Cambridge, MA - edX is pleased to announce the Open edX Core Committers Program, representing a group of top contributors that have a shared goal of accelerating our open source platform innovation and growth. The members will serve as fellow stewards of the Open edX platform with unique benefits including contributing, reviewing, and accepting high-quality contributions from the community to the platform.
The success of this initiative will further fuel the advancement of the edX platform by accelerating the rate in which new features, tools, and updates are made available to the educators and technologists building content for edX learners. We first released the Open edX platform to the world as open source software in 2013 as part of our commitment to enhance teaching and learning worldwide, and today, it powers over 2,400 learning sites including edX.org.
“Our platform is built so that educators can deliver learning at scale and continuously improve online and on-campus teaching and learning,” said JP Beaudry, CTO of edX. “Our Open edX network is powerful because it brings together passionate designers, technologists, researchers, and entrepreneurs that all share this commitment and work with us to deliver state-of-the-art education worldwide. The Core Committers program represents a cross-organizational mix of our top contributors that are stewarding innovation and improvement to the Open edX platform.”
The program, directed by edX’s Chief Architect, Nimisha Asthagiri, was piloted last summer with nine members, and is expanding to non-technical contributors like translators, designers, and researchers that demonstrate strong commitment, conduct, and caliber of work to the Open edX community. All of these members will work to design and develop high-quality, usable, and widely adopted offerings. Our current members include contributors from Appsembler, Edly, eduNEXT, OpenCraft, Overhang.io, and Raccoon Gang. In the past year, these Core Committers merged 60+ contributions to the platform and worked on projects including: making onboarding to the Open edX platform easier; improving our API frameworks; addressing and designing pathways for improving our proctoring capabilities; and mentoring new contributing developers.
Braden MacDonald, CTO of OpenCraft, shared: “The launch of the Core Committers program shows how much trust there is in the long term goals of the Open edX platform, as well as a real desire to work together to bring the project to its full potential. This is one of the huge advantages open source has over proprietary software as we’re able to do what proprietary software projects can’t do: aggregate the contributions of many organizations, and work together as a community. We know that everyone has a lot of demands on their time, so this kind of support from the top really empowers the core committers to make their involvement a priority. I’m excited to see where this could bring the Open edX platform!”
Our Core Committers will be among the attendees and presenters at this week’s Open edX Conference, on May 27th. For more information on the conference, and to register, please visit https://con.openedx.org/.
About Open edX Platform
The Open edX platform is an open-source learning management system that is used across the globe to teach and learn online. The Open edX platform powers edx.org, the online learning destination founded by Harvard and MIT that has served more than 30 million learners since 2012. The Open edX platform has been deployed to support everything from single classrooms, to universities, to nation-wide learning initiatives. Corporations, universities, governments, and NGOs choose the Open edX platform because it is robust, scalable, innovative, and full-featured. The Open edX project and its community share the vision that everyone, everywhere should have access to high-quality education. The Open edX platform makes realizing that vision, and your teaching and learning goals, possible today.
