We’re thrilled that Appsembler is a Keystone Sponsor of the 2017 Open edX Conference, May 24 and 25 in Madrid, Spain. This is their third year in a row sponsoring the conference, and we are very grateful for their support of the community.
We spent some time discussing with Appsembler what they’ve been working on and what they’re looking forward to as the conference approaches.
Tell us about Appsembler. What’s your approach to online learning? What makes you unique?
Appsembler is a software company that helps trainers and educators deliver better online learning experiences with one, easy-to-use platform.
We’ve been involved with Open edX since the beginning in 2013. Our CEO and Founder, Nate Aune, is one of the foremost Open edX authorities in the world and has helped dozens of companies elevate their training programs. As a result of working with companies large and small across multiple industries, we understand the challenges associated with creating and maintaining an online learning site. This has led us to develop the most powerful Open edX SaaS offering on the market.
Our new SaaS platform, Tahoe, is the first turnkey platform of its kind powered by Open edX. Tahoe makes it simpler than ever to deliver online learning experiences to employees, customers, partners and students. We manage all the technology — from deployment and upgrades, to day-to-day management — allowing our customers to focus on delivering great online learning content.
With Tahoe’s web-based theme editor, our customers can now build their own branded Open edX site within minutes and quickly go to market. Additionally, each customer gets a mobile-optimized theme with responsive design. Our theme makes Open edX a beautiful experience on mobile devices, which the out-of-the-box alternative doesn’t provide.
Who are your customers, and how do they benefit from your services?
Our customers are trainers and educators at corporations, universities, and not-for-profits. Their goal is to deliver incredible online learning experiences to their employees, customers, partners or students — and they need a solution that makes it fast and simple to do so. They don’t want to have to worry about hosting, resources, or any of the headaches that come with the technology side. That’s where we come in.
With Appsembler, our customers can:
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Go to market quickly: Normally, it can take at least 2-8 weeks to configure, theme, test and deploy Open edX. With Appsembler Tahoe, you can build your Open edX site within minutes.
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Reduce costs: The costs of managing Open edX on your own can be prohibitively high — both the initial costs (setup and deployment) and the long-term costs (maintenance, major version upgrades). Tahoe’s cloud-based software delivery reduces costs by eliminating the overhead of managing servers and hiring engineers to maintain the software.
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Take control: To launch Open edX, you generally need to have a highly skilled engineering and systems team to support it, as well as front-end developers to theme the site and build out pages. With Appsembler Tahoe, no coding is required. Just point and click.
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Have peace of mind: Since Open edX is open source, it is constantly evolving — along with our customers’ needs. Tahoe includes the latest Open edX software (currently, the “Ficus” release) backed with professional support, hosting and upgrades.
What’s exciting to you and the Appsembler team about working in the open source space right now?
Because Open edX is open source, we are constantly seeing exciting new developments from the vibrant Open edX community. This open sharing of ideas from around the world creates new avenues of possibility in online learning. The benchmark keeps getting higher and higher, and with this rapid pace of development, we believe that anything is possible and are thrilled to be a part of that movement.
Appsembler is also developing new applications and enhancing existing ones, all the while trying to push them “upstream” to the core platform. In addition to our reporting and faceted search managers, we have added new “white label” branding capabilities to the Open edX iOS mobile app. We are completing a new Video XBlock that provide all of the features and functionality of the built-in video player in Open edX, but with a “pluggable” back end that will work with just about any video hosting provider on the market.
What’s ahead for Appsembler?
At Appsembler, we envision a world where learning has no limits. Anyone will be able to deliver rich learning experiences to people all over the world. While we’re already seeing a shift from the physical classroom to “anytime, anywhere,” we believe there’s much work left to do.
In terms of what’s ahead, the Appsembler team is focused on accelerating that shift by simplifying how trainers and educators deliver online learning content. We’ll continue to match the pace of innovation from Open edX, and tune the platform to meet the needs of corporate learning. With Tahoe, our new all-in-one SaaS platform, we’ve taken a big step forward towards making that vision a reality.
Over the next year, we look forward to bringing all of our enterprise features into Appsembler Tahoe, including an extended API to enable arbitrary third-party integrations at “arms-length.”
What can Open edX conference attendees look forward to seeing at your sponsor table this year?
Aside from meeting the Appsembler team, conference attendees can look forward to seeing our new Tahoe product for themselves! At our booth, we’ll provide demos of Tahoe to show how easy and fast it can be for you to spin up your own branded Open edX site, and we’re offering a 30-day free trial to conference attendees. Come by and check it out yourself!
You can also hear about 10 reasons Appsembler is excited for Open edX 2017 on their blog.
Appsembler team
