Catch OpenCraft at the Open edX Conferen …
Catch OpenCraft at the Open edX Conferen …
Catch OpenCraft at the Open edX Conference 2023

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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 

Would you like to involve your learners in contributing, building, and improving your courses? 

Xavier is presenting recognized best-practices that have made open source communities successful. With decades of field-tested approaches in building collaborative online projects, open-source communities can provide a useful perspective to educators looking to develop a different kind of engagement with their students.

Xavier will be speaking on March 29, 2023.

About Xavier

Xavier is an Open edX Technical Oversight Committee member and contributor. He’s also active in several community working groups. And he was one the very first outside contributors to the Open edX codebase!

Xavier founded OpenCraft when he noticed there was a huge demand for instance customization and feature development on edX. To take on this challenge, he rounded up some of the best developers in the world!

OpenCraft is now one of the largest contributors to the Open edX code base (outside of edX, of course). We provide design, development, and hosting services for clients like Harvard, MIT, edX/2U, and Esme.

Xavier loves all things open source and has been a tenured contributor of free software communities; he co-created the free software game Card Stories, initiated the Ryzom.org campaign, and is a former board member of April, the primary free software advocacy organization in France.

Xavier is really active on the Open edX discussion forum. So reach out to him there!

Product Development in the Open: From Visibility to Collaboration

by Braden MacDonald, and tCRIL’s Jenna Makowski and Dave Ormsbee

tCRIL and OpenCraft led Product Discovery work on the Modular Learning Initiative. This initiative makes authoring more flexible by ensuring all parts of the course are independent, composable, and reusable. The teams adopted an “open first” philosophy, making product development a transparent process. Braden, Jenna, and Dave will discuss how community input shaped the project’s direction. They’ll also discuss what they learned, how they can improve community input channels, and ways for those that are interested to stay in the loop.

Braden will be speaking on March 29, 2023.

About Braden

Braden MacDonald is the CTO of OpenCraft, a Core Contributor to the Open edX project, and an active full stack developer. Braden has led the development of several major features of the Open edX platform, as well as many projects in the broader community ecosystem. He is the official maintainer of projects like Blockstore and Tutor’s ARM64 plugin, as well as several open-source projects outside of Open edX. When he’s not coding, Braden enjoys answering questions on the community forums.

Navigate your Data Lake with OARS

by Jillian Vogel, and tCRIL’s Brian Mesick

What are your wildest dreams for data analytics on the Open edX platform? Jill and Brian want to make those dreams come true.

In this talk, find out how far the Open Analytics Reference System (OARS) for the Open edX platform has come, and help guide where it's going. Jill and Brian want to hear from educators, administrators, operators, developers, and anyone else who wants to know more about how people are interacting with educational content.

Jill will be speaking on March 30, 2023.

About Jill

Jillian Vogel is a senior open-source developer and DevOps at OpenCraft. She’s an Open edX core contributor, and started contributing to the platform and analytics system in 2016. Jill loves working at OpenCraft because of our values, openness, quality, commitment, and empathy. She’s a firm believer in learning to code. She finds that even if someone doesn’t stay in tech, code is a tool that can be applied to any field, be it science, engineering, arts, or politics.

Catch Jill’s recent interview with LabXchange here.

What is the Open edX Conference?

The Open edX Conference is an annual 4-day event where the Open edX community and experts in ed-tech meet to discuss the latest industry research, technologies to enhance teaching and learning, and any technical advances in the Open edX platform.

We love delivering top-notch learning management solutions.

We’re an elite team of designers and developers, who love creating quality learning management solutions. Let’s chat about your latest project.

Photo credits: Unsplash

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