11-21 Newsletter: 2U Acquisition, End-Of-Year Virtual Event, Maple Release, Tech Radar

Posted by Gabriel D'Amours on December 6, 2021

2U Acquisition

E-Learning company 2U has completed its acquisition of the edX.org website and assets, as announced in Open edX's recent blog post. The Open edX project itself isn’t included in the sale. The proceeds from the transaction will fund a new nonprofit which will take over stewardship of the project, and also invest in other online learning projects. A Technology Oversight Committee (TOC) will be created to lead the Open edX platform's development and community governance. The committee, whose members have not been announced yet, will include representatives from the nonprofit, edX/2U, as well as other community members. edX and U2 have also made a formal pledge to contribute to the ongoing development of the platform.

-> Read the official press release by edX/2U

End-Of-Year Virtual Event

All members of the community are invited to join Open edX's end-of-year virtual conference and meetup, scheduled on December 14th, 2 pm-5 pm UTC. The keynote speech will be a "State Of Open edX" discussion about the creation of the new nonprofit, and the way forward for edX and 2U following the acquisition. Attendees can expect a few additional talks, along with ample time for chatting and networking. We are looking forward to seeing you there!

-> Read more and register for the event on the Open edX blog

Upcoming Release

The Build-Test-Release working group has launched the Maple beta 1 release and commenced testing it. The working group is encouraging all community members who have the chance to test Maple as well, especially if you’re using a feature in the Open edX platform that isn’t widely used. A few issues have already been reported, and we need volunteers to help fix them. These issues are low-hanging fruits and good first issues for anyone to get started with. If you’ve ever considered contributing, now would be a great time!

On some additional news, the Lilac 3 open release has been released. You’re encouraged to upgrade your Lilac instances.

-> Click here to check the Maples issues that need some love

Core Contributors

The Core Contributor program continues to grow with the addition of the first new Product & UX Core Contributor, Ali Hugo from OpenCraft, and a potential Product Management Core Contributor in prospect. To better provide context about each contributor’s efforts to one another, the idea of adding sprints is being discussed and contributors are encouraged to participate.

The frontend working group is working on removing IE 11 support and upgrading to Node.js 16. The data working group has recently been discussing the ElasticSearch vs OpenSearch issue.

-> Read more community meetup updates

Tech Radar

The Open edX Tech Radar, first announced a few months ago, is now live! The Open edX tech radar is a visualization tool that represents the technologies used in the platform. Its goal is to help new developers get involved, but also to facilitate reviews and discussions about technologies, frameworks, techniques, and tools used in the platform. The radar was built through community effort and is maintained by the community in Github.

-> Learn more about the tech radar

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