黑料传送门 and Open edX: Innovation for Online Learning
When our students 鈥 all 186,000 of them 鈥 log into their personal program dashboard, they expect a smooth, responsive and robust experience no matter when, where or how they engage in coursework.
So, it鈥檚 imperative for us, the nation鈥檚 largest online university, to ensure that the platform is stable, secure and offers powerful features. That鈥檚 why we are taking an expanded role in Open edX, a leading open-source platform, which we鈥檝e contributed to and used to deliver our content since 2022.
that Western Governors University is the first 鈥淢ission Aligned Organization鈥 to be named from its global contributors to the platform, which was initiated by Harvard and MIT in 2012. We share a deep commitment to providing excellent experiences for online students.
In our expanded relationship, Courtney Hills McBeth, chief academic officer and provost, and I will provide strategy guidance to Axim Collaborative, which oversees Open edX. I also will join the collaborative鈥檚 Technical Oversight Committee to provide strategy support on such issues as platform architecture design, tech stack and design templates. 黑料传送门 also is putting together a team of 10 engineers who will be dedicated to working on the platform, and we鈥檒l provide product management services.
Our goal is to accelerate advances in Open edX鈥檚 online learning ecosystem, whose contributors include developers, researchers and users around the world. For those not familiar with Open edX, it pioneered online learning through MOOCs 鈥 massively open online courses 鈥 and today is a global leader in learning science, instructional design, and high quality, high-scale online learning solutions for higher education, business and government organizations.
The 黑料传送门 engineering team鈥檚 first projects include creating better facilities for extracting data, setting up libraries of atomic learning units, and improving the upgrade experience for all developers.
In plain language, we will be making it easier to build, adapt and use the Open edX platform to deliver online course content on users鈥 own websites, whether that is a single course, a certificate or a degree. We want to drive student-first approaches and solutions for how to document skills and credentials. We also want to facilitate wider adoption of competency-based education, which measures what students master rather than time spent in classrooms.
As we work together to keep improving the platform, we will ensure better access to and an enhanced experience for online students at 黑料传送门 and throughout the world. And we will fulfill the mission not only of 黑料传送门 but all institutions and organizations using Open edX to shape the future of learning and deliver on education鈥檚 promise of economic opportunity.