Open edX Con Video Highlights
You can now watch every keynote and breakout session from the 2015 Open edX Conference online on our YouTube channel! One of our goals for this year’s conference was to enable broader access and participation for the community. We worked to provide livestreaming of much of this year’s Open edX Conference, featuring a schedule that […]
2015 Open edX Conference Wrapup
The 2nd annual Open edX Conference was filled with thought-provoking conversations, engaging presentations, and practical takeaways. More than 200 Open edX enthusiasts, developers, users, researchers, and educators traveled from around the world to join the discussion. Those who weren’t able to attend in person were able to get updates and participate by watching keynotes and […]
Welcome to Wellesley!
Welcome to Wellesley and Open edX Con 2015! We’re excited for those of you who will be joining us in person and online. The conference is at Wellesley College, in Wellesley, MA. Though it’s not far from downtown Boston, the campus provides a very different view of life in New England than the one we […]
Spotlight On: Ed Daciuk
We are taking some time in the weeks leading up to Open edX Con 2015 to share a bit about the speakers and what they are working on. Open edX Con 2015 is October 12-13th, at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA. Edward Daciuk from ExtensionEngine will be presenting Open edX and Adaptive Learning Monday October […]
Spotlight On: Adolfo Brandes and Florian Haas
We are taking some time in the weeks leading up to Open edX Con 2015 to share a bit about the speakers and what they are working on. Open edX Con 2015 is October 12-13th, at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA. Adolfo Brandes and Florian Haas come to Open edX Con from hastexo, working with […]
Last Chance for Open edX Con 2015
Today marks the final two weeks before Open edX Con 2015. Registration ends today, so register now to join us October 12-13th at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA. If you’re undecided about the conference, here are some reasons why this year’s conference is going to be amazing: Visit the beautiful Wellesley College campus […]
Open edX Con Sponsor: ExtensionEngine
ExtensionEngine goes above and beyond as a member of the Open edX community, using their corporate resources to organize and host meetups and sponsor Open edX Con 2015. We asked them to share some insights about their involvement with Open edX – read on, below. You can join ExtensionEngine (and us) at Open edX Con at Wellesley […]
Open edX Con 2015: Analytics in Education Technology
The second Open edX Conference is just weeks away. Reviewing the final schedule, it’s clear that there is a high level of interest in understanding and working with the piles of data a MOOC can provide about student behavior, as well as data which reflects ways an Open edX instance can be improved. Four of this year’s […]
Spotlight On: Xavier Antoviaque and Sarina Canelake
We are taking some time in the weeks leading up to Open edX Con 2015 to share a bit about the speakers and what they are working on. Open edX Con 2015 is October 12-13th, at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA. Register today! Xavier Antoviaque, along with edX employee Sarina Canelake, will be presenting Contributing […]
Spotlight On: Nicholus Warstadt, Silvia Vaca, and Feroze Naina
We are taking some time in the weeks leading up to Open edX Con 2015 to share a bit about the speakers and what they are working on. Open edX Con 2015 is October 12-13th, at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA. Register today! Nicholus Warstadt, Silvia Vaca, and Feroze Naina will be presenting Navigating Barriers […]
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 […]
The 2015 Open edX Con Hackathon will be held at CIC Boston!
We’ve been working hard to find the absolute best location for this year’s Open edX conference hackathon, and we’re really happy to announce this year it will be held at CIC Boston, a co-working and conference space centrally located in downtown Boston. CIC Boston provides state-of-the-art facilities for technical and collaborative events and we’re thrilled to use […]
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 […]
Open edX 2015 speakers announced
Today we are announcing the full lineup of community speakers for the year’s Open edX Conference. We have talks presenting use cases from on-campus blended learning to remote medical training to corporate and professional development, in-depth technical discussions about deployment in new and exciting environments such as OpenStack, tackling the challenge of complex migrations, and […]
Announcing Cypress, the latest Open edX release!
We are pleased to announce the release of Cypress, the third release of Open edX, the open source online learning platform that powers edX.org as well as hundreds of other online courses around the world. To get it now, please see the Cypress installation instructions. This release is absolutely jam packed with new features and […]
Announcing Mitchel Resnick as Open edX Con Keynote Speaker
We are thrilled to announce that Mitchel Resnick, educator, technologist, and developer of Scratch, will deliver a keynote address to Open edX Con 2015 on Monday, October 12th. Mitchel Resnick has been teaching and learning technology with children since the early 1990s. Along the way he has developed innovative tools, philosophies, and approaches to pedagogy. […]
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 […]
Open edX powered by Bitnami on AWS Marketplace
In a partnership between AWS, Bitnami, and edX, the Open edX Stack is now available in the AWS Marketplace as Open edX powered by Bitnami. Bitnami creates and maintains a library of popular server applications and development environments, set up for easy installation. These applications and environments are ready to work out of the […]
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 […]
#OpenedXHack, biggest Open edX Hackathon, first in France
On May 29 and 30, 2015, I had the pleasure to participate as an “event-helper” & jury in the largest-ever Open edX hackathon, held in France, and organized by OpenedX, IONISx (the digital learning arm – built on the Open edX platform – of IONIS Education Group, which includes the largest computer science schools in […]
Every Bit Helps
This month marks Open edX’s second anniversary. Happy anniversary everyone! 🙂 The edX project was launched in May 2012, with its first commit dating back to December 2011. But as a user of the platform, June 1, 2013 looked like Christmas. The code that was powering edx.org was open-sourced! Of course, changing the license and publishing […]
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 […]
Happy Open-iversary edX!
Two years ago, we took our platform and released it to the world under the AGPL. Not only could anyone install, setup, and use the same software that powers edX.org, they could also develop, change, modify, and share it with anyone (and everyone) else. The past two years have been exciting. We have worked with […]
#OpenedXHack
Over the past few days, six edXers have flown from Cambridge, MA to Paris in order to participate in an Open edX hackathon in France. Alongside France Université Numérique (FUN-MOOC) and IONISx, Nimisha Asthagiri, David Baumgold, Gabe Mulley, Beth Porter, Brian Talbot, and Ed Zarecor will be mentoring over a hundred students in developing the […]
Community Site: Open Online Academy
Recently, VP of Product Beth Porter met Ivan Shumkov from Open Online Academy (OOAc), which teaches architecture, design, construction, and real estate courses using the Open edX platform. Among their efforts, student work is shared and distributed using open licenses. One of their MOOCs was about designing “resilient” schools, capable of serving as community centers […]
Open edX at PyCon 2015
PyCon 2015 is coming up, and we’re all super excited! PyCon is the largest annual gathering for the community using the Python programming language, and since Open edX is written in Python, it’s a big event for us. This year, Open edX is an official sponsor of PyCon, and we have several great events planned […]
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 […]
9th edX Hackathon: Hacking is <3
Today our engineering team kicks off our 9th edX Hackathon! This is an opportunity for edX employees to work on edX and Open edX projects outside of our typical responsibilities and commitments. EdX engineers and non-engineers alike will dedicate the next two days to special projects including: Update Django Student Activity Dashboard: Create visual to […]
Birch Released!
It’s here! After lots of testing and several bug fixes, we’ve declared the Birch release candidate to be stable, and Birch is now a full-fledged release of the Open edX software. Aspen was released only about four months ago, but that’s a long time when it comes to Open edX development. Between Aspen and Birch, we changed […]
How We Find Sites built with Open edX Platform
We try our best to maintain a list of sites and instances of Open edX platform. Some of these are reported to us by the the owners of the instances when they update the Github wiki or while they are developing their Open edX instance. However, a number of sites are found through clever use […]
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 […]
Re-Licensing Developer Tools and APIs
One of the things we take pride in at edX is our commitment to open source. An important decision in open-sourcing code is the choice of a license. For the most part, we’ve used the AGPL license. To better meet our open-source goals, however, we’re changing a few of our licenses. Our more than 30 public […]
PyCon 2015
PyCon sent out talk acceptance notifications yesterday, and our office got really excited when four edX employees were chosen to speak. David Baumgold: Advanced Git Ned Batchelder: Facts and Myths About Python Names and Values Sarina Canelake: I18N: World Domination the Easy Way Adam Palay: Words, Words, Words: Reading Shakespeare with Python If you’re going to PyCon 2015, say […]
How Stanford Runs Its Own Fork
Stanford runs an instance of the OpenEdX code base that a team of engineers actively develops. We maintain our own fork at github.com/Stanford-Online/edx-platform and we try to keep our fork close to edX master by merging monthly from edX’s main edx-platform repository (github.com/edx/edx-platform). We prefer to land code through pull requests (PRs) to edX’s main repository, but […]
Open edX Conference Wrap-up
The inaugural Open edX Conference is a wrap! With more than 30 speakers covering dozens of topics from open badging to shopping cart integration, we had no shortage of inspiring projects and discussions. Our goal was to make this conference as open as our platform, and we came away impressed as always with the enthusiasm […]
Welcome to the First Open edX Conference!
THANK YOU to everyone joining us for our first Open edX Conference! We’re excited to be hosting so many members of our Open edX community from around the world to discuss developments on our open source platform. Whether you’re on-campus or off, we’re hoping you’ll take part in the conversation. Some of the presentations will […]
Spotlight on Nate Aune, Appsembler Founder/CEO
The Open edX Conference kicks off tomorrow, and among the many talented developers and innovators we’re hosting, Nate Aune, founder and CEO of Appsembler, will be joining us to talk about his work with Open edX. Read on for more background on Nate and Appsembler. How does working with Open edX relate to Appsembler’s mission? Our […]
Spotlight on: Yasumasa Watanabe, Project Manager at NTT Knowledge Square Inc.
Yasumasa Watanabe will be joining us this week to discuss his work with Open edX as a project manager with NTT Knowledge Square Inc. Read on for more background from Yasumasa! Tell us about your Open edX instance. Our service “gacco”, the Japanese MOOC powered by Open edX, is located in Tokyo, Japan. We’ve been […]
Spotlight on: Xavier Antoviaque, CEO/Founder of OpenCraft
Our first Open edX Conference is just days away! We’re expecting a great turnout, and are excited to meet Open edX community members from around the world. Meanwhile, read on for some background on Xavier Antoviaque‘s work with the Open edX platform as CEO and Founder of OpenCraft. Where is OpenCraft located? OpenCraft is a French company, but in […]
Spotlight on: Kerri Lemoie, CTO of Achievery
Kerri Lemoie, CTO of Achievery, will join us next week from Providence, RI, to discuss her team’s work with digital credentials, micro-credentials, Open Badges, and API functionality to integrate Open Badges into Open edX. Read on to learn more about how they got started! How does working with Open edX relate to Achievery’s mission? Achievery […]
Spotlight on: Ignacio Despujol, UPV
We look forward to welcoming Ignacio Despujol, New Internet Application Senior Analyst at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), to the Open edX Conference next week. Read on for more background on his work with Open edX! Where is UPV located? In Valencia, on the east coast of Spain, in southern Europe. How does […]
The Evolution of edX Course Discussions
Earlier this year, the course discussion engineering team at edX revisited our decision to build a custom discussion platform. In the course of investigating alternatives, we determined that support for the unique usage patterns of our users (both course staff and students) and deep integration with our courseware are key differentiators for edX. This determination […]
Spotlight on: Samuel Soubeyran, Neodemia
Samuel Soubeyran will be joining us for the Open edX Conference (register here!) to discuss his work as CTO of Neodemia, which builds MOOCs and SPOCs for clients such as BNP Paribas and BDO. Read on for more background on Neodemia’s work on the Open edX platform. Where are you/your organization located? Neodemia is located at the ENSAM incubator in Paris. […]
Spotlight on: Philippe Chiu, IONISx
In a few short weeks, Philippe Chiu will join us from Paris, France to discuss his role in EdTech as the Director of Digital Learning at IONIS and Managing Director at IONISx. Read on as Philippe fields some questions to give you a preview of what you’ll see at the Open edX Conference. Where is your […]
Louis Pilfold: From edX Student to Open edX Contributor
Guest post by: Louis Pilfold, edX Student and Open edX Contributor. This post originally ran on the edX blog on 11/3/2014. MITx’s Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python (6.00x) was my first online course. I heard about it on Reddit’s “learn programming” section. The course seemed to have an excellent reputation, so I figured it was worth […]
Spotlight on: Karl Mehta, EdCast
We look forward to welcoming Karl Mehta, Founder & CEO of EdCast Inc., to the Open edX Conference on November 18. A tech entrepreneur and investor, Karl also plays an active role in policy and government: He was selected by the Obama administration to serve as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow in 2012, and he is an active […]