Concept Note: A Modular Open edX Experience
This is a vision-forward concept doc to outline the value, scope and potential market fit for modularity. It is a draft and intended to stimulate discussion, and to inform a use case-driven narrative around current discovery work around course modularity, atomic learning units, and a lightweight LMS/learning core.
Beyond MOOCs: A Modularized Open edX Experience
Concept Doc
Abstract and Goal:
Open edX was built to deliver full, end-to-end courses. The course-centric model is deeply embedded in every level of the platform and platform architecture, such that the underlying structure results in difficult barriers to creating alternative, more nimble models of content delivery. Furthermore, the current platform core has grown into a gargantuan monolith that creates myriad challenges around extensibility and performance for developers and course teams who need agile customization options even within the end-to-end course experience. This Initiative proposes to create a new, radically simplified, modularized and scalable system that enables diversified experiences in building courses, learning experiences and course pathways. In addition to creating end-to-end courses from the top down, it would offer an alternative option for users to create, design, build, sequence and deliver learning experiences from the ground up.
Value and Impact:
Value to educators, faculty, SMEs, course designers, course authors:
Improves authoring by enabling a pedagogy-first pathway through the course design experience. Educators are freed to focus on designing learning objectives first, and building and sequencing learning pathways to achieve them, from the ground up, rather than molding learning pathways into a prescriptive, top-down course→module—> unit structure.
Empowers educators/course teams to define the boundaries of learning experiences and align them to more particular and diverse learner needs and outcomes.
Creates opportunities for educators to integrate adaptive learning strategies and tools to improve learner outcomes.
Creates platform flexibility required to explore alternative models of content sharing and content reuse.
Value to developers:
Enables faster development cycles by removing dependencies inherent in the edx-platform monolith
Provides an easier, more reliable path for extensions developers as extension authors should be able to build and test against a smaller repo than the edx-platform
Drive performance enhancements
Guiding Use Cases:
While the majority of current use cases for Open edX revolve around full course delivery, there is a defined and growing interest in alternative, more nimble models of content delivery. For example, use cases to design and deliver more flexible learning experiences include:
Delivering a single module as