While Open edX is well-known as a MOOC platform, it’s increasingly being adopted by companies for delivering employee and customer training. The needs of a company are very different than those of an academic institution using Open edX at a university. This panel is to hear from several innovative companies about how they’re using Open edX and discuss some of the challenges and opportunities of using Open edX for corporate learning.
Panelists:
We’ve been talking to dozens of companies who’ve either already adopted Open edX or are considering it, and through these conversations we’ve heard some common themes emerge:
Customizability: How can we customize the platform? How easy is it to change the look-n-feel to match our company branding? Can we create branded subsites for each customer?
Interoperability: How can we get Open edX to play nicely with our existing systems? Single-signon? LTI? Salesforce, Marketo?
Reporting/analytics: We want to know which learners have taken which courses, whether they’ve completed them yet, how long it took them to complete the course. Insights doesn’t seem to give us this data. What are the other reporting options?
Data portability: Can we import our content from another system? Can we export content in edX to our customers who might be using other LMSes? What’s OLX? Can’t I just use SCORM?
Security: What about security? How can we guarantee that our videos are secure? How can we control access to courses?
Reusability: Can we create content and re-use it across multiple courses? How do we keep the courses up-to-date as the content changes? What does a course lifecycle look like?
Extensibility: If the platform doesn’t have something we need, how easy is it to add the feature? What XBlocks are available, and how hard is it to build an XBlock?
Groupability: We want to offer the same self-paced course to many learners, but they might be in different groupings? What features does Open edX have to support this? Cohorts, custom courses, teams?
Discoverability: We have many courses on our site, and the flat course catalog is really hard to navigate. How can we improve discoverability and create a better browsing experience for users?
We’ll touch on these subjects and hopefully take questions from the audience as well. We have a stellar lineup of panelists who are doing really exciting things with Open edX. They’ll shed some insight into the obstacles they ran into, how they overcame those, and some possible future directions they envision for Open edX.
Our hope is that by giving these panelists an opportunity to share their stories, it will encourage more dialog between these stakeholders, so they can lobby for features that are important to them like better reporting, or even band together to co-sponsor these features.
