I am john Edmiston from Cybermissions, we have a very low cost A.A. degree in Biblical Ministries that is in both English and French, churches then sign up to put their students through the subjects which are only $7 each. Currently we have Moodle but it does not support the structure we want. We are wondering if Open edX could do this.
First the students would select their langauge
Then they would be enrolled in a mini-school where they only saw people from their own cohort (church) which would generally be anywhere from 8 to 40 people. their pastor would then be their facilitator through the simple A.A. degree. I would be happy to do a Zoom call to explain this.
Hi @John_Edmiston! Thanks for contacting our community! You project looks very interesting.
Open edX is a very powerful LMS, and most probably can meet your needs. It has very flexible features, like multi-language support, microsites, cohorts, etc. I suggest you contact one of our service partners for help on finding the best solution for you. You can find a directory of providers in this link: Open edX installation and hosting – Open edX
Hope it helps!
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@John_Edmiston I agree that it sounds like Open EdX, in principle, does what you want it to do. A few considerations that you’ll probably come up against:
Offering multiple languages for a course:
The Open EdX platform is translated into several languages. If you are planning to have a course offered in multiple languages, then there is a maintenance decision to be made. One option is to have multiple versions of the course, one for each language you offer. This makes course-building and maintenance a little simpler, but it means students of different languages will be in different courses. The other option is to offer one course in multiple languages and use cohorts to “gate” each language. (Users in the Spanish cohort see Spanish content). This can be pretty elegant from a user perspective and it keeps all your users in one course. It makes course development a little more technical. We built a cohort selector x-block a while back that allows users to self-select their cohorts for this very purpose. It’s old (Hawthorne?) and needs to be brought up to date to be compatible with the latest releases, but it’s a good start.
Using cohorts to silo students:
Using cohorts to keep students in their own groups so they only see and discuss with other members of their cohort is a pretty popular approach. It works well. But keep in mind that it presents a maintenance burden on the “owner” organization, so you’ll need to figure out some governance. You’ll need to be able to enroll all the students, manually place them in their correct cohorts, and deal with any changes to enrollments/cohorts. In addition, I presume you don’t want to be giving these cohort leads staff access to the course (they’d be able to see all enrolled students, so a privacy issue), so you’d have to make some kind of arrangement about how they can view the grades/progress for their specific cohort of users.
Quick note about CCX:
There is this rudimentary functionality called CCX in EdX. I don’t think it’s been supported for a while, but I do think it still exists. Google “Open EdX CCX” and you’ll see that it was originally built to support a use case similar to yours. Could be worth dusting off.
Hope this helps! If you can solve for the above, seems like EdX can do what you need.
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