The Open edX Conference 2016 (June 14-15th at Stanford University in Palo Alto) is on track. Registration, with tickets at $200 to $450, is open to developers, system administrators, education specialists and anyone who wants to learn more about the Open edX platform.

Organizers have called for proposals to speak in 40-minute sessions, 5-minute lighting talks and 90-minute workshops.

The conference, which will take place at Lathrop Library, will be focused on the development and use of the Open edX platform. A team of four edX employees (Erin Brown, Joel Barciauskas, Molly de Blanc, and Roberta Wilson) is organizing the conference.

A sponsorship package is also in place.

IBL Studios has released a new version of its IBL Campus iOS app, which is based on the codebase of the Open edX platform.

This 2.0 release, which includes improved navigation and additional security, is available for free on the Apple App Store.

Educational apps are mostly games and classroom tools today. The largest student-oriented apps (Duolingo, Quizlet and PhotoMath) only serve a tiny part of students’ needs, leaving huge potential for new entrants.

“Today’s educational content is painful to consume on mobile devices… Most high quality educational sites (Khan Academy, CK-12, Coursera, etc.) weren’t created to answer specific questions, so they don’t show up in these search results,” writes Christopher Pedregal, founder of Socratic.org, on EdSurge.com.

• “Smartphones can give learners superpowers so they can learn more things, more deeply, on their own.”
  
• “If you’re building a social product, be thoughtful about whom students want to share with.”
• “It’s clear that there are billions of people around the world who want to learn, and smart phones could go a long way in making learning more accessible.”
• Google’s Primer app is a good example of an innovative app.

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Download IBL Campus’ iOS app to take courses online and offline!

edX announced an agreement with Kiron University, a crowdfunded, German online startup, to help Syrians and other refugees in Europe (59.5 million in 2015) access college courses and earn their degrees.

Under this arrangement, to be started in April 2016, Kiron will add 300 edX courses to its learning platform and edX will issue free verified certificates for specific courses that can translate to college credit with Kiron’s university campus partners.

Participating universities include edX partner RWTH Aachen University, German universities of applied sciences and other European and American colleges.

Deploying Insights Analytics on Open edX is an extremely complicated issue. Several teams within edX and the consultancy OpenCraft have started a collaboration “to address some of the pain points around Insights Analytics setup, deployment, maintenance, and deployment”. Plans have been outlined on this Google document. This is a summary of all of the difficulties from the Analytics Team:

1. Maintaining jobs on the scheduler is a highly manual and rather difficult process
2. Jobs fail periodically, we should identify all common causes and resolve them
3. Schema changes are very painful (see the process above)
4. The AWS configuration is rather complex and difficult to replicate
5. The pipeline should be installed like every other component in the edX infrastructure. Currently it is not.
6. We should seriously consider deprecating edx-analytics-configuration and just merging it into the edx/configuration monolith.
7. The analyticstack (devstack) lags behind quite a bit and takes some manual intervention to generate new versions of. It also doesn’t support Elasticsearch 1.5, which is used by currently-in-development features in Insights. We’d like to move this into Docker.
8. Centralize event collection. We should probably be using Kafka or something similar.
9. Non-AWS configuration is rather complex and difficult to setup, which is very painful for the open source community.

From OpenCraft

1. Lack of documentation
2. Problems setting up edX Analytics Devstack (process took a long time, was impossible to complete for one team member; overall complexity of the stack made it difficult to distribute work to additional team members as needed)
3. Problems with Hadoop version conflicts (fixed at the time via a couple of PRs: #128, #127), not really an issue anymore
4. No (straightforward) way to run acceptance tests for edx-analytics-pipeline
5. Using Analytics in production:
   1. Many steps required to install the stack (partly due to Ansible scripts making assumptions about, e.g., AWS regions)
   2. Many steps required to configure Jenkins (manually creating jobs and setting parameters/interval for each Analytics task, etc.)
6. The number of PRs required to implement major changes slows work down (these types of changes often require PRs in four different repos; see “Dependencies” in this example)
7. Not being able to merge PRs implementing work done for clients; having to maintain changes separately
8. Deciding where to add different types of functionality (instructor dashboard vs. insights) was not straightforward in some cases

Success! Our #OpenEdX instance has a fully functional #analytics pipeline. Who else has come this far? @OpenEdX pic.twitter.com/meRTy9jJ4R

— Lorena Barba (@LorenaABarba) December 3, 2015

edX Inc, the venture created by MIT and Harvard University, has reached 46 charter members and 48 partner members as of today.

When partnering with edX, there are two maintenance models for a university or corporate partner, according to the Perpetual Learning Open edX consultancy.

MODEL 1: Self-Service

• Partner uses edX as a free LMS for a course with a revenue sharing agreement.
• The courses are created by Partner without course-production assistance from edX.
• Once the course is live on edx.org, edX will collect
  • The first $50,000 generated by the course, or
  • $10,000 for each recurring course
• edX and Partner will evenly split all revenues beyond that threshold.

MODEL 2: edX-Supported

• edX is a consultant and design partner, offering production assistance to universities for their MOOCs.
• edX charges a base rate of $250,000 for each new course, plus $50,000 for each time a course is offered for an additional term.
• Partner gets 70 percent of any revenue generated by the course.

In addition, there is a membership fee for contributing members of $500,000 and an annual maintenance fee of $100,000 or $45,000 starting in the second year of the term.

The Open edX Dogwood version was officially released today, on February 11, 2016.

This fourth Open edX release presents new features such as:

• Partial Credit
• Open edX Analytics Developer Stack
• Initial Version of Comprehensive Theming
• Additional File Types for Open Response Assessments
• Timed Exams
• LTI XBlock
• Otto Ecommerce Service

Detailed information about Dogwood is included in the Open edX Release Notes site. To get this release, visit Dogwood Installation Instructions.

Upgrading from the existing Cypress version into Dogwood is a challenging task. Officially, edX says the following about it:

“In order to keep up with the latest security updates and patches, as well as enabling developers to benefit from new features, we have upgraded Django from 1.4 to 1.8.7 and our Python version to Python 2.7.10. If you are currently running Cypress, upgrading to Dogwood will be a more involved process. If you’re having trouble, read the Installation Guide and try the edx-code or openedx-ops archives.”

Additionally, Ned Batchelder, a leading Open edX engineer said:

“Everyone, please note that upgrading from Cypress to Dogwood is *complicated*.  You need to read the instructions: http://edx.readthedocs.org/projects/open-edx-icr/en/dogwood/dogwood.html .  One of the reasons it took a while to finalize Dogwood was the complexity of the upgrade script.  Use with care :).”

IBL engineers’ advice is to avoid the risk of running that upgrading script (since it might break the whole installation) and simply build a new instance manually, migrating all of the data.

The next Open edX release, named Eucalyptus, is scheduled for mid-2016.

EdX engineer Molly de Blanc recently provided a insightful overview of the state of Open edX during a conference in Geelong, Australia.

During the talk, she highlighted edX’s goal of “reaching a billion students” and achieving financial sustainability.

Molly mentioned that, as of today, there are 203 public Open edX sites, 9 non-public sites and 2851 courses in 20 languages (853 courses are on edX.org). This count was made on January 19th.

The skills required for the $100K/year programming jobs can be learned online through edX.org, Coursera.com and Udacity.com.

Java, Python, Perl, C++ and other languages are in high demand worldwide, as reflected in the graphic above and the TIOBE index.

• edX’s Blog: The 3 Most Lucrative Programming Skills You Can Learn Online For Free
• edX’s Blog: The mobile app market is exploding and opening up new job opportunities and pathways
• Computer Science courses on edx.org

Some important navigational changes are coming to the Open edX platform’s LMS:

• The name of the current Courseware, that includes updates and handouts, is changing to Course.
• The name of the Course Info page is changing to Home.
• Home page will be located to the left of the Course page.
• A new tab called Resume Course in the upper right corner is being added.

The goal of these changes is to help learners to navigate through courses more easily.