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Enriching the Open edX Learning Experience
One of the greatest advantages of an open source platform and especially one with an active community around it is the possibility of many third parties to be involved in creating additional components, integrations and extensions that enrich the learning experience from many different angles.
This is especially true for the open edX platform, as it provides multiple extensions and integration possibilities at different levels, such as the plugin architecture, the xblocks, the LTI integration, and the custom problem types, to name a few.
One significant challenge in this scenario is for these contributions or possibilities to gain visibility so that anyone in the community can explore them and new possibilities are continuously added.
Collecting and maintaining this information has proven very hard, and these difficulties can lower the potential benefits of such a tool.
In 2020, the Open edX marketing group decided to take on this challenge again, and started working on building a new consolidated list of all the components that previous instruments had identified, curating and updating the information for each of the components. As part of this effort, the group discussed and identified the most relevant information for users to find, as well as the criteria that should be met in order for a particular component to be included in or excluded from the list.
After all this collaborative effort and multiple reviews, the first version of this instrument called the Extensions Directory was published in march 2021 on the Open edX website and in just a few weeks it has gained some visibility and traffic as a valuable resource for the Open edX community.
The extensions directory is basically a list of components, each of them described in detail in a card that contains all the necessary information, its name, description, vendor / creator and classification, as well as the links to the component page or documentation as shown in the image below.
Image 1. A card in the Open edX Extensions Directory
Image 2. Filter by function.
image 3. Filter by type
How to contribute to improve / grow the Extensions Directory ?
In order to keep the information in the Directory as accurate and complete as possible, the marketing group decided to distribute this responsibility on an annual rotation among members of the group. For the year 2021, edunext, a service provider fully committed with the Open edX community and the Marketing group was selected due to its leadership in bringing this idea to life. The maintenance of the Directory includes the consolidation and verification of the information as well the coordination with the Open edX team for its periodic publication.
All members of the Open edX community that use and are knowledgeable with the platform, as well as Vendors or open source contributors that have built and maintain any kind of extension are welcome to participate in this curation effort.
Visit edunext’s website at https://www.edunext.co/ to submit a new extension to be reviewed and included in the list or to suggest an improvement to the information already published.
As this first version of the Directory grows and more experience is gained in the process of maintaining this information we will be looking ahead for exciting new possibilities, such as making it more community driven, for example adding a way for the community to add ratings or comments to each component and for components in the directory to be able to report some usage metrics.
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