Online courses via e-learning platforms today become learners’ daily lives. More educational institutions provide online degrees. Most companies prefer to conduct online learning for their employees. Those facts imply that one of the ed-tech products, e-learning platforms, is used by many institutions and businesses with increasing curves of users. Hence, the Forbes report is reasonable that the global revenue of the ed-tech market will reach $325 billion by 2025. And one of the ed-tech products with the most worldwide users is Open edX.

Open edX is an e-learning platform used by the world’s best organizations. It became so popular in less than a decade following the increasing rate of the e-learning industry. So, what is Open edX? This article will discuss it for you.

What is Open edX?

To begin the discussion about Open edX, let’s review edX or edX.org. Both Open edX and edX.org are popular in e-learning discussions. Yet those two make newcomers confused because of their similar names. 

edX.org is an open-source online learning portal that delivers thousands of high-quality free and paid online courses. There are more than 55 million learners worldwide who choose various disciplines such as business, engineering, biology, language, writing, computer science, and many more in this portal. This non-profit project is the result of the joint effort of Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Besides, some other high-ranked universities and partner institutions in the edX consortium were also involved. 

Open edX is a learning management system (LMS) platform created by edX to build courses and run the core of the edx.org initiative. It can empower other providers and various institutions to design engaging and customized online learning. It enables higher education institutions or online campuses, companies, government organizations, and enterprises of all sizes to host MOOCs with virtual classes and training programs.

Open edX provides features such as online discussion groups, self-paced training, wiki-based collaborative learning, learning assessment to check learners’ progress, course and learners engagement analytics, an online library, and more. As created by education institutions, the LMS design is more friendly to pedagogical needs.

Who uses Open edX?

For an engaging online class, Open edX is very effective and proven. Hence, over 55 million learners use Open edX. Nine out of ten of the world’s top 10 ranked universities use Open edX. For example, Harvard University, MIT, Oxford University, National University of Singapore, etc. Besides, international companies also use  Open Edx for their employee training. For example, Microsoft, Google, Jonshon & Jonshon, McKinsey, World Bank, UNESCO, Amnesty International, and many more. Open edX also empowers government organizations’ online learning platforms. It includes China, Indonesia, France, Mexico, and many other countries.

Why Open edX?

Many top institutions choose Open edX for their online learning because it is learner-centric, innovative, scalable, and flexible. It has an immersive learning environment and a user-friendly user interface. The structure’s course navigation panel also helps the learners to switch from lessons to modules easily. Hence the learners will be more engaged in the courses. Besides, Open edX also facilitates the instructors or course providers with easy ways to deliver the learning content and maintain learners’ data and grades.

For education institutions with huge learners or companies with large employees, checking progress and grades will not be a problem since Open edX supports auto feedback. The computer or gadget will grade the exercise immediately after the users finish and submit their test. The learners can check their scores and progress in course completion as well.

Besides, Open edX is scalable. You can serve hundreds of monthly active users and learners only by installing Open edX on one server. If you add more servers, you can scale the system to reach millions of monthly active users. It means small, medium, and large organizations can use Open edX. Open edX will still be stable when a large number of users use it at the same time.

Besides, Open edX is customizable, and mobile friendly to enable learners to access it anywhere and everywhere, game-based learning support, adaptive learning support, and competency-based learning to facilitate learners to learn based on their pace.

How does Open edX work?

Open edX consists of many different web applications that work together to give a world-class learning experience. When you install the Open edX, there will be two portals or views. They are LMS and studio.

LMS

LMS is visible to both learners and instructors. The learners can access and complete the courses here. Besides, they can register their account, sign in, and enroll in the classes or courses. The instructors should also log in to the LMS to communicate with the learners and give them the best learning experience. There will be a dashboard that is only visible for the instructors to check learners’ processes and download learners’ profiles and grades. The LMS is usually visible to the public on the internet as the client’s existing web domain name.

Studio

The studio in Open edX is a Course Management System (CMS). It is only visible to people who build the courses, instructors, or course teams. An open edX studio is a place where you can create courses and upload learning content. The interface is easy to use. Therefore, you can easily create course outlines and insert learning content as text, images, or videos. Furthermore, you can also insert problem sets or tests like multiple choice, drag and drop, numerical input, text input, true or false, and many more. With the help of Xqueue, the hidden component of Open edX, those problem sets are auto-graded.

How to install Open edX?

Open edX is built with Ubuntu, Docker, Django, and react. It runs on Cloud technology such as Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, etc. Open edX uses more than 20 programming languages and technology, for example, MySQL, MongoDB, CoffeeScript, XBlocks, LTI, and many more. 

Open edX consists of many components and needs technical skills to install it. You can download and install this platform through development documentation or by hiring a professional IT expert.

However, installing Open edX with high complexity is not easy. Besides, hiring an IT expert to handle Open edX installation and its update will be too costly. There are too many things to do in marketing, creating high-quality learning content, and many more. In this case, Katalis.App will be your solution.

Katalis.App has the commitment to take a part in facilitating high-quality online education with world-class standards by using Open edX.  We help you to use Open edX to get the benefit of this great LMS without the problem of dealing with high complexity or hiring an IT expert. Contact us here for more detailed information.