Leveraging Open Source to Democratize Worldwide Education

MIT has a local instance of Open edX on-campus classes. 99% of current MIT undergraduates have taken a class in which they used this Open edX platform. Faculty are using it in many different ways to improve the effectiveness & efficiency of their instruction for better student learning. The Open edX platform provides rich online assessments with rapid feedback, adaptive hinting, videos with interspersed concept questions, and a range of other methods to activate student learning. Faculty are also leveraging the rich data that the platform provides to gauge student understanding in real time.

I cannot thank your team enough for the great and wonderful work you have done in the past year we have worked together. You have really shown how good of a partner you are. Words can’t give you justice for the hard work you’ve put in and how much the management and the university president were happy, the minister was impressed.

IBM is interested in democratizing skills in the cutting edge technologies such as data science, artificial intelligence, cloud and blockchain. We started looking for a platform that is aligned with our philosophy. We experimented with a number of learning systems and ultimately selected Open edX as a foundation for the IBM Developer Skills Network. Our skills network syndicates our content through dozens of private Open edX instances serving world’s largest companies, most prestigious universities, professional training providers and startup accelerators.

To master the business challenges of a volatile and fast-changing digital world, companies are required to constantly develop and maintain new skills while balancing their investments in education. Open edX has been instrumental to help solve these challenges among small and large enterprises in our clientele. Its simplicity and versatility enables us to design flexible and individual learning solutions, project-based or long-term. Open edX is a core component of our digital strategy.

Israel’s National Digital Bureau was seeking for a platform which is learners-centric, has the flexibility of adjusting to the local market needs and has a broad international open source community. Open edX was the perfect choice addressing these needs and in a few months Campus.il became the national platform for online education of Israel.

The platform’s modular architecture and flexibility allowed for customization and integration with existing systems.

We chose the platform because of its ability to be customized and for its ability to work with our needed integrations with other platforms. We also appreciated the community aspect of Open edX. Last, we saw this LMS as a sustainable solution to support our long-term digital education strategy. Ten years later, it proves to still be a viable solution for us.

Most learning management systems and platforms are built around the traditional model of learning that is limited to the requirement of a calendar and a gradebook. Our competency-based education model lets our students learn on their own schedule and pace, requiring students to prove mastery rather than achieve a grade or certain seat time.

Open edX gives us total control to customize the platform for our students and our learning model, including allowing us to directly author and leverage third-party authoring or design and useful development process tools.

One of the reasons we are excited about Open edX is the open-source model, as it enables us to understand the architecture and data flow of the components that allow us to create the right abstraction layer to push the data for our students into the system.

Our collaboration focused on hardening and optimizing Open edX Aspects on AWS, overcoming the common hurdles of scalability and cost. We transformed it into a reliable, production-ready cloud solution that ensures CampusIL and its partners get fast, consistent access to the data they need to maximize their pedagogical investment and improve learning outcomes for every student.

The primary reason we chose the Open edX platform over other platforms is its open source nature, along with its robust and highly customizable features that meet the unique requirements of both the ministry and the universities.