Open Edx Conference 2016
The Open Edx Conference 2016 was held from 14-17 June at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. Anchored by Edx, this annual Conference brings together active online practitioners from the Open Edx community. Participants ranged from corporates to higher education institutes. The conference had two days of presentation sessions, two days of hands-on activities, and a hackathon.
The keynote address on Day 1 by Jono Bacon, writer and software engineer, stressed the importance of building and maintaining open software development communities. He walked participants through some of the strategies and mechanisms for building such communities.
Mitchell L Stevens, Associate Professor of Education, spoke in his keynote on Day 2 about the legacy of educational institutes, and how open education through MOOCs is bringing about a discourse shift in higher education worldwide. Other presentations touched upon aspects such as MOOC architecture, data analytics, media production etc. Several short ad hoc discussions, called ‘Birds of Feathers’ (BoF), were organized by select members to discuss topics not included in the formal presentations. Some of the ideas that emerged in these BoF sessions were adopted to build solutions in the Hackathon – such as how to seamlessly embed license information into content. The hands-on sessions, new additions to the Conference, were meant to help new members learn from their peers by actually doing some of the most challenging activities, like setting up the development environment, running LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability), and so on.
Participants were excited to learn that the Conference will be conducted outside the US for the first time. Open Edx 2017 is scheduled for 24-25 May 2017 at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
All tweets from Open Edx 2016 may be found on twitter at #openedx2016
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