The Open edX Technical Oversight Committee

Ed Zarecor is the Vice President of Engineering for the Open edX project at Axim Collaborative.  Ed has been a software engineer, architect and technology leader throughout his career of more than 30 years, with a focus on educational technology.  For the last nine years, he has led development of the Open edX platform at edX Inc., where he served as the Head of Engineering and Head of the Open edX project. Notably, Ed oversaw a significant reinvigoration of the Open edX project starting in 2019, laying the groundwork for a more open and inclusive project, expanding opportunities for community participation, and so far, realizing a 10-fold increase in code contributions.  He is also one of the lucky few to have a three character GitHub username, e0d.

Ed is the Chair of the TOC.

Dustin Tingley is Professor of Government in the Government Department at Harvard University. Dustin is Deputy Vice Provost for Advances in Learning, Faculty Director for the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning Data Science and Technology Group (Harvard higher education data science group), and Faculty director for the Harvard Initiative on Learning and Teaching. He received a PhD in Politics from Princeton in 2010 and BA from the University of Rochester in 2001. His research interests include international relations, international political economy, climate change, digital education and data science.  His book on American foreign policy with Helen Milner, Sailing the Water’s Edge, was published in fall 2015, and was awarded the Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book published in the field of U.S. national policy. Recent projects include attitudes towards global climate technologies and policies, and the intersection of causal inference and machine learning methods for the social sciences. He teaches courses on data science, international relations, and climate change. Dustin co-founded ABLConnect, previously served as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Harvard Government Department and faculty director of IQSS’s Undergraduate Research Scholar program. Dustin has organized interdisciplinary conferences on causal mechanisms, climate change politics, negotiation in international relations, the intersection of causal inference and machine learning, active learning, peer learning, and equitable instruction in inclusive classrooms.

Ferdi Alimadhi is the Senior Director, Engineering and Products at MIT Open Learning where he has led the design and development of several Open edX based platforms for different learning environments, from residential teaching to professional education and MOOCs, including MITx Residential, MITx Online, MITx MicroMasters, and MIT xPro. During the last 8 years at MIT he has also led the ideation, design and development of several other educational products and platforms, reaching millions of learners around the world, including the new MIT OpenCourseWare, MIT Bootcamps, and MIT Video platform. He is the founding member and lead of the MIT Open project, as a social platform to connect MIT with learners, teachers and scientists worldwide. Prior to joining MIT, Ferdi worked at Harvard University. He is the original creator and project lead of OpenScholar project, an open source SAAS platform for building academic websites designed specifically for higher education and used by hundreds of institutions worldwide. Ferdi was the founding member of the Computer Science department of the first private university in Albania. He has a Master of Computer Science degree from University of Amsterdam and a Master of Software Engineering degree from Harvard University.

Anant Agarwal is the Chief Open Education Officer at 2U, Inc., guiding and furthering the company’s mission to increase access to high-quality education for everyone, everywhere. Anant joined 2U through the edX acquisition, where he directed its evolution into one of the world’s leading online learning platforms as founder and CEO.

As the first educator to teach an edX course on circuits and electronics from MIT, Anant drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. He remains a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT today. Previously, he served as the director of CSAIL, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Anant is a successful serial entrepreneur, having co-founded several companies including Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor, and Virtual Machine Works. He has received multiple accolades over the years for his pursuit of great educational innovation. He won the Maurice Wilkes prize for computer architecture and MIT’s Smullin and Jamieson prizes for teaching. He is also the 2016 recipient of the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize for Higher Education, which recognized his work in advancing the MOOC movement. Additionally, he is a recipient of the Padma Shri award from the President of India and was named the Yidan Prize Laureate for Education Development in 2018.

A pioneer in computer architecture, Anant is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the ACM. Scientific American selected his work on organic computing as one of 10 World-Changing Ideas in 2011, and he was named in Forbes’ list of top 15 education innovators in 2012.

George Babey is Director of Engineering at 2U, leading the development for our Enterprise business. In over four years at edX, George has focused on growing our commercial and academic business through products and features that assist learners and administrators to be successful when rolling out learning initiatives within their organizations. He has a special affinity for frontend development and has helped lead the Open edX project through various improvements such as micro-frontends (MFEs) and the Paragon component library. Prior to edX, George has worked in various engineering and leadership roles across a 20+ year career.

Stefania Trabucchi is a Senior Solution Consultant and Managing Director in Abstract-Technology. She helps clients identify the right tools to fit their needs. Stefania is one of the initiators and co-organizer of the Open edX marketing working group. She is an enthusiastic expert in technologies with a long-term working experience in project management, combining technology and creation. Stefania co-founded Abstract-Technology GmbH in 2015 and currently acts as the Managing Director. Abstract-Technology, one of the first European service providers for Open edX®, is a full-service provider that applies an agile and collaborative implementation approach.

Samuel Paccoud took over the technical lead role at FUN after a few years of freelancing. Since 2018, Samuel has been applying the Mikado method on FUN’s Open edX based stack with the following achievements:

• Recovering development velocity and agility
• A standalone catalog for OpenEdX with search, e-commerce, enrollment, application forms, dashboards and more to come: GitHub – openfun/richie: An opensource CMS to build education portals
• A modular LTI LCMS with several xAPI-ready content modules: a video and streaming platform, a BBB gateway, a markdown authoring module, a file deposit for students and more to come: GitHub – openfun/marsha: An opensource LTI Learning Content Management System (LCMS) 2
• A scalable LRS based on Graylog and Grafana: GitHub – openfun/ralph: A learning events processor to feed your data lake (expect some xAPI ) 1

Xavier Antoviaque is an Open edX developer and contributor. He is also the founder of OpenCraft, which is the largest contributing organization to Open edX besides edX/2U, as a provider of development and hosting services on the Open edX platform. The projects and clients involve many key actors of the Open edX community, including Harvard, MIT, edX/2U, ASU, UBC, Cloudera, as well as state projects like the ones initiated by France and Israel. He is a long-time contributor of free software communities: he co-created the free software game Card Stories, initiated the Ryzom.org campaign, and is a former board member of April, the main free software advocacy organization in France.