Attendees

The Technical Oversight Committee met on Mar 12, 2025 with the following members in attendance:

• Anant Agarwal (2U)

• Dustin Tingley (Harvard)

• Edward Zarecor (Axim) 

• Jeremy Ristau (2U)

• David Morales (WGU)

• Nacho Despujol (Instructor Representative, UPV)

• Régis Behmo (Operator & Core Contributor Representative, Edly)

• Xavier Antoviaque (User/Learner representative, OpenCraft)

Announcements

Welcoming New Members

• Jeremy Ristau (2U) was welcomed as the new representative from 2U, replacing George Babey on the committee.

• David Morales (Western Governors University) was welcomed as WGU joins the Open edX community as the TOC representative of the first Mission Aligned Organization

Mission Aligned Organization Candidate

• A second organization is currently discussing joining the Open edX project and TOC as a Mission Aligned Organization; they:

  • Would like to collaborate on advancing the Open edX platform

  • Are already reaching more than 10 million learners in India

UNESCO Global Education Coalition Membership

• Open edX is considering joining the UNESCO Global Education Coalition

• Founded in 2020 as an emergency response to COVID-19, is now a platform for multistakeholder collaboration in education

  • Involves more than 200 institutional partners from the UN family, civil society, academia, and the private sector

  • Focuses on three initiatives: connectivity, teachers, and gender equality

  • Serves as a transformative accelerator towards Sustainable Development Goal 4 (quality education)

• It was noted that edX is already a member of the coalition

Verbatims from Go-to-market presentation

• As requested at the last meeting, interview context that informed the go-to-market strategy recommendations has been compiled as quotes (specific quotes not included in the information provided), and provided for the TOC members to review

WGU & David Morales - Introduction and Welcome

• David Morales from Western Governors University (WGU) was introduced as a new member, who has presented the organization and its goals in joining the Open edX project - which include:

  • Contributing the developments WGU has already done internally on the project;

  • Improving the Open edX project by creating a team entirely dedicated to contributing and helping to maintain Open edX;

  • Making the maintenance of WGU’s Open edX instances more sustainable

• The committee welcomed David and praised WGU's participation and commitment to the Open edX project as a new organizational partner

Open edX Partners As Maintainers

• The committee discussed the Partners as Maintainers proposals that were recently discussed and voted on by Open edX partners

• Project partners aimed to address a critical issue of insufficient time allocation for core contributors, as many are unable to contribute effectively due to lack of time allocation by their organization. 

• The discussions and proposals covered several key areas:

  • Level of commitment required from partners

  • How contributions are made by partners

  • Repository maintenance responsibilities, a key goal of the initiative being to increase the contribution of maintenance time to better cover the maintenance needs of the platform

  • Partner program benefits

  • Marketing contributions

  • Commitment & control mechanism for partners, to ensure 

• It was noted that the winning categories from the partner vote were highlighted in green in the document, representing the preferred options from the provider community

• A point of discussion was a tie in the voting concerning the "committing criterion". An hybrid approach was proposed  as a possible solution to the tie:

  • Some titles would have fixed contributions (eg. “Preferred provider”)

  • Others would be proportional to organization size/team (eg “Partner”)

  • This approach was mentioned

• This solution did not achieve consensus, so the TOC agreed that a subgroup of TOC members would discuss these options separately to determine the best path forward

Forums Service Migration to Python

• The successful completion of the forum rewrite project to replace the legacy Ruby cs_comments_service with a new Python-based implementation was reported

• The new forum application is a drop-in replacement that moves from Ruby to Python and from MongoDB to MySQL

• Key advantages of the new implementation include:

  • Easier maintenance as most Open edX developers are skilled in Python rather than Ruby

  • Simplified architecture by helping to eliminate MongoDB and using the same MySQL database as other components

  • Compatibility with existing forum features including discussion XBlocks

• The migration plan includes:

  • Transparent migration path for existing installations through the Tutor plugin system

  • Migration tools to help users move data from MongoDB to MySQL

  • Complete removal of the Ruby implementation in a future release (June 2025)

• The committee praised the importance of this work as it eliminates a significant technical debt while preserving essential functionality for student engagement

Several TOC members have noted the importance of forums for courses, and expressed excitement at that adding additional missing features would be simpler