Core Product 1-pager

What is the Product Core? What’s in scope?

The scope of the Open edX Product Core is the full learning and teaching cycle. The focus of the Core is the pedagogical experience, with capabilities and Capabilities/features that make teaching and learning processes pedagogically sound and impactful.

1. For authors and course teams, this includes content creation, course/learning experience design and delivery.

2. For learners, this includes enrollment to credential.

3. For administrators, this includes management to analytics.

While the full list of Core Product capabilities and Capabilities/features is being refined, WIP frameworks and feature lists can be found here and here. 

Principles of the Open edX Product Core:

1. The Core is generalized. Capabilities/Capabilities/features in the Core must be designed in non-specific, business-agnostic ways, with the flexibility to support a wide and diverse range of use cases. 

2. Capabilities/features that are designed to meet the specific needs of any one particular community member, or that are written with specific business logic, are not part of the Core, and cannot be written into the Core codebase.

3. The Core is slim and streamlined. Capabilities/features included in the Core have a clear, data-defined purpose in the learning and teaching lifecycles and have singular implementations.

4. Outside the Core, we are working toward a robust state of extensibility, where customizations and business-specific experimentation can occur via plugins.

5. All capabilities/features in the Core that are intended for use by learners, course authors, teams and administrators have a reference implementation that does not require the end-user to have any technical experience or background, including a WYSIWYG UI. 

Who administers the Core and how?

The Core is gated by the Core Product Working Group, as community representatives, and by Axim Collaborative, as the stewards of the open-source project. Both parties use publicly documented open-source community practices and processes. These include:

1. The Community Release process, which includes biannual advanced planning for which new Capabilities/features, improvements and enhancements will be supported in each release.

2. The Product Review process, which tests the validity and viability of every feature and enhancement.

3. The Deprecation process, which provides a framework and timeline for removing Capabilities/features which do not align with the Core principles.