Open edX® 2017 Conference summary by Raccoon Gang

The 4th in a row and the 1st to be held overseas, this Open edX 2017 Conference is a significant milestone in edX evolution, marking new horizons to explore, new possibilities to use, new partners like Kiron to join the Open edX initiative — and, of course, new challenges to overcome!

310 Open edX specialists and enthusiasts attended the keynotes, lightning talks and multiple conversations in spacious lecture halls of Universidad Carlos III Madrid Leganés campus.

Main insights from the conference

Open edX in general achieved astonishing results over these 5 years:

• More than 22 million learners on edx.org and multiple Open edx installations in total

• More than 800 sites running Open edX instances worldwide (550 appearing within the last year)

• More than 5,000 courses published on these sites (1,300 added within last year)

• 9 out of 39 top MOOC providers run on Open edX

Open edX community grows strong and widens year by year and Raccoon Gang is proud to be among the contributing developers and conference sponsors. Here are some of our personal impressions from the conference:

1. It was an unexpected yet pleasant surprise, when  Anant Agarwal, CEO of EdX.org, mentioned our effort put into producing multi-proctoring module for Open edX in his opening keynote speech. We will do our best to deserve such an honor next year, too!

    

2. We presented the first crowdfunded Open edX XBlock developed together with Appsembler and other partners.

   The resulting Video XBlock from Appsembler and Raccoon Gang adds support for videos hosted on Vimeo, Wistia and Brightcove within the built-in Open edX video player UI in addition to the same great features the player already has — speed controls, clickable subtitles, etc. We described it in more details in one of our previous blogposts.

    

3. No Open edX Con comes without our customer doing a talk. Open edX Con 2017 was no different.
   We proudly attended the talk on gamification from Applied Materials, which was warmly met by the audience. After applying feedback and adding more features this system will be open-sourced to let all Open edX community use it in their projects.                            

4. We won the viral marketing award due to neat design of our T-shirts! Well, it’s not only FUN that can work with Open edX for fun, hehe!

Any conference is not only about talks – networking rules, and we didn’t miss the opportunity! Thanks for the great time, Abstract team! We were also invited to the Appsembler party, but we will keep these photos private…

It’s always inspiring to discuss current and future state of digital education with eLearning professionals from across the globe.

We are really satisfied with the outcomes of this conference. We met old partners and made new friends. We learned a lot of new interesting ideas and showed what we are capable of. See you next year on Open edX Conference 2018 and we are sure we will be able to bring lots of new stuff to the table!

p.s. Here are some more great articles and materials about Open edX 2017 Conference events:

1. Full list of keynote speeches, lightning talks and presentations
2. Appsembler’s 5 highlights of the conference
3. IBL’s summary of the conference events
4. Personal impressions from Michael Goudzwaard, an eLearning presenter and Learning Experience Designer from Dartmouth college, the US.