Open edX for IT infrastructure and DevOps training

Educators
1

Hello from South of France,

First thread opening here so a quick intro seems in order. :slight_smile: After more than 20 years in Open-Source IT (mainly infra, and a few other things), I gladly fell into the education side of things by becoming a Linux, Cloud Native technologies and DevOps trainer for schools and Ed companies.

Like when you only have a hammer, I started developing my courses using my DevOps tools and techniques, AKA Markdown and Everything as Code. This allowed me to build a system based on Quarto (MyST in sight for the future) for content creation, and the Open-Source automation toolbox for lab environments management.

While this is starting to work quite nicely, things got more complex when I began considering all the other features I’d need to manage access and run the sessions. That’s when I started learning about LMSs and the numerous technologies in that rich field. Quickly, Open edX appeared as the best solution, which led me here now !

Nevertheless, even after quite some reading of the docs and this forum content, I’m still struggling to wrap my head around what could be the best way to integrate :

  • Markdown content
    Because it fits DevOps tools and practices so nicely; because I learned to enjoy using it all along the days (even if I regret AsciiDoc); because it can be extended to format any textual content type; because there are processors to convert it in almost any format; and because AI agents are natural at reading and writing it.
  • IT infrastructure and DevOps activities
    Like training and assessment labs, with or without grading.
    Theses activities require provisioning environments (containers, VMs, networks, services) where the trainee activities are actually be performed.
    Ideally, trainees would access the labs through Open edX, serving as a portal, offering to trigger remote actions, embedding a web shell, or a dev env of sort.
    I’m also studying if and how JupyterLab/JupyterHub or DevContainers/VS Code Server could be part of the equation to provide a featured lab env to users.
    Trainees and grading system should have the hability to run checks in users dedicated env, to verify task completion/success.

Again, this is all very new to me so, the smallest pieces of information, the tiniest enlightenments, may be a huge help to draw a meaningful and achiveable path.

Thanks in advance for sharing your knowledge and experience

TY
J

2

Hi @Jeremie_Tarot. Welcome to the community.

Open edX is XML native. So, I see compiling markdown to HTML / XML as the shortest path to Markdown native Open edX content authoring.

What is Open Learning XML? — Latest documentation is a good place to get started on the structure of the XML format and content structure.

3

Hey Jeremie,

welcome to this community. I think this library can be of service to you.

Cheers

4

Hi,

Thank you @arunmozhi and @Felipe for those two valuable pointers.

Getting to know OLX a bit better was indeed an important step.

And for mu, it’s surely worth evaluating if and how it could be extended, or if a set of Pandoc filters could handle the md → OLX/H5P/whatever format conversion.

I’ll keep you posted…

TY

J