Platform Contributions

A corporate client hired OpenCraft to develop Open edX’s Completion API, which provides the often-requested ability to track a learner’s progress through each course by marking learning units as complete. Along with visual indicators developed by edX, this feature helps learners keep track of their progress and allows them to resume their course at the last unit they completed. The Completion API was introduced in the Hawthorn version of Open edX.

OpenCraft led the development work for Open edX’s Content Library feature, which allows instructors to create a library to build a pool of HTML components, problems, and video components for use in randomized assignments in their courses.

OpenCraft was hired by a client to develop what would become the popular Drag and Drop XBlock V2, a visual exercise where the learner drags items to zones on a target image. OpenCraft was then enrolled by the edX team to integrate the Drag and Drop V2 exercise as a standard problem type in Open edX and to make it mobile-optimized.

OpenCraft led the development work of the Image Explorer XBlock, a visual course component that prompts learners to explore an image containing hotspots and click the hotspots to display custom content.

EdX hired OpenCraft to develop a large part of Shibboleth and SAML Single Sign-On support for Open edX, allowing users to authenticate on the platform using a variety of identity providers.

The Australian National University, Australia’s foremost public university, hired OpenCraft to develop a project called the XBlock Reporting Tool. The tool improves reporting functionalities for XBlocks, allowing course instructors to get more data about learners’ responses to problems and to preview and download detailed reports. When completed, these improvements will be contributed to the next stable release of Open edX. OpenCraft also provides consulting services as needed for ANU’s in-house deployment of Open edX.

Harvard Graduate School of Education is one of the top schools of education in the United States. HGSE hired OpenCraft to assist them in deploying a course about change management. We deployed an Open edX instance with a customized theme to match their branding and were contracted for course authoring work. HGSE also had OpenCraft develop and implement a brand-new XBlock for their course called the Diary XBlock, which allows learners to write, save, and edit text for evaluation and feedback. The course was very successful with more than 100,000 enrollments, and the Diary XBlock was very well received.

Harvard University hired OpenCraft to develop advanced learning tools through their HarvardX online learning initiative. We developed the Atlas XBlock, a visual tool that aggregates survey results and displays them on a world map. We also rewrote and improved Dalite, a tool for asynchronous peer instruction which identifies discussion arguments for students to revise or defend, enabling peer instruction at scale in online courses.

OpenCraft was put in charge of deploying, customizing, and maintaining a large-scale Corporate Academy based on Open edX to deliver online training programs for a worldwide management consulting firm. We implemented several supplemental features on the Academy such as Single Sign-On, Insight analytics, and Mobile Apps. We were also given the task of developing several new features for the platform, resulting in the development of the Chat XBlock, which allows learners to chat with a robot acting as a teacher’s assistant on their mobile phones while in the platform. Finally, we provided the staff with consulting on course authoring with Studio.