platform-level objects like organizations and sites, making changes to the configurations, running management processes, accessing reports analytics, etc. and that helped us to identify some key gaps, and we have developed a tool to centralize and simplify the Open edX manager experience.
Let’s look at a practical example,
But wait, there’s more!
The Edunext Control Center works at multiple levels, providing you with an interface for your team to be able to work with the open edX platform components. The different levels with the application performance are detailed below.
What is valuable today?
Upcoming features to make your experience even better!
The previously described features are only a preamble of what we are planning to offer with the ECC, as we are fully committed to continuing bringing improvements and innovation to this management tool in order to help our subscribers make the most out of the Open edX technology.
Some features and improvements that we are currently working on are:
- enhanced site configuration capabilities.
- The access granularity for the different admin roles.
- User experience / User interface improvements.
Ready to get started with ECC?
If you are a current Edunext subscriber, under any type of subscription model, you’ll be able to access the ECC here with your credentials for the management console.
Not an Edunext subscriber yet? You can always create a lite account in our cloud-based subscription for free to start building your educational initiative with a qualified team of experts for the Open edX technology.
In case you are running a stand-alone open edX instance and would like to receive more information about the Edunext Control Center, you can always contact us at sales@edunext.co
