IBL News | New York
Open edX, a leading open-source platform and global community stewarded by Axim Collaborative has established a new category of institution-level partnerships called Mission Aligned Organization (MAO). This category is dedicated to accelerating the development of the Open edX platform.
The first organization to join the project is Western Governors University (WGU), the largest nonprofit university in the U.S.
This institution has committed to providing a dedicated team of ten engineers, guidance from senior WGU leaders, and product management services.
“Open edX is a highly scalable, open-source technology platform that has enabled innovation and fast technology implementation that is crucial for our students’ learning outcomes,” said David Morales, senior vice president for technology and CIO at WGU.
“We are committed to supporting WGU students with high-quality learning experiences and are also pleased to support thousands of other organizations embracing competency-based learning, student-first approaches, and solutions for documenting skills and credentials through our contributions to the Open edX project,” he added.
Morales will join the Technical Oversight Committee to support strategy, including platform architecture design, tech stack, and design templates.
The immediate priorities for the WGU engineers on the project include building a roles and permissions framework, creating better facilities for extracting data, setting up libraries of atomic learning units, and improving the upgrade experience for developers.
Axim Collaborative said, “With WGU’s participation, the Open edX project expects to deepen its ability to support competency-based education, which measures skills and learning rather than time spent in a classroom.”
“Students earn competency units (the equivalent of credit hours) when they demonstrate skill proficiency through completing performance and objective assessments. As a result, students progress through courses as they prove mastery of the material rather than advancing only when a semester or term ends.”
The Open edX platform is a leader in learning science and instructional design and pioneered massive open online courses (MOOCs). Since its founding in 2012, the platform has evolved into one of the top learning solutions worldwide, supporting high-quality, high-scale online learning in higher education, enterprise, and government organizations.
Supported by developers, researchers, and users, the Open edX platform empowers anyone to design or enhance courses and programs.
WGU adopted the Open edX platform in 2022 to deliver course content to its students. As part of this new collaboration, WGU will help develop additional features and capabilities of the platform, driving innovation that benefits the Open edX ecosystem.
“WGU’s contributions will help extend the Open edX platform to support better competency-based learning pathways, mastery learning, and microcredentials,” said Edward Zarecor, vice president of engineering for the Open edX platform, Axim Collaborative.
“We are delighted to see mission-driven organizations collaborate to accelerate innovation around high-impact solutions. WGU’s significant contribution will help all organizations leveraging the platform and continue to grow the Open edX ecosystem of contributors,” said Ferdi Alimadhi, Chief Technology Officer of Open Learning, MIT, and member of the Technical Oversight Committee.
• Blog: WGU & the Open edX Project: Scaling Solutions to Accelerate Access to Competency-Based Learning
