Open edX is the

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

platform software developed by the edX organization. On June 1, 2013, edX open sourced the platform it had built to date, naming it Open edX to distinguish it from the organization itself. The source code can be found on

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. The platform was originally developed by Piotr Mitros, as a research project at MIT, with maintenance transferred to edX in 2012. When edX was acquired in 2021 by 2U, the Open edX team and maintenance were transferred to the Center for Reimagining Learning (tCRIL), a nonprofit founded by Harvard and MIT with the proceeds from the acquisition.

Uses

Open EdX was designed for the EdX project, which remains the largest global installation as of 2022, with over 3000 courses and 500,000 regular users. The Open EdX community maintains a catalog of other installations, including fully-hosted learning sites open to public courses and 350 other instances run by organizations of all sizes. An Open EdX marketplace also features partners that provide various services to community members running their own instances in multiple languages.

Software

The platform has been released one to two times a year since 2013. Each release is named after a tree, honoring the tree of knowledge. The Open edX server-side software is based on Python, with

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as the

web application framework A web framework (WF) or web application framework (WAF) is a software framework that is designed to support the development of web applications including web services, web resources, and web APIs. Web frameworks provide a standard way to build and ...

Community

Platform design and development have been codesigned with its community from early in the project's history. The community maintains several working groups focused on marketing, build-test-release cycles, translation, data design, front-end design, and code deprecation. The community hosts an annual Open edX Conference, which rotates worldwide each year. In 2022 it was held in Portugal.

References

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External links

Open edX Conference
site

site for the platform Free educational software Free learning management systems Free learning support software Learning management systems Free content management systems Virtual learning environments Classroom management software