Table of Contents
Edunext is proud to be part of this event, and will be there to share its knowledge and experience on implementing the Open edX platform for its clients. We will be participating in the panel discussions and presenting our most successful cases to inform and inspire other professionals.
About the conference
The conference will take place on the MIT campus “at home”, and will focus on the theme of “Shaping the Future of Education Together”. As the Open edX community recognizes the platform as a medium that can enable people of all ages to reach their goals of lifelong learning, this conference is one of the largest gatherings of open source communities in the EdTech world. We will explore the various issues associated with the implementation of an LMS, present successful case studies to serve as an inspiration and reference for others, and discuss the latest topics of interest in the global education sector.
Our talks
In Edunext, we will actively participate not only as Contributing Sponsors of Open edX, but also as speakers. Our participation in the event will be led by:
— Juan Camilo Montoya, CEO, who will be talking about Automation workflows – Integrating Open edX with more than 5000 web applications
Track | Product Development and Usage
Open edX often operates as part of a complex ecosystem of digital tools and services that deliver specific value to learners, course authors and platform admins.
Orchestrating those tools often requires custom built integrations in order to share information while avoiding a large number manual interventions. This talk presents the use of an automation platform to integrate with more than 5000 of the most used web applications such as google drive, slack, hubspot, stripe and many more.
This talk will present the business case for integrating the platform with an automation and integration engine such as Zapier. A number of use cases derived from 3 years of experience at edunext will be presented to showcase the advantages and compromises of this model of integration.
The specifics of the different possible integrations will be presented, both for triggering actions from Open edX into the external tools and for responding to events initiated externally.
The talk will analyze the way these requirements fit into the new Open edX core product offering and propose some platform improvements geared towards streamlining this kind of integration / automation capabilities.
— Felipe Montoya, CTO, with the session “Using Open edX hooks for custom code”
Track | Developing and Operating
This will be a session to look at Open edX events and filter development step by step. Last year, we talked about the existence of the hooks framework as a reality that reached the master branches of the platform repository. During the year, we saw new developer teams use the extension points to create new functionality, and we have also seen new events and filters developed by different teams in the community.
Nonetheless, there may be many community members that are not yet familiar with this new extension point and would benefit from it. In this tutorial session, we’ll take a deep dive into building an Open edX plugin that can connect to an Open edX filter, as well as, an Open edX event.
We will also see an example of the process to bring new filters or events to the project and how to use this as a pattern to encapsulate some custom logic written to the platform repository.
Attendees will be able to run an example application in which we will build additional business logic for the course-about page as well as connecting to the course registration event.
Notes: The tutorial will be set up in a tutor based development environment. Attendees are invited to already have such an environment running in order to get the most benefit from the allocated time.
— Jorge Londoño, Engineering Manager, will lead a Lightning Talk about How is an Open edX release created?
Track | Developing and operating
We are all rushing to get our Open edX instances up and running on the last release. Yet, have we ever asked ourselves how that process works? Who is making each release happen and how? How could this process be improved? Let’s take a closer and quick look at these questions to understand how an Open edX release is created.
Currently, the Build-test-release working group is in charge of the paramount task of releasing each new version of Open edX and a significant part of the Community is not aware of how this process happens. They are mostly interested in getting the new version up and running, and promptly, getting access to the release notes to understand which new improvements and fixes this new version brings. This does not have to be this way. The more eyes and engagement we get from the Community to this process, the more it could be improved and turn into a more valuable outcome.
This talk will provide a quick overview of the Open edX release process, as it is right now, to anyone who is running an Open edX instances and is eager to contribute to this process from a product or technical perspective, and the following topics will be covered:
— BTR overview and which roles are involved in this effort
— Schedule: The schedule of cuts and releases
— Repos, tags, and branches
— Cutting a release
— Tagging a release
— Release notes and announcements to the Community
— Final thoughts and improvement opportunities
— Jhony Avella, DevOps, is leading the presentation Crunching the k8s numbers
Track | Developing and Operating
A session to deep dive into the challenges and lessons we’ve learned during this last year and a half operating Open edX instances in Kubernetes. Migration to containerization and microservices architecture has become increasingly popular in recent years due to its numerous benefits, and the Open edX platform could not be oblivious to these changes in the IT industry.
As Open edX providers, we have been working on this paradigm shift to migrate installations of different scales and with different requirements to the containerized model in Kubernetes. We will present the most important challenges that we had to face during this journey, exposing our solution approach and the results that we have obtained with numbers.
We will also provide insights on how to host a medium-large Open edX installation, presenting the relevant aspects to take in mind in every layer of the ecosystem and mentioning the most common issues an operator could run into.
Notes: The nature of the talk is technical, and assistants with experience in operations can have the ease to understand the topics that will be discussed. However, we will do our best to use the simplest speech possible to allow audience with non-technical profiles to take advantage of this talk.
— María Fernanda Magallanes, Software Developer, will present the Lightning Talk: Multiple Tutor environments with TVM.
Track | Developing and Operating
Tutor is the official Docker-based Open edX distribution, and with TVM, it makes it easy to manage the manual configuration of environment variables required to have multiple environments. As a developer, you can quickly and effortlessly create virtual environments for each of your clients. Whether you need Nutmeg, Olive, and Nightly, TVM simplifies the process by automatically setting the TUTOR_ROOT and TUTOR_PLUGINS_ROOT for each environment.
This talk is focused on introducing TVM, a powerful tool that enables developers who use Tutor to manage multiple Tutor development environments independently. This means that you can work on different projects with distinct Tutor versions and configurations, all in isolation.
This talk is specifically tailored for developers who already have an understanding of Tutor and would like to use TVM to better manage their projects and environments. By the end of this talk, they should have an understanding of what TVM is and how it can be used to their advantage.
— Santiago Suárez, Product Manager, will present with Ryan O’Connell, Senior Director of Product, 2U, the talk Product Review is Here For You
Track | Product Development and Usage
One challenge the Open edX project has grappled with is developing a standardized Product Review process for open source contributions. This has resulted in a long backlog of stalled contributions. All Open edX stakeholders – and ultimately, end users – have been impacted. The Product Working Group has proposed a systemic overhaul to the Product Review process. This talk provides an overview of the proposal’s key tenets, its impact, and case studies. We will also discuss our learnings.
As you can see, we have an interesting line-up of topics to share with you at the upcoming Open edX Conference 2023. You can also visit the full Schedule here. We look forward to seeing you there!
How to participate in Open edX Conference 2023
By combining technology, innovative teaching methods, and open education platforms, we can shape the future of education for the better. This will ensure that students have the skills and knowledge they need to be successful in their field, while also providing them with the tools they need to make learning more efficient and engaging.
If you are interested in being part of this exciting event, all the information you need is available at https://con.openedx.org/
See you at the Open edX 2023 Conference, to shaping the Future of Education Together!
