Open edX Community -
June 1st marks the one year anniversary of the open source release of the edX platform. Stanford has been using our own Open edX instance since April 2013. We've successfully run twenty public MOOC's and many more courses for on-campus use. We have developed and contributed back many features to adapt the platform for our own pedagogical and research needs. As you can see in our just-published "Stanford Online 2013 In Review," Open edX is an important enabler of Stanford's online education efforts (see this announcement or download a PDF copy of the full report
).
We would now like to see adoption of Open edX really take off. We believe Stanford has a useful vantage point to observe and comment on what is working, and what is not, in the open-source project. We are sharing with this community our recommendations to improve governance, core technology, and community management. We believe making these improvements will drive adoption amongst teachers, hosting providers, researchers, IT departments, and developers. Our recommendations are informed by interviews with a dozen stakeholders.
I invite you to read our findings and recommendations document in either Google Doc or plain HTML formats. But for the impatient I've copy/pasted our twelve recommendations in the bottom of this mail.
Nate Aune, an experienced entrepreneur and open-source contributor, did the research for Stanford and authored the paper. Thank you to Nate, the interviewees, and reviewers who made this happen.
We look forward to ongoing work with the edX leadership and engineering team to improve open-source efforts and improve the platform.
- Sef Kloninger
Head of Engineering, Stanford Online
Office of the Vice Provost for Online Learning
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Governance
Clarify and communicate the mission of Open edX
Establish clear guidelines for contributors
Expand governance to involve community in technical and product decisions
Technical Improvements
Open up the development process: public wiki’s, public bug tracking
Move to 2-4 stable releases per year: release notes, upgrade scripts, improved packaging and testing
Provide more ways to extend and modify the platform without having to change the core: content interfaces and API’s
Improve the Open edX documentation
Create a more informative website targeted at platform adopters
Establish an ecosystem of commercial vendors and hosting providers
Community Building
Hire a full time Open edX community manager
Establish, measure, and communicate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Create forums to engage platform users (developers, hosting providers, researchers), e.g. user group meetings and office hours