Open edX® 2018 Conference summary by Raccoon Gang

The 5th in a row Open edX Conference 2018 was remarkable eLearning event, which attracted over three hundred developers, educators, and business professionals. All participants attended the keynotes, lightning talks and multiple conversations in spacious lecture halls of HEC Montréal University.

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

• More than 35 million learners on edx.org and multiple Open edX installations in total
• More than 1500 sites running Open edX instances worldwide (700 appearing within the last year)
• More than 7,000 courses published on these sites (2,000 added within last year)

Reimagine Education Goals for 2022

Open edX not only puts and achieves its goals but also makes eLearning more accessible every year. Anant Agarwal, CEO of EdX.org, singled out 5 main areas of work for the next 5 years:

• Education Access – expanding access to education on the truly global scale; reaching to 100M learners with further platform internationalization
• Quality Education –  leveraging the power of digital technology for learning (AI powered personalized learning, VR and AR), and deploying analytics for learner engagement.
• Lifelong Education – establishing life-learning for all community of learners
• Omnichannel Education  – transforming the delivery of education through an omnichannel approach
• Modular Education – building a fully modular model for education with MicroMasters programs and mentoring services

MOOCs 2025

Delivering a keynote at Open edX 2018 conference, Columbia’s Researcher Fiona Hollands presented her recent study “MOOCS 2025”, where she made two predictions about the future of MOOCs in general:

Hawthorn release

Long-awaited Open edX Hawthorn release was announced at the conference. The main insights of release were presented by Marco Morales, edX Product Manager:

Open edX and SSO

Sergey Movchan, CEO @ Raccoon Gang, explained why Single-Sign On is so important in eLearning environment and how Raccoon Gang implements SSO in Open edX:

Lightning Talk: What’s new in SCORM Xblock

Natalia Vynogradenko, Instructional Designer @ Raccoon Gang, described  the best practices of SCORM Xblock settings in Open edX platform:

Lightning Talk: Open edX Learners Global Analytics (OLGA)

Sergey Movchan, CEO @ Raccoon Gang presented the tool that is able to collect global Open edX instances and learners statistics:

Lightning Talk: RG analytics 1.0

Sergiy Movchan presented the new analytics tool for Open edX, which gives not only rich insights about learners performance but also gives the opportunity to detect content related issues:

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. We’ll definitely take part in Open edX Conference 2019  which will be at the University of California at San Diego on March 26-28, 2019. See you there!

Here are more great articles and materials about Open edX 2018 Conference:

1. MOOC Expert Fiona Hollands Makes A Suggestion and a Prediction

2. edX CEO Anant Agarwal Announces Ambitious Goals for 2022

3. 5 Highlights from Open edX Conference 2018

You also can catch all plenaries and breakouts of the conference on Open edX YouTube channel