Open edX

EdX is an online courseware site best known for hosting free college-level courses from a variety of well-known educational institutions like MIT, Rice University, and Kyoto University. While edX's original emphasis was on providing the courses themselves, the project is now engaged in building a user and developer community around its underlying free software platform. The project aims to roll out a do-it-yourself course hosting service in early 2014, an effort which recently picked up the support of Google.

In the lingo of educational software circles, the edX platform is a Learning Management System (LMS), although that term also encompasses several other distinct application categories. EdX itself is focused on massive open online courses (MOOCs). MOOCs are generally open to all participants, are accessed via the web (often solely via the web), and the course materials are typically accessible to the public. This is a distinction with LMSes built for use within an educational institution, such as Moodle, where managing student records, enrollment, billing, and other functionality is necessary, and where it may be important to integrate course materials with a classroom experience. MOOCs often allow users to sign up at will and many do not track attendance or issue grades.

EdX is run by a non-profit organization which goes by the utterly-not-confusing name of The xConsortium. Historically, the chief backers of the service have been MIT and Harvard (although many other universities offer courses on edx.org), but in April 2013 the organization was joined by another major partner: Stanford University. Stanford's support was significant not just for the institution's clout, but because its team brought with it the expertise from Stanford's own open source MOOC service, Class2Go. EdX and Stanford announced their intention to merge the functionality of the Class2Go project into Open edX, the codebase on which the edx.org service is built.

Stanford's input is no doubt a big win for edX, but an arguably more important new partner arrived in September. On September 10, Google joined the Open edX project, too. Like Stanford, Google had had its own open source LMS project. Google's was called Course Builder and, naturally, it differed quite a bit from the LMS services run by universities. Although there were course contributions from educational institutions, Google released a number of technology-related courses of its own, and there were offerings for the general public on a range of non-academic subjects, from starting a business to planning a fantasy football team.

As is the case at Stanford, Google's developers are said to be contributing to Open edX based on the lessons they learned in their own LMS development experience. But the Google announcement also specified that the project will be launching another web service, this one called MOOC.org. Whereas edx.org is a university-centric course platform, MOOC.org is described as an open site which "will allow any academic institution, business and individual to create and host online courses." Or, as The Chronicle of Higher Education called it, "YouTube for courses." The Chronicle article also notes that edX has not yet decided on a content-policing policy, but that it has established that the data on who takes and completes courses on MOOC.org will belong to edX.

On the software side, the current-generation Open edX product is edx-platform, which includes the LMS system and a separate course-content authoring tool named Studio. Studio is more of a traditional content-management system; instructors prepare lesson materials, quizzes, and tests in Studio, which are then delivered to the students through the LMS front end. This edx-platform code is what can be seen running on the public edx.org site.

But Google's expertise (and perhaps Stanford's as well) is expected instead to go into the next-generation replacement platform, which is built around a completely different architecture. The replacement architecture starts with the concept of XBlocks, which are small web applications written in Python but which can be interpreted by one or more renderers. So, for example, an XBlock-based quiz component would produce the interactive quiz itself when run through the test-giving renderer, but the grading renderer would actually be a different view on the same data store, rather than an unrelated module. Each XBlock has its own private storage and can offer different handlers to different renderers, so each can be more or less a self-contained entity.

One of the benefits touted about this approach is that it allows administrators to implement more than one grading renderer—as the documentation explains it, the same block could be graded by the instructor or peer-graded by other students, depending on the renderer. If that sounds like a minor distinction, however, one of Open edX's other new initiatives is an AI-based grading system. The Enhanced AI Scoring Engine (EASE) library and Discern API wrapper use machine learning to classify free-form input text (such as student essays). The theory is that the instructor can hand-grade a subset of the student responses, and the API can use those scores as a metric to classify the remaining responses in the set. That grading method might not seem fair to tuition-paying students working toward a degree, but for a free online course with thousands of concurrent students, it is perhaps more understandable.

The Open edX platform also includes a discussion forum component, a queueing system for processing large volumes of assignments, an analytics package, and a notification system (the goal of which is eventually to provide real-time notices for messages and assignment results via SMS and other communication methods). For the moment, the new XBlock-based platform is still in the early stages of development. No template XBlocks have been released, although the documentation discusses a few possibilities (lectures, videos, and quizzes, for example).

Online courses are clearly here to stay, although whether MOOCs will steal significant business away from universities (as some fear) remains to be seen. Educational institutions have already adjusted to the necessity of providing online courseware to supplement their in-person classes, and many do considerable business every school year offering online-only courses and degrees. But there is still a step up from self-hosted LMSes to the mega-scale MOOC programs envisioned by edX. It will certainly be a challenge for the edX team to simplify MOOC deployment and management to the point where offering a public class online is as simple as setting up a Wordpress blog. The Open edX–powered MOOC.org is slated to launch in early 2014, which is still plenty of time for the project to iterate on the process until its software makes the grade.