5 benefits of Open edX® microsites

Microsites are the subdomains of your main Open edX platform domain. These subdomains help structure your MOOC content, allowing to separate certain courses by one (or more) of several filters. Here are just some of the possible filters:

1. Courses of one author grouped amongst all the other authors of that Open edX platform
2. Courses of one faculty grouped amongst all the courses of that campus
3. Courses of one campus grouped amongst all the available courses
4. Courses of one company amongst all the courses on this topic
5. Single course landing page that can help promoting the course better and increase students’ engagement

This way the students can browse only the courses relevant to their goals, without the need to surf amidst all the content housed by this Open edX platform instance.

What else do Open edX microsites have to offer?

There is an additional benefit of microsites, aside from content structuring and it’s a possibility to CUSTOMIZE them separately. This means you can have several absolutely differently customized course collections run by a single Open edX instance. Here is why it’s great:

1. You can group the courses by associated company and brand the page in company style.
2. You can choose languages, fonts, backgrounds, color scheme, etc. separately for each Open edX microsite you run.
3. You can have different modules running on each microsite, as one xBlock can be needed in Chemistry courses and useless in Maths courses.
4. You can have different payment  methods attached to different microsites on one Open edX instance.
5. You can attach a chat bot for Open edX to any separate microsite, which will enhance the UX greatly by helping suggest your students relevant content only.

Open edX microsites are a relevantly new feature, yet they are already warmly welcomed by the students and authors of several MOOC providers. These microsites allow diversifying and customizing the content to fit the users best – while still using a single Open edX instance to run it! Here are examples how it all works:

1. All the content deployed on some Open edX instance
2. Content grouped by a certain filter.

Potential Open edX microsite use cases

Here are just some of the potential use cases for Open edX microsites:

1. System whitelabeling for customers
2. Course branding to increase student engagement
3. Department/faculty branding for companies/universities, etc.

We are planning to add support of arbitrary custom domains to work with microsites. So, if you are interested – keep in touch to stay informed. This option is already available for our customers as a manual configuration procedure – you may have it now if you contact us.