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 edX/2U, and three from members of the rest of the Open edX community. The first six members were recently nominated, and the remaining three members will be chosen soon.
-> Read the Technical Oversight Committee's foundational charter
The end-of-year community virtual event took place on December 14th, bringing a successful conclusion to a landmark year for the Open edX platform. Ed Zarecor from tCRIL presented a "State of Open edX" keynote that covered the creation of tCRIL, the platform's new governance structure, and the Maple release. We also enjoyed watching other talks on the program, and had fun talking with old friends and new!
-> Watch talk recordings and download presentation materials
Maple, the latest stable version of Open edX, was released on the 20th of December, thanks to the great work of the Release working group ? ! Maple brings a good amount of fixes and features, such as the implementation of the new Learning Micro Front End as the default platform experience, granting course and library creation rights on a per-organization basis, and improvements to the Common Problem Editor — so be sure to upgrade your Open edX instance(s)! Also, please let the working group know if you spot any bugs or issues.
-> Read the official announcement
Core Contributor work is now organized into 2-week sprints, which aim to help coordinate contribution efforts and drive more contributions. During the first-ever Core Contributor sprint, the focus was on helping to assign the remaining open issues for Maple from the release working group board. It was also nice to get to meet all the core contributors!
-> Check out the latest Core Contributors Sprint
The Marketing Working Group is working on a number of issues to improve the Open edX platform's marketing ecosystem, such as preparing community member presentation videos, creating various promotional materials, and helping redesign the provider marketplace experience on the Open edX website. 2021 has been a productive year, and the group is excited about the year to come!
-> Check out the Marketing Work Group's Trello board
The Translations Working Group, was formed with an initial focus on improving platform translation for ten languages: Spanish, French, Arabic, Italian, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian, Mandarin, and German. The group needs additional translators for Arabic, Hindi, Russian, and Ukrainian, so please let us know if you're interested! The group is also working on implementing automated translation for the official platform documentation — something that has been long requested by the community. We'll keep you abreast of our progress on this topic in the upcoming newsletters.
-> Check out the Transifex Work Group's Trello board
We would love to turn this newsletter into a community effort. Do you have any news about Open edX that you would like us to share? Please let us know by going to the Newsletter threads on either OpenCraft's public discussion forum or the Official Open edX forum!
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 the community can focus in order to expand its reach in the e-Learning space. We enjoyed getting to talk with other community members in the Gather space and hope to see you at the next one!
-> See the event's Youtube playlist
The next release of the Open edX platform, called Maple, is scheduled to release on December 9, 2021. A beta version will be made available in early October to allow the community to test the software, report bugs, and improve documentation. Stay tuned for more news about Maple next month when the test branch is released!
-> Learn about early Maple features on Confluence
Did you know that a single Open edX instance could be split into multiple "sites," each with its own theme, home URL, and course catalog? The process of creating and administering sites can be quite tedious. To address this, we developed Sites Generator, an open source tool that automates the whole process! Read the blog post to learn how to configure Sites.
-> Explore Sites-Generator's public code repository
The Open edX team announced the creation of a Frontend working group that will be responsible for stewardship of the frontend of the Open edX platform. The group welcomes members of the community to discuss the goals and challenges of the platform's frontend features and partake in key technical decisions.
