Cloning a course from edX to Open edX - and integrating with WordPress

An organization wishes to have the same learning experiences on their own website as they already exist on edX.

Is it possible to export edX courses and use it in OpenedX (fully-managed or self-hosted) + integrated with a WordPress existing website? (Assuming that the right of ownership/ fair use is not an issue)

Finally, does anyone know about tools to make this cloning simpler, as well as any integration tips with WordPress.

P.S. Can anyone point me toward the licensing considerations ?

Learning experience is povided by Open edX, which is the backbone of edx.org

If a user is authoring a course on edx.org, I suppose he can easily export the course in zip format (OLX) and import it on the organization’s own Open edX instance. That’s the simplest and only available way when you dont have SSH access to edX servers.

As for Wordpress integration, check this plugin developed by guys at eduNext. It allows you to make your wordpress site as a marketing site for an open edX instance.

I think eduNext’s WP ntegration plugin can serve as good start point, since the drupal marketing site source code (edx-mktg repository) is private.
However, It won’t cover the same navigation experience: a lot of development effort should be made for this to serve as a replacement for edx.org.

This way at least, you can customize the look and feel of your wordpress site, then enable it as a marketing site by :

  1. Confguring the plugin on WP’s side.
  2. Switching the feature flag ENABLE_MKTG_SITE and edit your MKTG_URLS to use those of your wordpress site.

Anyone who knows an alternative is more than welcome to tell us here :slight_smile:

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Yes in theory, but probably not in practice.

It’s technically possible, yes, but it requires access to edX Studio in order to export the course, and typically only the original authors of the course have that access. Unless you happen to be one of the course authors, you’d have to contact edX or the course author(s) and ask them to provide you with an export.

Since most courses on edX.org are copyright and earn income to support edX and their institution, you would also generally need to work out a licensing deal beforehand, and provide a compelling business case for offering the same content on a competing site.

That will usually be the biggest issue though; copying an entire course is not going to fall under “fair use”.

A few courses on edx.org do use Creative Commons licenses (example), so you can use those ones if you comply with the license terms (in that example, no commercial use is permitted). However, even then, there is no way to directly get an export of the course from the edX UI. So re-using content from a single unit would be relatively easy by copying and pasting, but if you want to re-use the entire course as a whole, you’d still need to ask the course authors to share an export of the course with you or see if they’ve posted a copy of the course export/source code on another website like GitHub.

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