Hi folks! We just announced that my company was being acquired by Edly. I will be joining Edly as VP of Engineering, where I will be working on extending Open edX and further improving Tutor.
I’m tremendously excited by this new chapter of my life. Our goal is to make even more important and meaningful contributions to Tutor, Open edX and the edTech world. And yes, this includes lots of free, open source stuff
That being said, we also understand that this acquisition can cause some anxiety in the community. Of course Tutor has become an essential component of the Open edX ecosystem, and this acquisition will inevitably raise some questions about the future of the project. We want to answer these questions now. Don’t be shy! Anything goes. @Yasser_Bashir, Arbisoft CEO, will join me in answering.
Oh and I’ll be writing from the NYC —> Boston train so please expect some delays in my responses
Yes to both. We want Cairn to become the default, free and open source standard for Open edX analytics. We need to conduct some technical investigations to decide how best can Cairn play with the existing Edly Insights stack, but this should happen, eventually.
I don’t expect there’ll be structural changes to the program. As far as I am concerned, the maintainers program is working well, and we don’t want to change that. We do want to involve the Edly developers more in the Tutor ecosystem, and that means in particular onboarding some of them as Tutor plugin maintainers. I expect that they will replace me as maintainer for the plugins that I am assigned to. Current maintainers will be kept in their position, unless they desire otherwise.
That being said, my hope is that we will produce much more plugins than there exist today. It means that we will have to scale our organisational efforts to improve coordination between maintainers. For the time being, I’m alone in charge of the coordination, and I tend to do very little – just because maintainers are doing a great job so far. We’ll probably have to re-think some aspects if we are to increase the number of maintainers. In any case, if we need to make changes then they will be discussed with the current maintainers.
I’ll take the opportunity to thank current and past @tutor-maintainers. In particular: Kyle and Adolfo from tCRIL, Jhony from Edunext and Ghassan. Your contributions are a tremendous help to the project and I’m lucky to be working with you!
Yes, absolutely. Tutor and its official plugins are all licensed under the AGPL and we have no intention to change that.
The whole Tutor ecosystem has become a very important pillar of Open edX and we want to keep it that way: by continuously improving Tutor and releasing new plugins. This can only happen if the software remains open source.
@regis
Do you have a date when you think Cairn will be open sourced?
Will there continue to be a paid version of Cairn that provides support?
I attended the OARS meeting at the Open edX conference 2023 and was excited to see some similarities in tech stack that Cairn uses. I’m trying to figure out if we should go with Cairn now and/or wait until OARS is released. One thing I really liked about OARS is the xAPI tracking. I’m really not sure when OARS is scheduled to be production ready and we most likely need to use a working analytic solution as soon as we can. Currently we use Figures but I would prefer something more real-time and ease of custom reporting like Superset provides.
Yes, I agree that there are some parts of OARS which are very cool. We could definitely trade tracking logs for xAPI events – though I’m not as critical of tracking logs as others. xAPI events would be more standard, consistent and easier to work with, but we could achieve similar results with some very basic tracking log filters. I think that OARS really makes sense if you want to deploy a learning record store (LRS) next to your analytics reporting stack. When Ralph becomes compliant with the LRS standard, this should allow you to aggregate Moodle and Open edX data. But I fail to see the purpose of an LRS outside of that niche scenario. Moreover, my understanding is that OARS makes it harder to connect events and MySQL data, whereas in Cairn it’s trivial to run JOIN statements between these two sources of content.
But let’s discuss this further in the data working group
@regis We do appreciate you getting back with us on this and I did find the repo available here.
If I do have anything else to say about why we would need to use an LRS in more detail I’ll reach out to the data working group for sure. At the moment our instructional design team uses Articulate Storyline and there is an option to trigger xAPI events which would get sent to the LMS and eventually get stored in a LRS.
