Posted on by Perpetual

Open edX 2016 Conference: Day 1 Run-down

Despite previous conferences being held in a New England autumn, edX decided to change things up with a decisive move to Stanford University in the sunny Bay Area. From June 14th to 17th, hundreds of innovators arrive in Palo Alto to discuss, innovate, and celebrate how far Open edX has progressed. Perpetual Learning was proud to be a Friend of Open edX conference sponsor, our second one running.
​Anant Agarwal kicked off the conference, covering topics like how credentialing is evolving on edX, from Course completion in the early days to the new trend of Micro Masters becoming the word of the day.

​​​Anant also covered Academic Integrity tools, including virtual proctoring, a topic very close to Perpetual Learning as we’ve worked to enable proctoring on FunMOOC using ProctorU’s services.

​He also recited an anecdote of how an Indian student Akshay Kulkarni recognized him on his trip to India, and had come up to Anant and thanked him for edX,  which he attributed as the main catalyst towards eventually landing a job at Microsoft.
Picture

Photo of slide on stage, excuse clarity

Picture

Photo of slide on stage, excuse clarity
Following this, Jono Bacon, Director of Community at Github, keynoted on Building a Community Exoskeleton. He provided key insights and frameworks to help further develop and structure the Open edX community, very timely as the Open edX community is reaching a critical mass requiring some organized collaboration, which we are seeing with the adoption of tools like Slack. Jono rightly pointed out that achieving the underlying collaboration workflows is more critical than the tool used to solve this challenge.

Joel (Dev Manager), Mark (CTO) and Eddie (Chief Architect) from the edX team spoke about the state of Open edX and Development and Architecture priorities and initiatives. The sheer number of (known) Open edX sites out there is accelerating each month.

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Photo of slide on stage, excuse clarity

Eddie presented a clean and structured multi-tiered representation of the Open edX architecture, which was developed in time for the conference thanks to ‘Conference Driven Development’ as Eddie noted.

Lunch in the courtyard of the Lathrop Library was another highlight of the day, with the sun hitting the spot after the morning session indoors. While the selection of the food was quite delectable, our personal favorite was the lemon tart not to mention the supply of fresh lemonade through the sunny day.
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We got back to attending several interesting sessions in the latter half of the day. Regis Behmo from Funmooc demystified the Open edX source code in his session Open edX 101: A Source Code Review. Steven Burch from StanfordX spoke about dogfooding Open edX, with a few often over-looked and very pragmatic soft aspects of testing and building good software. The team from Applied Materials discussed the usability of Open edX in a corporate environment and highlighted the gaps and how they’ve been able to work through them. We enjoyed particularly the talk from TokyoTech, who showed one of the best applications of edX insights as we gained truly deep insights into learner engagement.

There were several more engaging talks and ‘birds of a feather’ sessions, a more detailed run-down of the schedule here.

​We ended the day sipping summer wine under the canopy of (Dogwood?) trees exchanging ideas, planning, dreaming. And with this just being day one, we can’t wait to see what the rest of the event has in store.