Exploring a Community Courses Instance for the Open edX Community

Community Discourse
1

Hello everyone :wave:,

I wanted to bring an idea to the community and hear what people think.

One gap we seem to have today is a shared space where community members can both learn from courses created by the community and, with the right process in place, contribute courses back to the community. An Open edX instance for and by the Open edX community, where we can all host courses and learn through dogfooding, while sharing the maintenance burden of the production instance.

At the moment, we do have a training instance, but it is mainly used for onboarding core contributors and does not currently serve as a broadly open place for community-led courses. Its learner access and authoring permissions are both restricted, leaving a gap compared to a place like edX Edge, which allowed more freewheeling authoring.

The idea is to explore a community courses instance: a space for the Open edX community, where courses can be openly taken by community members, and where trusted people from the community can create and administer courses.

A few things this could help with:

  • creating more opportunities for community learning and upskilling
  • making it easier to share practical knowledge in a course form
  • giving contributors a pathway to develop and publish useful learning content
  • dog fooding the product so that we know the pain points and solve for them.

One possible approach would be to build on the existing training instance. Another would be to create a separate instance specifically for community courses, if that turns out to be a better fit from an operational or legal point of view.

For course authoring, one possible model is to build on an existing trust framework, such as the Core Contributor program. All the core contributors would be given permission to author and administer courses on this instance, including the right to invite other authors to edit their courses. The core contributors would have free hand in creating any course, without any specific rules or approvals required for it, beyond respecting the law and basic netiquette. I would love to hear thoughts from the community on a few questions:

  1. Would a community course instance be valuable to you?
  2. Should this live on the existing training instance, or would a separate instance make more sense?
  3. What should the review or approval process for granting course creation & administration look like? Does it make sense to you to delegate that authority and trust to core contributors?
  4. How should we think about long-term ownership and maintenance for these courses?

This is still an early idea, and the main goal of this post is to gather feedback, concerns, and suggestions before moving further.

Even if you are unsure about the full shape of the idea, it would be really helpful to hear your perspective. Support, concerns, edge cases, and practical suggestions would all be valuable.

Thanks in advance ā€” Iā€™m looking forward to hearing what the community thinks.

5 Likes
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Hi Farhaan,

I like the idea - I have one suggestion. What if we focused on building a shared community library instead? That way, folks could build their own courses on the instance from shared resources. It would also make it easier to update courses. And it would get folks using libraries and disseminating the value to their clients and customers.