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About Open edX

It may be hard to understand at first sight the differences between edX, the online learning initiative by edX Inc. (edx.org) and the Open edX platform. In short, edX is a non-profit initiative that delivers high-quality online courses from Harvard University, the MIT and hunderds or other consortium members, and Open edX is the technology platform that edX inc created to power this initiative. As Open edX was licenced as an open-source technology it can also be used to power many other online learning initiatives not affiliated with edX.org. Our purpose at eduNEXT is to support this type of initiatives by providing services and solutions based on the Open edX platform.

To find out more about edX visit edx.org
To learn more about the Open edX platform, visit open.edx.org

The open edX platform is a cluster of applications including the LMS or learner platform, studio or authoring platform, the ecommerce application, the insights platform and the mobile apps. Visit the Discover section to find more details about the nature of each application and their functionality. You can check out this List of Open edX features, which we have prepared with the Open edX community for simplifying the exploration and location of different features. 

Another possibility is by looking at the official documentation sets located here.

Finally, exploring the platform via one demo or by setting up and working with your own site is one of the best ways to find out the different functionalities included in the platform.

Courses on edx.org are publicly listed in the edX course catalog and are open to learners from around the world. To publish a course on edx.org, your organization must have an agreement with edX Inc. You can contact edX directly to find out more.

Definitely. For initiatives interested in selling their online courses, we provide ecommerce capabilities through our e-commerce add-on available in both Enterprise and Performance subscription and which allows you to monetize your courses in different ways:

  • By offering courses that are free to enter and have a paid upgrade option.
  • By having fully closed courses, where a payment is required to enroll.
  • By offering bundles of courses that can be purchased together in a single transaction. – Distributing discount codes to promote the purchase of your courses.
  • By having enrollment codes, to allow only certain users to enroll in your paid courses at no cost. The Open edX e-commerce application currently supports PayPal, Cybersource, and PAYU as payment processors. Support for additional payment processors can be developed for a service fee. To learn more about this feature please read this article that covers this essential topic.

To find out more about edX visit edx.org
To learn more about the Open edX platform, visit open.edx.org

Open edX offers all its functionality completely free, it is designed to simplify communication between teachers and students, and to make it more interactive. Open edX includes two products: the LMS for managing the learning process, and Studio for the content creation. With Open edX, content is implemented through special block plugins that allow you to add interactive elements.

You’ll be glad to know that Open edX has the capability of multilingual configurations. We currently support multiple languages including both left to right and right to left configurations, find out more about the languages we support, and the level of translation of each language here. Please keep in mind that the course content needs to be translated by the author.

In the course outline in Studio, you can use access settings to specify which learner groups can access particular components or units. You can restrict access based on one group type, such as content group or enrollment track.

Yes, you can track the learners’ progress and behavior. It is possible to know how many active learners you have and the interaction of your learners in activities such as problems or discussions. This component is included in the Performance subscription which is available starting with 200 users. You can also generate reports about the enrollments, login activity of your learners, certificates and timed exams in the EduNEXT Manage Console. Also, the instructor dashboard on the LMS offers a few reports to follow up on learners’ progress in the course.

Embedded content (from video streaming providers), SCORM content, XAPI content, H5P components. All web enabled formats can be included into a course (PPTs, PDFs, and other similar content).

  1. The look & feel of your site can be customized in different ways: By integrating Open edX with an additional CMS You can observe this approach and feature in action on the edX.org site. If we visit this link, we will notice that this page looks quite different from your standard Open edX homepage, and the reason is that this site is, in fact, built-in WordPress CMS (outside of Open edX). To learn more about this go here
  2. By extending the Open edX theme You can choose to include your images and HTML contents to meet your specific needs, although this will require the changes to be executed directly into the Open edX platform code by you or your technical team and compromising the continuity of the service.
  3. By customizing your theme You can customize your style, HTML content of most of your site directly from our Management Console without performing any changes on the code of the platform or the redeployment of any application.
    All these options are available in our cloud-based and On-premise model. To have a quote for any of these services please contact our team at sales@edunext.co

There is no time limit for the use of our LITE subscription. We recommend you begin using our free Lite subscription and then upgrade to a paid one to start enjoying our advanced features.

Cloud subscriptions

There is no time limit for the use of our LITE subscription. We recommend you begin using our free Lite subscription and then upgrade to a paid one to start enjoying our advanced features.

With our Cloud subscription service you can begin as soon as you’re ready.

To have a site in our platform you need to have at least your own domain or site.

No, there is no limit regarding the capacity of our servers to host a given number of users, we have operated with up to 60,000 users with no downtime periods.

It depends on whether you choose a yearly or a monthly subscription. If you choose a monthly subscription and you exceed the number of paid users, we will charge you for the extra number of users. If you choose a yearly subscription, we will monitor the average number of users that you have each month. You may have more or fewer users in a given month, the importance is that you maintain an average according to the number of users you paid for. In case your average constantly exceeds your limit, you may run out of total yearly users, and will need to upgrade your account.

The first step is for you to activate a LITE account. Once you are ready to explore more advance features, you can proceed by making an upgrade on the eduNEXT Management Console (EMC).

A new version of the Open edX platform is released almost biannual. Each release comes with a new set of features and updates such as new learner experiences and improvements in course navigation.

On Premise Vs Cloud

Depending on the size, interests, and requirements of the intended installation, we can offer different alternatives, which I’ll explain in detail below. The first one, and the one we recommend for most initiatives is to choose one of our cloud subscriptions. This would be recommended for all initiatives under 10k monthly active users and would be the fastest way to get all the new features from the latest Open edX release, plus all our exclusive features that add a lot of value to simplify and improve the management of the online learning project.

Prices for this kind of service are all published here and depend basically on the type of subscription and the number of active users. These subscriptions are the fastest and most cost-efficient way to get you running. Please note also that this kind of subscription doesn’t come with any vendor lock-in, because we agree to supply and all the database records if the day comes when you decide to terminate the subscription either to move to your infrastructure, to another provider, or one of our on-premise solutions. Also, it’s key to note that an active user is counted only if the user goes into the learning materials during that particular month, so you can have as many registered users as you need to, and each active user can be enrolled and active in as many courses as they want and still stay within the limits of your subscription. You can get started immediately by launching one of our lite subscriptions that will get you the experience of running your site with us, and also a chance to use some of our features at no cost for a limited number of users. To find out more about cloud-based services visit this article.

Further along, the road, when your initiative is significantly large, you may be interested in having an exclusive instance. In that case, we can offer the upgrade to an on-premise installation in case you need or want to have the solution hosted on your infrastructure or an exclusive AWS, azure, or private infrastructure. To give you a general idea, these services start at USD 5000 for a basic installation in English and may go higher depending on your specific requirements. To learn more about the On-premise model read this article.We can also start by deploying an independent Open edX install in your infrastructure from the beginning, however, we always recommend starting with our cloud subscriptions, Which are very flexible, affordable, fast, and easy to deploy, and invest in customizations and exclusive installations only in the extent of the real needs and growth of the user base.

We recommend the cloud-based subscription model for most initiatives, it is the fastest way to get all the new features from the latest Open edX version, plus all our exclusive features that add a lot of value to simplify and improve the management of the online learning strategy. However, if you begin with the cloud services and later on want to have the Open edX platform installed and configured on your own infrastructure, you can let us know and the eduNEXT technical team of experts will assist you.

The Open edX® platform can be deployed on a variety of hosting options, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Hetzner your on-premise infrastructure, and more. By working with eduNEXT you can implement an Open edX® platform on your preferred hosting solution. We specialize in Open edX® managed hosting services to help you monitor, manage, and scale your hosting.

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