Open edX 2018 Montréal: Birds of a Feather

Conference (Wednesday-Thursday)

The 2018 Open edX conference is May 30 and 31 in Montreal Canada, preceded by a day of tutorials and succeeded by Developer Summit 2018.

Birds of a Feather (BoFs)

There will be a board near registration detailing the times and locations of specific Birds of a Feather gatherings.  This page is a place to pre-plan topics and gauge interest.

Proposed topics

Add your proposal for a topic here, and we will help facilitate finding a time and place for groups that show interest to meet!

TitleDescriptionProposer

Interested? (tag yourself using @{your name})

Certificates and badges

Let's discuss how our organizations are using certificates and badges with our Open edX deployments, share best practices and stumbling blocks, and ideas for future enhancements or fixes.  I can present a new approach for badges and experience with Badgr.io (hopefully including their just-released Pathways feature).  Please join! Feel free to add any related specific topics or ideas here....

What are the best practices people are using to find instructors and courses? 


Posted on the table to the side of Registration this morning - Thursday at 2:55pm (coffee break). Please check for changes and/or ;location

Bryan Wilson, Appsembler


Mobile Apps

If you're a mobile application developer or designer, come introduce yourself. This is free-form. Please add topics to this list, with your name next to it, if you're interested in discussing something specific with all of us:

J'aime O of Appsembler

J'aime O

Albert (AJ) St. Aubin (Deactivated)

Braden MacDonald

Marco Morales (Deactivated)

Harry Klein

Pierre Mailhot

Nimisha Asthagiri (Deactivated)

UX and UI DesignIf you're a designer, come introduce yourself. Let's get to know each other and talk about how we design, and want to design, engaging and delightful experiences for learners and authors.J'aime O of Appsembler
Authoring & Authoring toolsMade a cool XBlock lately? Done something unusual in a course? What tools are we missing in Studio to deliver awesome learning experiences? That's what I want to talk about!Matthew Harrington, Appsembler

Matthew Harrington

Harry Klein

Corporate & professional learning trends

What does it mean to be a “Learner First” organization? 

    • How can your organization ensure that learners are getting the information they need, where and when they need it, in an experience that is empowering, enabling, satisfying, and delivers impactful content?
    • Do you know how learners are measuring their success? It’s not all about how satisfied they are with your course.
    • In what new ways may you need to understand your learners?
    • How must you enhance the learning experience and empower learners?
    • What data must your capture to gain insights into your learners?

Harry Klein,

Appsembler

Valerie Pierre

Jay Stockslader

Containerization of Open edX

While Open edX Devstack is Docker-based, it still depends on Ansible to build the images. This can slow down the developer's workflow and alienate newcomers to Open edX, as they have to learn all the intricacies of Ansible in order to debug installation issues.

This BoF is to discuss a new pure Dockerfile-based (no Ansible) way to set up a local Open edX development environment, and also explore what a container-based production deployment of Open edX looks like using only Dockerfiles, and not depending on Ansible for the orchestration.

See discussion of these two topics in this Google Doc "Running Open edX on Docker", which is the scratchpad to identify goals for the upcoming Open edX Development Summit.


Posted on the table to the side of Registration this morning - Thursday at 3:40pm. Please check for changes and/or location

Nate Aune, Appsembler
Backend/Frontend Split

Most frontends across all Open edX services are built using server-side templates and "older" Javascript libraries like Backbone. Efforts are under way to build modern frontends using React and Bootstrap that interact with the server via RESTful APIs exclusively. It would be great to get together and meet others who are interested in this idea.

It would also be great to discuss the benefits to our mobile applications.  As we move to more RESTful apis could we find benefits to our applications?  Can we find more common ground between the two services?

Douglas Hall (Deactivated)

Albert (AJ) St. Aubin (Deactivated)

edX

Ari Rizzitano (Deactivated)

APIs

Have you extended the Open edX APIs? Had to deal with deprecation issues on upgrades? Looking for better standardization, documentation, and support for community-based extensions?


Let's gather and talk through what we all need, and how we can work together as a community--and together with edX–to build a robust and well-documented set of APIs for Open edX.

Aaron Beals, Appsembler

Douglas Hall (Deactivated)

Samuel Paccoud

Julien Maupetit

Nimisha Asthagiri (Deactivated)

Robert Raposa

Developer Documentation

What documentation do you find very useful?  What documentation trips you up?  What documentation could you never find at all?  Where do you go for documentation?

Let's discuss our various documentation needs and try to discover what we wish to improve next.

Robert Raposa, edXNimisha Asthagiri (Deactivated), Nate Aune

Other meetings

If you would like to schedule a private meeting, please contact one of the event organizers at the registration desk.