Using Open Edx as "the only" LMS Option of our University

Dear Community,

This is my first post, and I’m looking forward to your comments. I’m working as a Digital Learning Team Leader in a boutique private university in İstanbul Turkey.

Having 3000+ students, we are considering to use Open edx as our single LMS option in the near future.

Currently our LMS solution is Blackboard. We are considering to move from BB to open edx. A local software company will setup and perform the maintenance and customisation. We will have a 2 semester long pilot process for open edx. Mean while whole university will continue to use BB as usual. After pilots, we are planning to switch totally from BB to open edx for whole university.

What do you think about using open Edx as the only LMS option after using BB for 5 years? Any challenges for Instructors, students or us -as the digital learning team-?

Unfortunately we will not be able to use 2 platforms at the same time after pilot process because of budget limitations.

Thank you.

Welcome to the community @ozorand. Quick questions: why are you moving from Blackboard, and what convinced you to try using Open edX? I don’t know Blackboard all that well, but given that it is more of a “traditional” LMS designed for residential courses, there are likely a few notable differences between Open edX and BB.

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EdX has intentionally focused on online and large-scale courses rather than the on-campus market, so there are a few features one might expect from and LMS that Open edX doesn’t have. For instance, there’s no easy way to “section” your courses, there’s no integration with student information systems, and getting certain downloads from courses above a certain size is very slow. Still, things are better on this front than they were a few years ago. Staff grading is easier than it was, for example.

I know MIT has made extensive use of Open edX on-campus. They’ve built a few custom additions to it, and they put a lot of time and work into maintaining it (I believe they have one full-time person and two part-time people doing that work).

@pdpinch might be able to give more details, or at least point you toward a good reference.

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