Catch OpenCraft at the Open edX Conference 2024

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 MacDonald, our CTO is co-presenting this talk with other community members.  

You may have heard it's now possible to write plugins for Open edX micro-frontend pages.  Awesome, right? No more forking! (Or, at least, not always...) This workshop teaches you how to build a plugin from start to finish, getting plenty of guidance along the way.

All you need is an internet-connected device, a browser, and a comfortable way to enter text. Development will be done remotely: there's nothing to install on your machine this time around!

Advanced Frontend Pluggability

Tuesday 1:30 PM | Braden MacDonald, our CTO is co-presenting this talk with other community members.  

In October 2023, a group of frontend wizards gathered for the Frontend Pluggability Summit. The goal? To devise solutions that allowed developers to modify the user experience of a Micro Frontend (MFE) without the need for forking. One solution stood out: the Default UI Slots components mechanism. This workshop will dive deeper into this mechanism, showcasing its proven potential to extend MFEs within the Open edX community.

A Deep Dive Into the Open edX Platform’s Competitive Standing & Future Enhancements - Part 1

Tuesday 1:30 PM | Douglas Draper, our Learning Specialist is co-presenting this talk with other community members. 

This two-part workshop will provide a detailed analysis of the Open edX Platform's competitive standing in the EdTech market and will include the following topics:

• Current trends in E-Learning 
• Comparison of the Open edX Platform and other open source LMS 
• Map of the global deployments for the Open edX platform, highlighting its major markets
• Interactive SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis 

We hope that you will join us for this engaging and interactive two-part workshop! 

A Deep Dive Into the Open edX Platform’s Competitive Standing & Future Enhancements - Part 2

Tuesday 4:00 PM | Douglas Draper, our Learning Specialist is co-presenting this talk with other community members. 

This workshop represents part two of the "Deep Dive Into the Open edX Platform’s Competitive Standing & Future Enhancement" workshop and will cover an analysis of the Open edX roadmap, whether it reflects market trends, and recommendations to align the roadmap with consumer and community interests.

Client Strategy & Retention

Wednesday 4:00 PM | Douglas Draper, our Learning Specialist is co-presenting this talk with other community members. 

What are the most important practices that ensure that Open edX clients are able to quickly see results with their educational initiatives and sustain that success over time? This session will showcase real examples of how Open edX partners help major learning institutions tackle their technical issues while addressing the strategic challenges that ensure long term excellence.

Peeling the Layers of Open edX - Exploring the Maze that is XBlock Runtime

Thursday 1:15 PM | Kaustav Banerjee and Piotr Surowiec, OpenCraft developers, are co-presenting this talk.

Does the Open edX codebase seem too complex and intimidating? Let’s trace the code: from shiny new MFEs all the way to the guts of the XBlock runtime. We’ll explore the major classes and their inter-dependencies, and we’ll review some of the recent efforts to simplify the XBlock runtime.

Taming the Authorization Beast in Open edX: Looking into the Platform’s Access Model & Future

Thursday 2:15 PM | Maxim Beder and Moncef Abboud, OpenCraft developers, are co-presenting this talk.

Authorization in Open edX is a critical element that governs user access and permissions within the platform. This talk gives an overview of the access model and how it works. It delves into the technical details of its implementation. It’ll look at the current state of authorization, how roles are implemented and their existing limitations, and how upcoming developments will address these limitations.

Flexible Credentials in Open edX

Thursday 2:15 PM | Piotr Surowiec and Farhaan Bukhsh, OpenCraft developers, are co-presenting this talk.

Discover a practical alternative to default certification methods. We will explore a new Open edX plugin that gives developers and instructors the power to craft personalized certificates, define tiers based on learner performance, and customize criteria for issuing certificates.

React Query: Why We Love It

Thursday 3:40 PM | Braden MacDonald, our CTO is presenting this talk. 

Many Open edX frontends (MFEs) are developed using a state management library called Redux, which is powerful but tends to require a lot of boilerplate code. In this talk, you’ll meet React Query, a popular alternative library for fetching data from the backend. Learn how it provides a better experience for both developers and users.

How UX Can Minimize Distractions in Learning Platforms

Thursday 3:50 PM | Ali Hugo and Cassie Zamparini, OpenCraft Product Managers, are co-presenting this talk.

The success of a learning platform goes beyond the quality of course content; it also hinges on the user experience within the platform. By using minimal UX to create distraction-free interfaces, we can foster focused learning and empower learners to succeed in their educational endeavors. 

A distracted mind is not an effective one. In this talk we’ll show you how thoughtful UX design can establish focus and help learners apply their minds to the content that matters.

Aspects Analytics: I Didn't Know You Could Do That!

Thursday 4:30 PM | Jillian Vogel, Senior Developer & DevOps, is co-presenting this talk with other community members. 

Did you know…

• …that Aspects is Open edX's officially supported analytics platform?
• …that you can add custom queries and charts to Aspects?
• …that you can integrate your organization's processes into the analytics pipeline?
• …that you can swap in hosted solutions for the databases and services?

Aspects was designed from the ground up to be modular and extensible. In this talk, we'll discuss and demonstrate how to customize and extend the Aspects Analytics system for you.

Want to know more about the Open edX Conference 2024?

Join us at this year's Open edX Conference along with global EdTech leaders. Learn about innovative uses of the Open edX Platform within various business and higher education institutions, and come discover the latest advancements in instructional design, course constellation, and methods for operating and extending the Open edX platform. To learn more visit the conference website or review the conference schedule.