Full name
Samuel Paccoud
Picture
Title
Make OpenEdX agile again
Goals summary for the 2023 term (<40 words)
I believe development velocity and community engagement would benefit from breaking down the monolith into 4 interoperable functionalities:
- the learning content: interoperable LCMS and LTI providers, emitting xAPI events. Many projects.
- the catalog: search, ecommerce and marketing
- the classroom environment: mobile first, built for interactivity, modular for composability, ready for adaptive learning and skill based learning
- the LMS: student management incl. enrollment, grades, certification, dashboard…
Details
Within each of these 4 groups of functionalities, and after agreeing on the interfaces and open standards, a motivated group in the community can take ownership of a project and build it.
On the backend, breaking down the monolith to smaller projects would unlock the power of the Django and Python communities at large.
On the frontend, we would build a library of xAPI-ready components for learning that can be used to build learning experiences faster.
Only vote for me if you believe in this method, as I’m very obsessed with it. This would be a major refactoring for OpenEdX in the end and can seem ambitious, but its efficiency is proven and it brings fast results because each project taken out of the monolith straight away recovers its velocity.
Relevant experience
I fell in love with Django about 10 years ago and took over the technical lead at FUN after a few years of freelancing. Since 2018, I have been applying the Mikado method on FUN’s OpenEdX based stack with the following achievements:
- recovering development velocity and agility
- a standalone catalog for OpenEdX with search, ecommerce, enrollment, application forms, dashboards and more to come: GitHub - openfun/richie: An opensource CMS to build education portals
- a modular LTI LCMS with several xAPI-ready content modules: a video and streaming platform, a BBB gateway, a markdown authoring module, a file deposit for students and more to come: GitHub - openfun/marsha: An opensource LTI Learning Content Management System (LCMS)
- a scalable LRS based on Graylog and Grafana: GitHub - openfun/ralph: A learning events processor to feed your data lake (expect some xAPI )
We recovered our velocity and growth after just a few months applying this method. In August 2022, we were awarded 13M€ to build a market place for B2B learning in France, which came as a big recognition for our work and will accelerate our projects.
Taken to the level of OpenEdX, this method could unlock engagement and creativity in the community and allow us to collaboratively transform OpenEdX to a modern and open education platform for the future.
I believe we could start for example, with the 2 most critical parts:
- Make LTI and xAPI first class citizens in OpenEdX. It would be awesome if teachers could add any LTI content to their course in 1-click via deep linking. Easy to do and huge impact.
- Rebuild forum/discussion
Time commitment
I can commit 20h per month to the TOC mission.
The FUN team could contribute to some small projects that would be started and to the engineering effort.