Open edX Pilot

Abstract

The University at Buffalo (UB) College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with campus partners, proposes to explore Open edX as a traditional and post-traditional education delivery platform to students on a global scale. Open edX is the same open source platform that Harvard University and MIT co-produced to deliver MOOCs and is used for edX, but without requiring the two-million-dollar membership "buy in" to access the full-service edX consortium (marketing, hosting, etc.). Open edX provides a means to deliver courses, certificates and degrees in a highly flexible Learning Management System with different "plug ins" that enhance available functionality (e.g., e-commerce, research tools, etc.). We intend to partner with IBL Studios, a full service Open edX vendor, that can set up and configure Open edX, offer 24x7 application support, and assist UB with maintaining the UBx instance. If successful, we anticipate that a SUNYx service can be developed in a manner like the current SUNY-Coursera partnership.