OpenEdX

What do you like best?

Open edX is a great platform for learners rather than the instructors. This point is great for the big open courses where the class sizes are often much larger than in a typical online course. It is also useful because the main focus is for the learners to follow a more self-guided journey on the course and to interact directly with each other more so than with the instructors. The instructions are also very straight forward, and they offer detailed troubleshooting instructions for both learners and instructors to use when they run into any issues. The platform also allows for learners to easily track their progress and grades during the course. It is also simple for instructors to help learners and to manage the discussion forums.

What do you dislike?

There are not many bad points with OpenEdX, but there are some difficulties when a course becomes a little too large. It sometimes seems to overwhelm the platform, and it can cause delays in updating students' progress and connections with other platforms like Yellowdig. However, even when there have been some technical issues with the platform, such as delayed updates to progress reports, the issues are often resolved quickly and efficiently. Lastly, while the platform is definitely geared towards learners, which is excellent, it would be helpful to make it a little more user friendly for instructors. For example, it is hard to address some student questions quickly, because you only see a user name for the student unless you go and download the entire class roster. It might be useful to have a list available directly on the platform that could be searched instead of always having to download that list.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

I would just note that OpenEdX seems to work quite well for general courses where the focus is more on students' self-learning and discussion rather than on traditional instructor/learner interactions.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

While it can cause some issues on the platform when a class becomes too large, OpenEdX helps to address the need for larger class sizes when it comes to general education classes. The platform also does make it easier to manage a course by allowing instructors to upload a variety of content for the users, but the simple navigation of the site also makes it easy for both the learners and the instructors to navigate.