"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 will make it easier for you to find, curate, and build relationships between course content. Your learners will thank you too! Think of courses that are effortlessly searchable and primed for personalization.
Contact us if you’d like to know more about the project.
A feature that will be released soon is copying and pasting course content. Talk about saving content authors more time! OpenCraft is very excited to be involved in the UX and development of this project. Ultimately, the feature will allow authors to copy sections, subsections, units and components, and then paste them into different locations within the same course or into a different course. No more duplicate work - whoop!
Keep your eye on the Open edX forum for the official public release of this feature.
We’re proud to announce that during the first six months of this year, three more OpenCrafters were bestowed the Core Contributor title. We now have 13 Core Contributors!
The Open edX Core Contributor program allows members to participate in defining and deciding the direction of the platform through design, coding, marketing, and more. To become a member you need to embody commitment to the project, exemplary conduct, and high caliber contributions. Well done to the following three team members:
Code Contributors:
UX and UI Contributor
Meet our amazing Chief Technology Officer! Braden hails from Vancouver, Canada. When he’s not doing awesome things with code, you’ll catch him hiking the glorious mountains right on his doorstep.
Braden started his journey at OpenCraft in 2014. But his journey in open source started with his first contribution at age 14! He loves being a part of the Open edX community, and the community loves him! He was made a Core Contributor in 2020. Projects that have received a lot of his attention are things related to XBlocks and how they're stored, including Modular Learning and Content Libraries. In fact, he’s super happy about being involved with the Modular Learning efforts where he’s building functionality that he and the community have wanted for a long time. Braden particularly loves being involved in architecture discussions. You’ll often catch him being extremely helpful on the Open edX forum.
Outside of OpenCraft and the Open edX community, Braden likes to work on open source JavaScript/TypeScript projects. He’s a big fan of Deno, TypeScript, and Next.js. He’s also the co-founder of Neolace and TechNotes, and owner of MacDonald Thoughtstuff Inc.
As I mentioned, Braden is really active on the Open edX forum, so reach out to him there!
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!
As our team is 100% remote, these two weeks of the year are a great way to connect, catch-up, and meet new team members. Sadly, not everyone was able to join in the fun, but we still had representatives from Australia, Europe, Asia, North America, South America, and Africa. Here’s the lowdown on the two weeks we spent together.
This year, Open edX went back to its roots and hosted its annual conference at MIT, the birthplace of the Open edX project. In fact, the conference was held in the very same building in which the first lines of code were written for the platform. Sitting there 12 years later, you couldn't help but think how much the platform has grown and how far we've come as a community over the years.
As some of Open edX's biggest fans and most active contributors, the OpenCraft team makes an effort to attend the conference whenever we can. It's a wonderful opportunity for us to reunite with the people we work with during the year - both within our own team and the community at large. Also, because our team members are often selected as speakers at the conference, we get the opportunity to show off what we've been working on and share our ideas with the community. In turn, we get the chance to learn about what others have been working on. We often leave a lecture hall feeling inspired by the efforts of other community members and brimming with new ideas!
Four OpenCraft team members presented a talk this year. Xavier Antoviaque spoke about "Building Collaborative Courses" by involving learners in the course creation process. Braden MacDonald joined other members of the Product Development team to introduce the Modular Learning Initiative to the community and discuss how community input helps shape product development. Jillian Vogel joined Brian Mesick to share the progress of the OARS (Open Analytics Reference System) project: an ambitious effort to improve the analytics of the Open edX platform. Lastly, Piotr Surowiec discussed the work that went into migrating a comprehensive theme from a legacy frontend to the MFE. He outlined the key differences between the theming options in the comprehensive theme and the MFE.
Every year, the welcome address and keynote talks are some of the main highlights of the conference. For those of you who couldn’t make it to Boston this year, we’ve linked to the videos of these talks below:
When not presenting talks, participating in workshops, or meeting with our clients, the OpenCraft team managed to sneak in some good old-fashioned fun! We beat the cold by visiting the Cambridge Brewing Company (who, by the way, serve delicious fried Brussel sprouts that even devout haters of the vegetable would enjoy!). We embarked on a self-guided tour through the MIT grounds where we marveled at the Biomimetic Robotics lab, got chased out of the library, and walked the campus grounds alongside a group of Canadian geese. On Wednesday night, we attended the conference reception where we wined and dined within the walls of the MIT Museum. And on the last day, just to throw in a little bit of culture, we visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum where we found each display to be more interesting and opulent than the last.
The conference went by in a flash, but we certainly managed to make the most of our time! Not only were we able to interact with the community in a way that remote collaboration doesn't always allow, but we also got the chance to strengthen our bond as a team - something money just can't buy! Once the 2023 conference had drawn to a close, we headed back to our Airbnbs to prepare for our next adventure: an OpenCraft co-working week in Bogotá, Colombia!
We arrived around the 1st of April, ready to have fun in the vibrant city of Bogotá. The Colombian capital is a whopping 2,625 meters (8,660 feet) above sea-level. We were warned that the city’s dizzying heights can give you a touch of soroche, or altitude sickness. So we made sure to take it easy the first few days after we’d landed.
One week is definitely not enough to catch all the sights of Bogotá. The city sprawls as far as the eyes can see, cradled between the chilly peaks of the Andes mountains. We experienced four seasons in one day. Sun, rain, wind, hail - you name it. We never knew what to expect. Thank goodness for our cozy co-working space at CO+LABORA in Usaquén. The area oozes cool. Trendy restaurants and bars adorn cobblestone streets, while storefronts are painted with bright patterns and colors.
When we travel as a team, you never go hungry. Everyone is eager to try everything! This time it was arepas, empanadas, pescado frito, ceviche, bunuelos, arequipe, and, of course, coffee!
While we do work a bit and the face-to-face interactions are invaluable, we also play a lot. Our team has an amazing adventurous spirit. But there’s also no pressure if a proposed activity is not your jam. For example, only a few of us decided to tackle the mountain of Monserrate. It sits 3,152 m (10,341 feet) above sea level, and it dominates the center of Bogotá. At the top of the mountain rests a church with a shrine, devoted to El Señor Caído. We set out, and it was testing. But in the words of our intrepid leader, Xavier Antoviaque, “This mountain isn’t going to hike itself!” And it didn’t. We used every muscle and every breath to make it to the top. The steep rise in altitude is what makes the hike a beast. The route is scenic and peppered with colorful vendors and their canine friends.
We stopped multiple times, not just to take in the majestic views, but to also catch our breath. But, we did it in the end! And it was worth it. Magnificent gardens lie at the foot of the church. The views are so good that no picture can really do them justice.
Other highlights of the trip included visiting and working at the awesome EduNext offices. We’re so lucky to have such wonderful friends and colleagues like you!
We also visited the beating heart of Bogotá, La Candelaria. The neighborhood‘s narrow streets are adorned with out-of-this-world graffiti, shops selling emeralds, handcrafts, religious artifacts, crystals, and sacred herbs for smudging. This melting pot of culture leads to hotspots like the Gold Museum and Museo Botero. Both showcase absolutely amazing collections. Not to be missed!
Now back to food. Every year we end our week with a special team dinner. Our team dinner this year was nothing short of spectacular. We were treated to course after course at Humo Negro. The chef presented us with his preferred menu. He was full of passion and it just added to the beauty of the experience. The dishes were beyond original, and praised local ingredients. Think “salad” that comes in the form of a ball that pops in your mouth, grilled oysters with burnt cream and seaweed, sea urchin mousse, crispy sea snail with pumpkin seed puree and pickled guatila, chawanmushi with pirarucu, scallops and spirulina, and arracacha with grilled wild berries and yogurt. I would never have been so daring if the food hadn’t been set down in front of me. And man, it’ll remain one of the best memories of food I’ll ever have. Our team laughed and bonded over these strange, surreal dishes. Well done, Humo Negro. Well done, OpenCraft!
On the last night, we had a festive night in. We sat around the fireplace at Xavier, Jill, and Piotr’s Airbnb. Kshitj cooked us a delicious curry and we tried a variety of native Colombian fruits. Some were more palatable than others 😂. Watching everyone pull a variety of faces was priceless.
I can’t believe another conference and co-working week has come and gone. I’ll forever be grateful to be part of this kind, wonderful team and community.
Until next year…
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:
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’re an elite team of designers and developers, who love creating quality learning management solutions. Let’s chat about your latest project.
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 from tCRIL and the 3 members from 2U.
The 3 elected community representatives have the mission to represent the community as a whole, but with each a specific focus:
If you or are running a currently active course on Open edX, please register to vote! This includes any form of contribution to the authoring of a course, and particularly Teaching Assistants (TAs).
Voter registration is open until September 30th, and the election will be held in October.
We also need the whole community’s help to let all eligible voters know that they can vote. Since we are an open source project, our community is spread over many individual Open edX sites. Many learners, instructors, TAs and operators will not be following the news here – so if you know any, or have any way to get the news of the election registration published where users of Open edX will see it, please help!
For more details about the election, see the TOC Community Election Charter which has been recently enacted by the TOC, after community review. This is still an experimental process, which the TOC might adjust based on the experience gained running the elections.
Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash
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, and cram in a few team meals and fun activities. Our time at the Conference was preceded by a week-long team retreat around Lisbon, Portugal, where we spent quality time together! Here’s a recap of those two weeks:
Most of the team arrived around the weekend of April 16-17 — coming from all corners of Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. While the majority of the team managed to fly to Lisbon, a few of us unfortunately could not make it, because of Covid-19 and visa-related issues. Sad. We'll see you next year! Still, there were more than 20 of us on-site, all ready to meet and have a good time!
Since the conference venue was located in the town of Carcavelos, roughly 20 km West of Central Lisbon, we decided to rent accommodations around that town to enjoy the weather, the beachfront location, and the relaxed atmosphere of the area. The Lisbon larger metropolitan area has a vast and efficient network of public transit, which made moving to other locations and getting to downtown very easy.
We bundled up in cozy Airbnbs, ready to work (a little), eat (a lot), and spend good times all together. Speaking of work — we rented two nice coworking spaces in nearby Estoril (another prime beachfront town!) to allow team members to catch up on work whenever they wished. Many of us also needed to prepare sessions for the conference, and the coworking spaces proved perfect for this.
During the first week, our days mostly consisted of going to the coworking space in the morning to get some work done, eating lunch together (often with a beach view!), working a little more, and spending the rest of the afternoon and evening doing stuff together. Oh, and we drank lots of strong espresso coffee, and ate unreasonable quantities of Portuguese pastries. Some went for the ubiquitous, sweet egg custard-filled pastel de natas, while others (such as myself) favored salty pastries such as the classic pastel de bacalhau, filled with cod fish. Portuguese take their pastries seriously, I'll tell you that — they're just everywhere!
Here are a few highlights from the first week:
We went on an e-bike tour, visiting a number of locations around Lisbon that offered gorgeous viewpoints of the city and its surroundings, featuring some of the city's brilliant street artwork. Things suddenly took an unexpected turn when our colleague Fox flew over his bike, and broke his arm. Yikes! Thankfully, he was taken good care of, and was able to enjoy the rest of his trip (although in a cast).
A board game night took place at Gabriel, Geoffrey, and Giovanni's place (a.k.a. the G-House). Many games were played, a bottle of fine whiskey was shared (thank you, Xavier!), pizza was eaten, and additional beverages were delivered to the apartment at a late hour. Success!
Some of us went diving in Cascais. After the logistical challenges (no car, no gear, zero knowledge of the area) were sorted out (Uber, gear hire and expertise from Bork), this was worth the effort. Xavier deserves all the credit for this, by the way — without his determined optimism, we never would have even gotten in! The water was cold, but the day was gorgeous. By swimming only a few meters off the coast, we saw octopus, many fishes, starfish, and sea urchins, buried amongst the rocky underwater ravines.
We went for an all-out bar crawl in the traditional neighborhood of Alfama, visiting all sorts of drinking and eating establishments. Which ones? How many? We don't remember exactly… but the food, ginjinha (cherry liqueur), cachaça (sugarcane spirit), and other delicacies were definitely abundant. To the great misfortune of one of our colleagues, one thing we definitely remember is that we did not find any chicken wings.
Following our team retreat, we all attended and participated in the 2022 Open edX Conference, hosted at the beautiful seaside campus of Nova School Of Business and Economics, in Carcavelos. The conference spanned from Tuesday, April 26th to Friday, April 29th — you can review the complete schedule in Sched.
We were truly eager to meet the Community again, and see old faces and new: people from The Centre for Reimagining Learning (tCRIL), friends at edX, team members from other service companies, and many of our clients attended in numbers. What a pleasure it was to reunite with familiar faces, and to meet new members of the community! After a lengthy period of isolation, coming all together again certainly felt like a blessing.
For this year's edition, the OpenCraft team got pretty involved in many aspects of the conference. Some of us had been busy for months helping tCRIL with the conference planning. Some volunteered for on-site help and many of us were invited to present sessions during the conference. In 2022, OpenCraft team members presented 4 hands-on tutorials, 4 breakout sessions, and 3 lightning talks — not bad! We were also the event's reception sponsor for this year.
This year's conference offered four distinct session tracks: Integrations and Extensions, Pedagogy and Instructional Design, Platform and Product, and a Virtual Track for those who could not attend in person. Our sessions touched on various topics, including UI/UX, Micro Front-Ends, platform deployment, LTI, and the Core Committers Program. By the way, all session recordings are available on Open edX's Youtube channel — go watch them!
We also enjoyed attending the excellent sessions prepared by our colleagues, clients, and friends, which explored a wealth of complementary topics. We were equally excited to attend the keynote speeches, and these two in particular:
Ed Zarecor and Jenna Makowski from tCRIL presented the much-awaited "State Of Open edX" keynote (watch here). The talk gave insights on the important changes happening in the Open edX project's governance following the 2U/edX acquisition and the creation of tCRIL, and touched on other important topics such as Core Contributors, and the product vision and evolution of the platform. The talk was concluded with a guest appearance by Racoon Gang CEO Sergiy Movchan, who explained how the Open edX platform can be leveraged to support and maintain educational programs in war-torn Ukraine.
Open Source evangelist Tobie Langel's keynote speech, titled "From Open Governance to Collective Ownership" (watch here), discussed the critical topic of collective ownership of open source software. He argued for the importance of true, community-driven open source projects that are based on openness, collaboration, and equality. Needless to say, as strong open source advocates ourselves, we were quite captivated by Tobie's presentation. A few of us even had the pleasure to sit down with Tobie and discuss some more.
Kudos and special thanks to tCRIL, edX, and every member of the Community who worked hard to make this event a success! We're thrilled to see that the broader Open edX Community is increasingly involved in the project's governance, and in the planning of activities such as the Conference. We're taking steps in the right direction : )
Another definitive highlight during the week of the conference was the OpenCraft-sponsored food & wine tour, organized by yours truly. What better way to mingle and discover Lisbon other than touring historical neighborhoods on foot, eating great food, and drinking great wine? We organized a lucky draw, formed a group of 12 lucky tour guests, and had a wonderful Thursday night walking Lisbon's colorful streets. Our tour guides took us off the beaten path, sharing intriguing anecdotes about Portugal and Lisbon's history in the process. We visited a specialty olive oil shop for some tastings, ate charcuterie in a traditional Portuguese grocery store, and sat down in three (!) different restaurants to sample Lisbon's finest traditional dishes. Needless to say, our stomachs were full, and our heads were now filled with memories. Faithful to what is seemingly becoming a tradition, I took the remaining survivors for a bar-hopping ride to end the night in true Portuguese fashion.
We ended the week with our traditional team dinner, sharing a few last bites of excellent vegetarian food at The Green Affair, a few drinks, and warm goodbyes until next year. It all went in the blink of an eye!
Some of us visited Sintra towards the end of the trip, which is a beautiful and well-preserved castle town near Lisbon that hosts a variety of fascinating historical buildings and stunning natural scenery. A perfect day trip!
Before we knew it, our two weeks in Portugal were over, and it was time to head back home. But what a time we had! We are all very grateful for our presence in Portugal this year, and can't wait to do this all over again next year in Cambridge, USA : ) Thanks to everyone who made this possible!
Photo credits: Gabriel D'Amours, Jill Vogel, Geoffrey Lehée, and Giovanni Cimolin da Silva.
This article was written by Sarina Canelake, Engineering & Community Manager at The Center For ReImagining Learning (tCRIL).
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 we call the “3 Cs”: Commitment to the project, exemplary Conduct, and high Caliber contributions.
The program began in 2020, with an initial 9 community members being granted write access rights to various Open edX code repositories. Since then, the program has expanded to include nearly 40 core contributors, who not only commit code but oversee translations, manage projects, and more.
Recently we codified the program in OEP-54. “OEP” stands for Open edX (Enhancement) Proposal. An OEP is a document that details a specific decision being made by the Open edX community; the community agrees that they will follow the processes defined in the OEPs.
In OEP-54, we define various aspects of the Program, such as membership criteria and the nomination process for a new member. I’ll dive into some of these, with a focus on Core Contributors who commit code changes.
As we’ve expanded the number of Core Contributors who can commit code, we’ve also begun expanding the number of roles a Core Contributor can take on. Contributors are welcome to hold more than one role, as well! A full list of roles and responsibilities can be found at this link; a few roles I’ll highlight are:
For information on how to really dig into the community, see OEP-54’s “Where Do I Start?” section - there’s a lot of good resources there to get you started, as well as a few pointers on how you can reach out on the forums or to specific working groups. Joining a working group is a wonderful way to meet members of the community and get started on tasks identified by the group as having high value.
For those who code, I recommend joining the Build-Test-Release or Frontend working groups, as both groups tend to have a backlog of tasks they’d like people to pick up. The Deprecation working group is pretty fun (in my opinion!) - they focus on removing dead code from the system. They also tend to have a large backlog, but some tasks may be pretty complicated unless you know some Open edX architecture or are strong in Django/Python.
If you work at a company that’s developing Open edX features you’d like to someday see in the main codebase, you should reach out early in your development process to get pointers on the best way of architecting and implementing your change in order for it to have the greatest chance of being accepted. Reach out in the discussion forums in the Collaborative Proposals topic. Submitting your bug fixes, changes, and features upstream is a great path towards becoming a Core Contributor.
Community members who have demonstrated the 3 C’s, with a history of contributions to the Open edX project, may be nominated for inclusion in the program by an existing program member. For coders, the nomination would specify one or more repositories in the openedx GitHub organization for the nominee to get write access to. The process is designed to be straightforward and transparent: it takes place on the discussion forums, and other Core Contributors in the program weigh in on the nomination. Members are encouraged to give constructive feedback if they don’t feel a nominee is quite ready to join the program.
The Core Contributor program is administered by The Center for Re-Imagining Learning (tCRIL), the nonprofit organization that stewards the Open edX project. At any point on the road to becoming a core contributor, the program administrators may be reached in the #core-contributors Slack room in the Open edX Slack, or at cc-program-admins@tcril.org.
It’s been a joy and a privilege to be a part of the Open edX community and to have the chance to help administrate the Core Contributor program. I look forward to working with more and more of you as the program goes.
—---
Sarina Canelake
Engineering & Community Management, tCRIL
Sarina has 5+ years experience hacking on the Open edX platform and working with the Open Source community. She is dedicated to enabling open source contributors to the Open edX platform via extensibility and process improvements. She lives in Boston, MA with her 3 cat sons and has a lifelong love for all things Pokémon.
Photo by Chang Duong on Unsplash
by Braden MacDonald, CTO of OpenCraft & Nimisha Asthagiri, Chief Architect at edX
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 first phase, we are now preparing to expand the program, and we are excited to announce that all the organizations involved with the program have signed a formal declaration of commitment to the program.
Participating organizations will be allocating significant resources to the program for the next two years, in a bid to further accelerate the development of the project, empower many organizations to collaborate better, and contribute more development time to the project.
To tell us more about these changes, here are some thoughts from Nimisha Asthagiri, Chief Architect & Engineering Director at edX, and Braden MacDonald, a core committer and the CTO of OpenCraft.
Nimisha: The Core Committers program is a cross-organizational framework for distributing rights and establishing responsibilities in our Open edX ecosystem. We believe it will increase trust, alignment, and engagement in the community, while enabling
We launched a pilot of this program in June 2020 with 9 technical Core Committers. We plan to expand the program by an order of magnitude; this time, also inviting non-technical contributors who are critical to the success of our platform. We look to invite core committers who have demonstrated:
Braden: The Core Committers Program gives additional rights and responsibilities to some people from the Open edX community (who don’t work at edX). In particular, it gives us the right to review and accept contributions to Open edX (e.g. new features, bug fixes, documentation improvements, etc.) as opposed to waiting for a developer who works at edX to do that review. At the same time, we are responsible for being good stewards of the platform, which means that we need to ensure that we only accept high-quality contributions that are in line with the platform goals, that we help with the technical upkeep of the platform, and that we foster a successful developer community. There’s more to it than that, and you can read about it on the program page.
At the moment there are nine core committers from the community, although more people will participate in the future.
Braden: The declaration of commitment is a new promise from the organizations and institutions involved in the core committers program. It’s not from the core committers themselves, but from the leaders of their respective companies. What it means is that the leaders of these organizations see the value of the program and consider it a priority – and more importantly, they will ensure that the core committers will have the time and resources needed to participate effectively. This type of work is important for the long term health and growth of the project, but can often take a back seat to more short-term priorities. We know that everyone has a lot of demands on their time, so this kind of support from the top really empowers the core committers to make their involvement a priority. I want to say kudos to the leaders for that initiative.
It shows how much trust there is in the long term goals of the project, as well as a real desire to work together to bring the project to its full potential. This is one of the huge advantages open source has over proprietary software. In other industries, open source projects like Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap or Linux have been able to out-compete very large and wealthy corporations, by doing what proprietary software projects can’t do: aggregate the contributions of many organizations, and working together as a community. I’m excited to see where this could bring the Open edX platform!
It’s worth reading the whole document: Declaration of Commitment to the Core Committer Program
Nimisha: “Faster alone, farther together.” I am thrilled to see the dedication and resources that each organization has pledged to the success of the program and our platform! This shared commitment, in March 2021, by leaders of each organization is another significant milestone that symbolizes our trust in the combined strength of our alliance.
Each participating organization has sincerely measured their own posture and committed their best to the greater good of the community. Some have promised to steward ownership of key platform capabilities, such as internationalization and platform releases. Another has promised to provide timely responses to requests from the community. Many organizational leaders were able to pledge time (20 hours) per month per core committer in their company. I expect this signed commitment will be effective in empowering core committers to have the latitude they need to contribute to the wider community.
Nimisha: I have been delighted to see core committers moving forward many of the items listed in our architecture roadmap. For example:
Besides what had been called out in the roadmap:
Braden: Together, in only a few months core committers have helped to review and merge 60+ contributions to the platform, answered tons of questions on the forums, participated in architecture discussions, improved documentation, and reduced technical debt. A few of the things that stood out to me personally: Usman Khalid (also at OpenCraft) has been doing great work on improving Blockstore and moving it into the core platform. Peter Pinch (MIT) led an initiative to use a consistent template for pull requests, which I’ve been really glad to see. Felipe Montoya (eduNEXT) is working to formalize an exciting proposal for “hooks” that would make plugins more powerful.
Nimisha: edX’s recent investment in launching and supporting the expansion of the Core Committer program demonstrates our renewed commitment to the Open edX community. edX’s executive team and board of directors are supportive of the program and our strategic goal to accelerate advancements to our platform with shared rights and responsibilities with the wider community.
Within edX, we embark on a “galileic” shift in mindset from edX-centric development to edX being an empowering member and investor of the Open edX community. To make this happen, it will take deliberate planning and technical, process, and organizational changes. While we relied on eager and determined “edX Champions” to support Core Committers in the early phases of the program, we will need support beyond the initial fanbase as we expand and scale.
Overall, edX is encouraged by the initial successes of the program, including the impactful contributions by the core committers and the resolved commitment from our dedicated Open edX providers.
Braden: It has certainly made it easier and faster for us to contribute new features and fixes into the Open edX platform, which was the primary goal we at OpenCraft had at the outset. So that’s something we’re really happy about. And from my own experience as well as hearing from the other core committers during our review of the first phase, I can say that it’s given us a stronger sense of responsibility toward the platform. You just have a different perspective when you’re responsible for making a decision (like approving a contribution) than when someone else is doing that. It’s made us more motivated and empowered to think about how we can make the platform the best it can be, in the short term and the long term. For me personally, it has also motivated me to be more active on the official forums, answering questions.
Nimisha: Kudos to the initial troupe of the Core Committer pilot (Phase 1) for being pioneers in the program and modeling their technical stewardship with predetermined goals.
In our mid-November kickoff of Phase 2 (co-establishing the program), we focused on:
For more information, Xavier has published an excellent summary of the event, with additional notes available on the wiki.
Currently, we are executing action items that we agreed upon at the winter event. Our recent successes include:
Forthcoming, the following in-progress action items will have a profound impact on scaling the program as it grows:
With the powerful engine of an empowering core committer program, I look forward to us collaboratively building a globally impactful education platform – leveraging the innovative, fortuitous, and aligned efforts of our community technologists, designers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and others.
Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash
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 this year.
Open edX have published an official blog post to announce the good news. Read it here.
The nominations were evaluated according to two categories, the “most important technical project” and the “most important project in instruction or learning design”.
LabXchange was one of the many nominated projects by the community. It is a free and powerful online learning platform charged with innovative features and content. Powered by Open edX software, it provides users with enriching learning experiences and assets to help them grow. Through the development of the LabXchange platform, OpenCraft has contributed major new Open edX features such as Blockstore, a new XBlock Runtime, and a new visual assessment editor. You can learn more about LabXchange by checking our other blog post.
It gives us immense pleasure to announce that LabXchange was chosen to be “the most important technical project” among the many compelling nominations submitted by the community. We would like to congratulate Robert Lue, Professor of the Practice of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University and UNESCO Chair on Life Sciences and Social Innovation, Gaurav Vazirani, Managing Director of LabXchange, and David Ormsbee, Staff Software Engineer at edX. We would also like to congratulate Braden MacDonald, our CTO at OpenCraft, Usman Khalid, Senior Open Source Developer at OpenCraft, and every OpenCraft member who put any of their valuable time towards growing this platform; after all, we are a team working together to help each other grow alongside OpenCraft.
As a company dedicated to contributing to Open Source Software, such a prize is a bright indication of the appreciation the community has for the work we are proud to be contributing daily.
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.
Congratulations to Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Amgen Foundation for the launch of LabXchange!
LabXchange is an exciting new science education platform loaded with innovative features and content, and it’s now free and open to the public at LabXchange.org. Users will find a rich and ever-expanding collection of world-class learning assets, including videos, assessments, and simulations. One of the key features of the platform is that users can freely combine assets together to create their own “learning pathways.” These pathways can then be shared, remixed, studied, or assigned to learners.
Two years in the making, the LabXchange platform is powered by Open edX software and integrated with edX.org. This means that users can use a single account to learn on both LabXchange.org and edX.org, and the same LMS technology powers both sites. To make this platform possible, LabXchange has contributed several major new Open edX features such as Blockstore, Content Libraries version 2, a new XBlock Runtime, anonymous access, and a new visual assessment editor.
Both the LabXchange platform and these new Open edX features were primarily developed by OpenCraft, with substantial support from edX. This project has been possible because LabXchange, edX, and OpenCraft worked closely together and collaborated on every stage of the project from initial implementation planning through to development and launch. Even now that the platform is live, development is ongoing and new features are being added every week. If you want to learn more about how LabXchange was developed, we encourage you to attend this year’s Open edX conference in Lisbon in May where you can hear from the people that worked on it.
Here’s an overview of some of the Open edX features that LabXchange is using:
Your edX.org account is also a LabXchange account. Users can sign in to LabXchange in much the same way as instructors can use their Open edX LMS user account to sign in to the edX Analytics Dashboard. This was implemented using the auth-backends plugin, which allows any Django-based application to share user accounts with an Open edX instance.
Each piece of content on the LabXchange site, such as a video or interactive simulation, is an XBlock, just like each component of an edX course. Most of the XBlocks used for LabXchange are identical to the versions used to build courses on edX.org, although many have a stylesheet applied to match the visual style of the LabXchange site. A few unique XBlocks are used for new content types unique to LabXchange, such as case studies or interactive simulations.
Blockstore is the next-generation content storage system for the Open edX platform, designed to replace the previous “modulestore” and “contentstore” systems that store data in MongoDB. Blockstore is versioned, scalable, format-agnostic, and file-based. That means that it provides a consistent foundation layer that can store video assets, XBlock definitions (OLX), metadata/tags, courses, and other things we haven’t yet thought of. Blockstore is designed to be able to hold terabytes of such data without losing performance. It’s also deliberately simple, creating a platform that developers can use to build experimental Open edX features and plugins much more easily than ever before.
Each learning asset (XBlock) on LabXchange is stored in an Open edX content library, using the new “version 2” of the content libraries feature, which is built using a new XBlock runtime and stores content on Blockstore. These new features make it possible for learners to view and learn from assets in a content library directly, without needing to first import the XBlocks into a course. The new XBlock runtime introduces the concept of “Learning Context” to the Open edX platform, where a learning context can be a course, a content library, a LabXchange pathway, a blog post, an admissions test, or any other virtual place where learning can happen.
Using the LabXchange site, educators can search these content libraries to find content and assemble learning assets (XBlocks) into new learning pathways.
LabXchange uses the same “Problem” component that Open edX courses use, but if you view, create, or edit a problem on LabXchange you might find that it looks quite different than you’re used to! LabXchange uses a new visual style for problems designed to simplify both learning and authoring. In particular, the new visual editor allows instructors to author problems without having to write markdown/XML code, using an intuitive authoring UI that was designed by LabXchange and implemented by RacoonGang. The new visual authoring UI will be available to all in a future version of Open edX Studio as an optional alternative to the current editors.
Users can use many features of LabXchange without needing to register an account, including viewing and interacting with learning assets (XBlocks). Up until this point, users could not view interactive Open edX content (such as problem components) without both registering an account and enrolling in a course. Now, the new XBlock runtime has been designed from the start to be able to support so-called “anonymous” (not logged in) users, and allow them to interact with almost any type of XBlock. In the future, course authors who opt-in to this feature will be able to make a portion of their course available for users to sample before they enroll, and provide a more complete preview experience than is possible today.
We’re excited about the technical advances in LabXchange, and about the collaboration that created it. Open source software, and the distributed working groups it enables, will let us continue to develop and extend the Open edX platform as the best online learning environment. We’re looking forward to more innovation in the future!
This article was written by team member James Tait
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 and fun activities. Our time at the Conference was followed by a week-long team retreat in Mexico where we spent even more quality time together. Here’s a recap of those two weeks:
Although most of us arrived over the weekend of March 23rd-24th (despite people missing connections due to delays at security!), the Conference itself didn’t kick off until March 26th.
Monday Mar 25 was our first coworking day at UCSD, and kicked off with our weekly sprint meeting. We had a wonderful team meal at Donna Jean, a delicious vegan restaurant in San Diego.
Tuesday was workshop day at the conference, so those who were involved headed over to Center Hall for that while the rest of us continued at the coworking room in The Village, UCSD.
Wednesday was the start of the conference proper and kicked off with breakfast and registration at Center Hall before keynote talks from edX® CEO and founder Anant Agarwal, edX COO Adam Medros, and Director of Learning Science and Engineering at Amazon Candace Thille, punctuated with a brief talk from Ned Batchelder in which several OpenCrafters got shout-outs, and followed by a panel discussion and lunch.
The breakfast and lunch bars were a good opportunity to mix with people from the Open edX community and put faces to names and GitHub handles. There was a healthy mix of in-depth technical discussions, general business talk and friendly chatter which was reflected throughout the conference.
Wednesday afternoon saw the arrival of the talks from the community; several of us gave talks ourselves: Xavier and Seamus co-presented “A Contributor’s Journey - The Impact of Our Work on Others, and on Ourselves”, and Piotr co-presented “Painless Open edX upgrades and maintainable UI customizations”.
When the formalities of the conference were finished for Wednesday, there was a reception at Birch Aquarium. We were greeted with margaritas and invited to walk around the tanks and see the exhibits while enjoying food and drinks. This, again, proved to be a useful networking opportunity, and we were treated to a glorious sunset.
Thursday kicked off with breakfast and juggling, followed by the more serious business of more keynotes: Mark Haseltine, Marco Morales and Nimisha Asthagiri presented The State of the Open edX Platform; Robert Lue gave an inspiring talk about An Open Source Pathway to Personalized and Collective Learning at Scale; Dean Baker talked about A Route for Saving Journalism and other creative work; and Walter Bender rounded up the morning with a thought-provoking piece about How transparent AI can transform learning.
After lunch, there were more community-provided talks. Our CTO Braden MacDonald co-presented a talk with David Ormsbee about the Blockstore Architecture, and team member Jill Vogel talked about Maintainably Extending Open edX: Why, When, How.
Friday was the day of the Developer Summit; for those who didn’t attend, it was a regular work day. Several of us attended a falconry lesson organized by Pooja, which was excellent, as well as providing some breathtaking views over Mesa Valley. We met some beautiful raptors and had a great time flying one of them. In the evening a group of us went along to Mesa Rim bouldering centre to test ourselves against immovable objects!
We made the trip from San Diego to Puerto Vallarta on Saturday March 30th, arriving shortly after midday, which gave us a nice relaxed afternoon to settle in. There was ceviche followed by margaritas by the sea to really get us into el spirito de México!
On Sunday most of us hiked from Boca de Tomatlán to Playa Las Ánimas. It was a glorious sunny day with some stunning beach views.
A couple of common themes in Puerto Vallarta: waiters have repeatedly told us we were ordering too much food, only for us to prove them wrong; seems we really do have an appetite! And a lot of places just aren’t set up to accommodate a group of 10 or more turistas to arrive unannounced - who knew?