(This is one of the three questions from edX Marketing that I mentioned on List of proposed marketing activities)
To help edX Marketing understand the challenges you face: can you describe some missed opportunities? Where could you have marketed the Open edX platform, but were not able to for some reason? What was blocking you?
I lost a probable potential client because of the UI/UX customization was almost impossible to do on the existing version, especially for LMS.
Most “missed opportunities” I can think of relate to product design or functionality i.e. features that were needed or expected but that didn’t exist out of the box such as easy theming, lightweight analytics dashboard, grade book, live conferencing tool integration, chat and messaging tools, etc. These are features often found in the more “traditional” LMSs, and users expect them. Of course there’s always the possibility of developing such tools but it comes at considerable cost.
One could argue that Open edX has serious product/market fit issues - however good our marketing activities can be, this will remain a core issue. But let’s not forget that it began as a MOOC-centric LMS (and still is for the most part) and that it’s slowly evolving towards something larger and more permissive.
I appreciate that feature gaps are a real issue. For this question in particular though, we’re looking for specifics about marketing gaps that can be filled.
An open source project has the best chance of growing into a successful ecosystem if the entire community around it takes an active role.
An open source active developer community (and providers) grows trough
We should take this topic from the technical perspective also in the marketing perspective to be successful.
Missing point: people knows the brand edX as academic Mooc platform, less people know Open edX as a modern and powerful LMS system.