Updated for 2026 to reflect current institutional LMS requirements. TL;DR If you’re responsible for selecting or upgrading your institution’s learning management system (LMS), whether you work in a university, government department, or enterprise, this guide is for you. Below, you’ll find our no-fluff take on: By the end, you’ll have a clear framework for making […]
In our recent guide on choosing the best open-source LMS for universities, governments, and enterprises, we explored why open technologies provide public institutions with greater control, transparency, and long-term value compared to proprietary platforms. This article takes that discussion a step further. Government organizations worldwide are steadily expanding their online learning initiatives, ranging from internal […]
Open edX is one of the world’s most powerful open-source learning management systems (LMSs). And honestly, there’s no greater show of trust than the institutions that rely on it. We’re talking Harvard, MIT, Western Governors University (WGU), Arizona State University, Zoom, and the list just keeps going. It’s a platform trusted by universities, governments, and […]
At OpenCraft, we are often approached by clients who want to push the boundaries of what the Open edX® platform can do. In this case, the request was clear: design and develop a suite of 10 custom XBlocks that would enhance interactivity, support innovative teaching methods, and remain fully compatible with the core platform. Project […]
Recognition is powerful in online learning. It motivates learners, supports educators, and signals skills to employers. With its global scale and flexibility, the Open edX Platform has the potential to recognize learning in so many ways. But currently, certificates only tell one story: pass or fail. That simplicity leaves a lot unsaid. It doesn’t capture […]
This year, the Open edX Conference will be held from July 2 – 5, 2024 in Stellenbosch, South Africa. I’m so excited for the community to visit my beautiful country! And what’s more, we have some awesome talks lined up by our very own OpenCrafters. Getting Started with Frontend Pluggability Tuesday 10:00 AM | Braden […]
The arrival of new AI technology has sent the world of online education abuzz. The new technologies have brought new excitement to e-learning, but it’s difficult to tell what’s hype and what’s not. What will the impact of AI be in the online learning space? What’s likely to change? What will remain the same? We’ll […]
Open edX presents Content Tagging! "Tagging" has been a long-requested feature for managing content in Studio, and now OpenCraft is finally designing and building it for Axim Collaborative! While there are big plans, the first release will be a user-friendly, minimal viable product. Here are some of the things everyone can look forward to: So, get ready for more organized learning content. Tagging […]
After an unforgettable Open edX 2022 conference and co-working retreat last year in Lisbon, Portugal, we were eager to see what our 2023 trip had in store!
This year, the Open edX Conference will be held from March 28 – 31 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The conference schedule is jam-packed with awesome tutorials, talks, and workshops. You will hear from three of our coding wizards. Check out their talks below: Building Collaborative Classes - Borrowing From Open Source Practices by Xavier Antoviaque […]
Conference Preview Get a sneak peek of the 2023 Open edX Conference with tCRIL's series of "Conference Preview" blog posts. The articles focus on the less-publicized but equally exciting Tuesday and Friday schedules, in addition to the two main days of the conference. Mark your calendars for March 28-31, and stay tuned, as session proposals […]
Olive Released 🫒 The fifteenth Open edX community release, called Olive, is now out! The release was coordinated by the Open edX community via the Build / Test / Release working group, and brings improvements to the Discussions Micro-frontend (MFE) and HTML component editors, but also novelties like the brand-new Authentication MFE. You can also learn more […]
Listaflow is a new open source tool being built by our team here at OpenCraft. Although it is still in its early stages, Listaflow is already being put to good use by the Open edX community. In this post, I’ll give a brief overview of: The Story Behind Listaflow OpenCraft is a remote company, with […]
2023 Conference Keynotes The team at tCRIL announced the first two keynote speakers for the 2023 Open edX Conference, taking place March 28-31 at MIT: Early Bird rates are available for only a few more weeks – so go ahead and book your conference ticket! -> Register now for the 2023 Open edX Conference December Meetup The […]
When you search Google images for “UX design process” you’ll probably see something a little like this: I wish the UX design process was that simple. In my experience it looks more like this: Yup, that’s right! It’s a mess. Just the sight of it makes the control freak in me break out into a […]
Here's a recap of our October 2022 newsletter: Open edX Conference 2023 The 2023 Open edX conference has just been announced! The event will take place between Tuesday, March 28 and Friday, March 31 2023 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The annual conference is a great opportunity to meet members of the community […]
There are some great resources for building extensions to the Open edX platform. The XBlock SDK is excellent, and MFEs offer a great way to build a custom frontend for your Open edX LMS. However, sometimes you need a fully independent application which can communicate to the LMS on behalf of your users. So, today […]
Here's a recap of our September newsletter: TOC Election - Sep 30 deadline In October, the Open edX Community will be called to elect 3 members of the new core decision-making body of the Open edX project — the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) — and we need your help! The 3 elected community representatives will […]
OpenCraft has been interested in working on improvements to the discussions infrastructure in Open edX for quite some time now, and created a proposal for creating a Discourse plugin for Open edX and making Discussions a pluggable component back in 2019. Since then, we got the opportunity to work on a major blended development project […]
Register to vote In October 2022, members of the Open edX Community will be called to elect 3 members of the new core decision-making body of the Open edX project — the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) — and we need your help! The 3 elected community representatives will join the TOC, along with the 3 members […]
September Community Meetup The September Open edX Meetup will happen on Thursday September 22 at 10am EST. It will feature two speakers: John Swope, from Curricu.me, and Ed Zarecor, VP of Engineering at tCRIL. John will demonstrate how to use Advanced Assessment and Javascript within the Open edX platform with fun and flexible exercises. Ed […]
Nutmeg Features Nutmeg is the latest Open edX named release. Our friend Sarina Canelake, Engineering Manager at the Center For Reimagining Learning (tCRIL), published a short series of blog posts that look at some of the newest additions to the Open edX software. The Nutmeg Feature Round-up offers a tour of several new learner and instructor-facing features, […]
A few months back, I wrote a blog post on how to build your own Micro Front End for the Open edX platform. More than half of the post's content was centered around Redux. Redux is complicated. It's frustrating. In fact, most developers I know would rather forget it even exists. However, it's hard to […]
Here's a recap of our June 2022 newsletter: Nutmeg Release Nutmeg, the latest stable version of the Open edX platform, is now released! Nutmeg brings exciting new features such as the user tour (taking new learners through a quick tour of the course), new weekly course goals with reminder emails, and improvements to various micro […]
User Retirement in an Open edX platform is the very last stage of the user account’s lifecycle, which begins with registration of a new user. That is, it is the thing that happens when a user clicks on the “Delete My Account” button on the Account Settings page. However, it is not a single step, […]
Here's a recap of our May 2022 newsletter: Lisbon Conference + Retreat Recap The OpenCraft team flew to Lisbon, Portugal to attend a team retreat and participate in the 2022 Open edX Conference. All OpenCraft team members work remotely — the Conference is always a great occasion for us to meet in person, to work […]
After three years of not seeing each other in the flesh, the OpenCraft team flew to Lisbon, Portugal to attend a well-deserved team retreat and participate in the 2022 Open edX Conference. All OpenCraft team members work remotely — the Conference is always a great occasion for us to meet in person, to work together, […]
Here's a recap of our April 2022 newsletter: This edition of our newsletter will be shorter than usual, because our team is currently retreating in beautiful & sunny Lisbon, Portugal. ☀️ We're seeing each other for the first time in three years, and we're having a great time! The weather is beautiful (although quite windy at times!), […]
Introduction We at OpenCraft, while maintaining Open edX instances for our clients, often run into unique problems that have quite interesting solutions. Sometimes the journey leading to these solutions ends up teaching us a lot about software engineering itself. Through this blog, we want to share the experience of one such journey that we undertook […]
Open edX Conference The program and schedule for the 2022 Open edX Conference are now live! Please visit Sched to see the full program and build your own custom conference schedule. Conference registration is also still open. The 2022 Conference spans four days: Tues, April 26 – Registration + Tutorials and in-depth trainingWed, April 27 – Conference Day 1 […]
The Open edX Core Contributor Program grants community members expanded rights and ownership over various aspects of the Open edX Project, allowing them to actively participate in defining and deciding the direction of the platform. Members of the Core Contributor program earn this distinction by participating in Open edX community with distinction. They embody what […]
Conference Themes The 2022 Open edX Conference will be hosted in-person in Lisbon, Portugal, from Apr. 26-29. You should register as soon as possible – the early bird rates end on Feb 28th! The Open edX team is putting together an ambitious program: the conference will present innovative uses of open source technology in higher education and […]
This article was co-written by OpenCraft team member Adolfo Brandes and Daniel Seaton, Sr. Learning Systems Designer at MIT. In this article, we'll describe how problems, videos, and pages from Open edX courses can be reused on the Canvas LMS via a new LTI implementation in Libraries v2, a feature recently developed by OpenCraft for […]
Here's a recap of our January 2022 newsletter: Open edX Conference After two years of forced hiatus, the long awaited, in-person Open edX Conference is finally back! As recently announced by Open edX, the 2022 conference is scheduled for April 26th-29th, and will be hosted in Lisbon, Portugal. We at OpenCraft are preparing to submit […]
Governance As the stewardship of the Open edX platform is moving from edX/2U to the newly formed Center For Reimagining Learning (tCRIL), the team has announced the creation of a Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) as a new governance structure to the project. The TOC will have nine members: three from The Center for Reimagining Learning, three from […]
Travel’s been rare over the last year. Recently, our CEO Xavier and I flew into Cambridge and sat down with several clients and community members. It was the first time in a long time. Over the course of two weeks, each order of coffee came with a splash of the same question. Everyone wanted to […]
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 […]
The Open edX platform is a large open source project that has been around close to a decade. The web changed in the years from its initial release. In particular, frontend technology advanced to the point where dedicated applications can be built in JavaScript. To keep pace, the community has adopted the use of "Micro […]
Here is a recap of our October 2021 newsletter: Maple Release Update The master branches for Maple, the next Open edX Release, have been prepared and announced! Note that the prepared branches are mainly for community members interested in helping review and build Maple, and not for public consumption. Tutor also recently added support for the master Maple […]
A good way to assess learners in online courses is to evaluate essay-type text responses through a set of well-defined quantized criteria (called rubrics). The Open Response Assessment (ORA) is a component available in the Open edX platform that allows creating free-text input and offers a variety of evaluation methods based on rubrics: peer-graded, staff-graded, […]
Community Event The Open edX community hosted an online event on Friday, September 17. It featured a talk by Ed Zarecor on the state of the Open edX project, a case study on using the platform to address public sector online education needs by academia, and a review of the platform’s market niche. We also discussed where […]
This article was written by team members Shimul Chowdhury and Guruprasad Lakshmi Narayanan. An Open edX "site" presents a catalog of courses and course content in an individual way. A vanilla Open edX instance features a main, single site by default, but — did you know the platform could support multiple sites, all hosted on […]
Open edX Community Event All members of the community are invited to join a virtual Open edX conference and meetup, scheduled on Sept 17th. The event will feature Ed Zarecor, the Engineering Director for the Open edX platform, who will discuss the future direction of the platform with the audience. Attendees can expect a few […]
This article was written by Giovanni Cimolin (OpenCraft) and Ned Batchelder (edX). Learning Tools Interoperability® (LTI®) is a standard used to integrate different learning platforms and tools and allows a richer learning experience through the use of graded problems, interactive content, and third-party applications. LTI support in the Open edX platform opens a wide range […]
Here is a recap of our July 2021 newsletter: 2U Acquires edX 2U, an educational technology company, announced that it is acquiring edX. The proceeds of the transaction ($800 million) will go to a non-profit that will continue under the leadership of the edX founders, Harvard and MIT. The non-profit will own and keep growing the Open […]
Here is a recap of OpenCraft's June 2021 newsletter. Lilac Released Lilac, the twelfth Open edX community release, is now officially available! Like Koa before it, the Lilac release was coordinated by the Build-Test-Release community working group, led by OpenCraft team member Adolfo Brandes. This new version of the platform comes with a list of improvements and new […]
Software development is a complex process. Anyone looking to invest in software for their company wants to know that they are investing well. However, most software development engagements of scale will take place over the course of many months or even years. How can you be sure your software team will meet your needs? We […]
This blog post was co-authored by OpenCraft team member Usman Khalid and edX team member Dave Ormsbee. It is with great excitement that we're announcing that all the XModules in the Open edX platform have recently been converted into XBlocks. What are XModules? XModule was the original framework for course components in edx-platform, and the […]
Here is a recap of OpenCraft's May 2021 newsletter. Open edX Conference The 2021 Open edX virtual conference happened on May 24th, and was a great success! As co-organizers, presenters, and sponsors of the event, we were very proud to participate in a series of captivating talks and discussions about the future of online education. […]
At OpenCraft, we do a lot of feature development for our clients. While the Open edX platform is great and feature-packed out of the box, the best part is its extensibility. And we take full advantage of that when we need to develop a new feature. The most important part When developing a new feature, […]
Here is a recap of OpenCraft's April 2021 newsletter. Open edX Conference The 2021 Open edX Virtual Conference has officially been announced! The event is structured as a half day event and will occur on Thursday, May 27th, between 1PM and 5PM (UTC). Our CTO Braden will be hosting a talk on LabXChange and Open edX’s next-generation learning content […]
This article was written by Braden MacDonald, CTO of OpenCraft & Nimisha Asthagiri, Chief Architect at edX Announcement As part of edX’s ongoing commitment to empower the Open edX community, the Core Committers Program was created last year to share development responsibilities across major Open edX providers & institutions. Based on the success of the […]
This blog post shows how to enable encryption at rest for Amazon S3 Object Storage used by your Open edX instance. When you use server-side encryption, Amazon S3 encrypts an object before saving it to a disk, and decrypts it when you download it again. The first question is Why would you want to do […]
Here is a recap of OpenCraft's March 2021 newsletter. Intro to Open edX Platform Ned Batchelder from edX and Fox Piacenti from OpenCraft gave a joint talk during the last Online Community Meetup. Ned explained the difference between edX and the Open edX system. Fox gave an overview of the components that make up the […]
Every industry has its best practices, and we follow them for a simple reason: to walk the path already forged and successfully tested by others. In this blog post, I will describe some of the practices we employ to reduce maintenance and ensure maximum reliability in our hosting of Open edX instances. Closely follow Open […]
The Open edX platform is constantly growing in every aspect, something that’s desirable for every Open Source Software that proves to be useful and true to the name. In that sense, the ways of setting up the platform keep evolving, too. Unless you’re knowledgeable with the tools used for working with the platform in a local environment, there is no “simple” way to get started with an instance without help. That’s where we come in.
The parts of the Open edx platform are numerous and can be confusing. Newcomers lose themselves in the project's size. Getting your bearings can be a challenge, as we covered in our article on the DevStack. However, a quick overview can go a long way in understanding the Open edX platform's Components. We shall see […]
Arguably, one of the biggest things about the most recent Open edX release, Koa, is that it officially supports the deployment of (some of) the newfangled micro-frontends edX has been putting out. Among them is edX Publisher, also known as frontend-app-publisher, and we at OpenCraft feel it warrants some introduction in addition to what’s in […]
If your company runs a copy of the Open edX platform, you may feel satisfied with its impressive array of features. However, keeping an up-to-date installation is essential for several reasons. You would not want to end up facing security issues, being stuck with old bugs, or missing out on great things the platform has […]
If you’ve had the opportunity to take a course on edx.org, you might wonder how you can contribute to the Open edX platform. The Open edX project is massive – involving many interdependent pieces working together. Deploying the Open edX platform takes a great deal of expertise. However, you can run your own copy for […]
The edX.org website opened in 2012 as a massive online learning destination with free courses that anyone could enjoy. Today, edX® tracks hundreds of thousands of learners. When the Open edX platform was released in 2013, the need to serve large audiences drove its features. A system oriented around such large course sizes needed to […]
The Chat XBlock describes itself as "An XBlock that allows learners to chat with a bot, where the bot follows a script and the learner can choose among possible responses."
Work often involves a lot of repetitive and time-heavy tasks. For example, at OpenCraft we automate the decommissioning of unneeded servers, the preparation of monthly invoices for our employees, and tasks like sending reminders about project and sprint planning. Since most of these tasks require following a step by step procedure, we work carefully to […]
Note: we no longer offer our Pro & Teacher Plan A few months ago we decided to rebuild our Open edX instance manager frontend to provide more customization options and features to our Pro & Teacher plan subscribers and trial users. We needed to go from a simple registration form (shown below) to a full […]
So, you’ve been looking for a learning management system (LMS) and have decided that the open source Open edX platform makes the most sense. You’re not alone! It’s the most widely used LMS platform in the world, with 45 million people using it in 34 different languages. It’s open source, so you don’t have to […]
Congratulations! Congratulations to Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Amgen Foundation, and the LabXchange team on this win! Even though the Open edX Conference was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the awesome team at Open edX chose to celebrate the work of its community by announcing the inaugural Open edX prize earlier […]
We’ve consciously built OpenCraft on four values: Openness, quality, commitment and empathy. When it comes to quality, especially when it comes to ensuring the best privacy, security and flexibility for our users, we don’t do half-measures. We work as hard as we can to ensure that our clients get the best possible Open edX development […]
I’m excited to share that we have launched an updated Pro & Teacher hosting plan for your Open edX® instances! We work very closely with our clients, and we listen to their feedback. As such, we have been working hard to improve our hosting plan after hearing that customization was too limited, the process to […]
At OpenCraft, we work daily with top-tier universities. This probably isn’t all that surprising given that we specialize in developing and maintaining custom instances of Open edX, which is an open source course management platform that hosts Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and online learning. A massive number of institutions worldwide are members of edX.org, […]
Foreword It’s probably not a surprise that a company that develops open source software values transparency. After all, transparency is one of open source’s biggest benefits. Concerned about the security of the software? Worried about whether it is compatible with other critical systems? Need to understand exactly which services the application relies on? With open […]
From fall of 2016 through summer of 2018, OpenCraft worked closely with the edX for Business team and Arbisoft to build out and improve several crucial features for the Open edX Enterprise Service. These features still exist today and are ready for everyone in the Open edX community to use, extend, and build upon. We’ll […]
Foreword In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, hundreds of millions of people have suddenly had to adjust to working remotely, often with no more than a day or two to prepare. Not all companies have responded well. An internal memo sent out by management to Wall Street Journal employees, for example, recently drew a […]
This technical tutorial targets Ubuntu 19.10 and supports older versions down to Ubuntu 16. Introduction Your Linux user password prevents unauthorized logins to your Linux installation, but it does not prevent unauthorized access to your hard disk data. For instance, a thief that steals your computer could easily avoid the Linux user password entirely by using […]
This post was co-written by Braden MacDonald (CTO at OpenCraft) and Ned Batchelder (Software Architect at edX). This has also been posted by edX on the Open edX blog. LabXchange is launched! Congratulations to Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Amgen Foundation for the launch of LabXchange! LabXchange is an exciting new […]
Introduction The move to using Docker for the Open edX® devstack brought many improvements to our workflow, but it isn't obvious how to use a key developer tool with the Docker-based devstack: a python debugger. With recent changes to Visual Studio Code, it’s now possible for VS Code users to get Intellisense and debugging working […]
What H5P is (and why you should care) H5P is a tool that allows course authors to create rich HTML5 content for their courses, including games such as Find the Words and personality quizzes, multimedia apps such as audio recorders and interactive videos, as well as a variety of common and not-so-common question types. It […]
Are you looking into new solutions for your next online learning experience and do you want to offer courses on a customizable and expandable platform? Are you having doubts about which platform you should use to host your next training or class? This article will help you find out whether the Open edX platform is […]
This article was originally posted on the Open edX website. The upcoming Open edX® release contains an exciting, much-requested new feature: Public Course Content. This gives you the option to make either a course outline or course content available to anyone, regardless of whether they have registered for an Open edX platform user account or enrolled […]
The OpenCraft team was present at the 2019 Open edX Conference that was taking place on March 23-26 at University of California San Diego. All OpenCraft team members work remotely - the Conference is always a great occasion for us to meet in person, to work together and to cram in a few team meals […]
