Open edX Call for Papers: Ends Dec 7
Early bird registration is now live for Open edX 2019, March 26 – 29, hosted by UC San Diego. Buy now and save! Answer the call for papers – send us a talk proposal Are you an edtech enthusiast? Do you design or run courses on Open edX, edX.org, or other online learning platforms? Do […]
How Arbisoft Helps Open Source Education
(Editor’s Note: this guest blog post comes from Fatima A. of Arbisoft. We appreciate Arbisoft’s continued support of the Open edX Conference and the community) Arbisoft + Open edX Open edX now powers 1,500 installs around the world. Top institutions such as MIT and Stanford have used it to open-source their course materials, making the world’s best […]
Open edX Conference Program is Live
We have an exciting program lined up for this year’s Open edX Conference in beautiful Montreal, May 29 – 31. Register for the Open edX 2018 Conference We have in-depth workshops on Tuesday, May 29, followed by keynotes and breakout sessions on May 30th and 31st. This is a wonderful opportunity to meet the Open […]
Newest Open edX Release Dogwood Now Available!
Dogwood is here! While Boston may be covered in snow, here in the edX office, blossoming Dogwood is in the air! This fourth Open edX release brings new features, accessibility improvements, and other options to the platform. A global community uses Open edX to teach and train everywhere from high schools in Australia, universities in Indonesia, […]
New Oppia XBlock allows embedding interactive activities into Open edX courses
My name’s Sean Lip, and I’m writing this post on behalf of Oppia.org, a website that allows people to create and share interactive online learning experiences called ‘explorations’. These explorations simulate a conversation with a personal tutor, allowing students to learn by doing while receiving targeted feedback. Exploration creators can easily improve their explorations over […]
Open edX as an LTI Tool Provider
Overview The Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard is a widely-adopted, lightweight way to integrate diverse educational components. A containing application (the LTI consumer) embeds a tool (the LTI provider), to present a seamless user experience in a single web page. Open edX has long been an LTI tool consumer, allowing instructional teams to embed learning […]
Intern Spotlight: Utkarsh Jadhav
My name is Utkarsh Jadhav, and I am a master’s student of Computer Science at Northeastern University, here in Boston. I have spent the last thirteen weeks at edX working with the Platform team. The Platform team is responsible for building up the infrastructure for Open edX products, particularly working on making the code run […]
Partial Credit – From Concept to Implementation
Greetings! My name is Colin Fredericks. I work at HarvardX as a Senior Project Lead, which means that most of my job is helping Harvard professors make quality courses. However, over the past few months I’ve been working, mostly in my spare time, on adding partial credit to the Open edX platform. I really like […]
Writing Faster ModuleStore Tests
Most developers who have added features to edx-platform are familiar with ModuleStoreTestCase. If your tests exercise anything relating to courseware content (even it’s just creating an empty course), inheriting from this class will ensure that data gets cleaned up properly between individual tests. This is extremely valuable, but can also be wasteful in many situations. During last week’s hackathon, I […]
Intern Spotlight: Tyler Nickerson
My name is Tyler Nickerson, and I am a rising junior at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA. For the past three months, I have had the pleasure of being an edX intern working with the E-Commerce team. The E-Commerce team develops tools that are used to better manage and maintain monetized courses, such as […]
Intern Spotlight: Kyle McCormick
I’m Kyle McCormick, a rising sophomore at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and I just finished an 11-week summer internship on edX’s Mobile team. During my time on the team, I focused primarily on performance-related backend work. In this post, I’m going to be talking about one of the two projects on which I spent the most […]
Third Party Authentication using SAML Protocol
Summary Over the past several months, edX partners and Open edX community members designed and implemented new sign in capabilities that allow learners to use their campus credentials to access edX courses. Similar to the way that edX currently supports sign in with Google or Facebook, learners at participating institutions can authenticate into edX using […]
Intern Spotlight: Ben McMorran
I’m Ben McMorran, a rising junior studying computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I’ve spent the last twelve weeks as a software engineering intern on the Teaching and Learning (TNL) team. This is my second summer as an intern here at edX. While there are many tasks I worked on during my time here, there […]
McKinsey Academy Contributes Poll & Survey XBlocks
About two years ago, McKinsey Academy and edX began working closely together to launch a new professional development experience for McKinsey’s clients built on the Open edX platform. Recently, using the XBlock framework, the McKinsey Academy team — in partnership with OpenCraft — worked to build new polling and survey components that were needed for […]
OLI and edX Collaborate on New Feedback Mechanisms for Learners
To enable a richer set of immediate feedback options in the Open edX platform, the Open Learning Initiative at Stanford University collaborated with edX and the Open edX community to add two new feedback mechanisms across all of the basic problem types in the platform. The Open Learning Initiative designs courses based on learning […]
Open edX Releases Creative Commons Licensing!
We are pleased to announce that the Open edX platform is now incorporating Creative Commons licenses for sites that choose to offer them! This feature is currently live on edx.org, and site operators will get the functionality when they update their version of Open edX. Turning the feature on is as easy as setting the […]
A Case for Accessible, Usable and Universal Design for Learning
Issues of learning technologies and accessibility are more of a hot topic in our field than usual these days. EdX recently reached a settlement with the Justice Department to make its website, course creation platform and mobile applications accessible under ADA. Harvard and MIT are facing a lawsuit for lack of online captioning for materials for the general […]
Why Student Mentoring is to Higher Ed what Google is to the Internet
Before taking up the challenge of helping Boston University harness the opportunities of educational technologies and digital learning, I spent several years researching how the Internet had disrupted news and journalism. What happened there was that, thanks to digital technologies, a once-scarce resource – access to news, became abundant (one might say, overabundant) as digital […]
A Tale of Two (Memory) Leaks
During February, edx-platform suffered from two different issues relating to memory usage in our webapp. After the dust had settled, I wrote up a three-part series detailing the tools we built and used to diagnose the bugs, and a detailed breakdown of each bug, and how we diagnosed them. Part 1: An Introduction to Memsee […]
Databits Challenge
Last September, HarvardX and Databits, an invitation-based website where creative coders, engineers, and data scientists connect and share their work, challenged the Internet to create an interactive visualization of the binomial distribution. Specifically, they asked participants to develop a tool to help students understand a concept in probability — a tool that could be integrated into the Open […]
Facebook and Google authentication
If you’ve visited edx.org lately, you might’ve noticed that we now offer two new options: signing in via Google and Facebook! You can, of course, still sign in with your edX account information, but for folks like me who hate having to memorize passwords for a dozen different accounts across the web, being able to consolidate my […]
edX Update: November 22, 2013
Greetings from edX! It’s been a while since you’ve heard from us, and we’re happy to be posting this update. We hope you’ve been discovering and enjoying some of Studio’s new features in the meantime. The last few weeks have brought many exciting improvements to Studio. In addition, we’ve begun publishing a complete and cumulative list […]