Open edX® is an advanced open source technology to deliver online learning. Created by Harvard and MIT and used by millions worldwide.
Open edX™ is an online platform for creating, delivering, and analyzing online courses. It is the open source platform that powers the edx.org initiative but also thousands of other online learning initiatives across the world. The Open edX world is complex, rich and diverse.
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”, than can or not be integrated into an online learning initiative.
To create and run online courses, you’ll need at least to know the two basic applications:
This is the Learning Management System, where learners sign up for the site and log in to enroll and access and complete their courses. Instructors also use the Open edX LMS in order to access some management tools such as course stats, manual enrollments, gradebook management, course reports, certificates configuration, email, and more.
This is the content management system where authors create, configure, and manage their courses and course libraries. As authors can add and organize courseware, add and configure activities, upload course files, and configure course policies and settings.
Log in as a learner to browse different course option and explore the types of course activities and resources available.
Explore the STUDIO platform and experiment on an existing course.
The Dogwood named release, being the 4th release of the open edX platform by edX, is planned to be out there before the end of 2015. One of the main engineering challenges for this release will be migration of the Django framework from 1.4 to Django 1.8.
The second official Open edX conference will be held in Wellesley College in Massachusets in October 12th and 13th, 2015. This conference is for developers, system administrators, education specialists, and anyone who works with or wants to learn more about the Open edX platform.
edX has recently announced the newest release of Open edX under the name Cypress. This new release is already deployed for all the instances of eduNEXT.
The new tree species in the Open edX named release space is called Birch. This one was first released on february 2015 and it includes some very interesting new features.
On November 18th – 19th 2014 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the team encharged of the Open edX community hosted the first official Open edX conference, focused on the development and use of the edX open source platform.
After the 2014 Open edX Conference, edX organized a two day Hackathon to get the community to work together with edX engineers in developing new interesting projects. The eduNEXt team participated actively, working in a project aimed at implementing the use of libsass instead of sass to allow the removal of a ruby dependency from the stack.
In order to make it easier for people in the Open edX community to collaborate and share knowledge over the Open edX codebase, edX has created a strategy of named releases, that will provide stable points for the Open edX initiative around the world to start working from. The first one of such named releases is called Aspen.
In December 2013 the State Department hosted alongside with Harvard, MIT and edX a meeting to propose ideas for using technology to improve the current state of higher education. This turned out to be the first ever Open conference, named edX Datajam 2013.