Who am I?
15 years experience as open source software developer
10 years as President of Jazkarta, Python web development firm
Consultant at edX, Inc. in 2013
Presented at Open edX conference 2014
Commissioned by Stanford to author Open edX gap analysis report
Founder and CEO of Appsembler
Appsembler
Solutions provider specializing in the Open edX platform
Open edX customization, implementation, hosting and support
Official referral partner of edX Inc.
Headquarters in neighboring town to Cambridge, MA
MIT Sloan, Financial Times, Aquent, Intersystems, Metalogix
“Lecture-style” model
PassiveWatching video lectures
Reading text
“Learning-by-doing” model
ActiveRich interactive activities
Practice by doing
Intersystems
30 year old company
Lots of software products
Very successful classroom training
High customer satisfaction for classroom
7
Problems with classroom training 8
Doesn’t scale wellClass is limited
Can only send so many studentsExpensive
Challenges for online labs
Very technical courses
Need a way to get access to the software
Avoid providing trial licenses
Avoid downloading software
Avoid setup complexity
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“What we really would like is for our customers to be able to put their hands on our software - you know, hands to the keyboard, and use it.”
- Jim Breen, Director of Learning Services
11
Create student sandboxes for mobile developers
1. Student needs a sandbox environment in which to complete an exercise
2. Clicks a button in the course in edX, and a Linux container is provisioned for them in 10 seconds with the software pre-installed and pre-configured
3. Student completes exercise and container is shut down (or can remain running if they’re going to come back to it)
Live demoView this video on Youtube to see the virtual labs service in action, and integrating with an Open edX course.
Watch video!or go tohttps://youtu.be/8SqG2ilZQz0
“What if we authored an edX course about developing on the Open edX platform and provided a Open edX development environment within the edX course!?”
- Nate talking to himself in the shower
19“Meta moment”
EDE - edX Development Environment
Cloud-based development environmentPowered by
• Open edX running in 1 container• Cloud9 IDE running in 1 container• Paired with a shared volume
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Shared volumeedx-platform
ApplicationOpen edX devstack
Code editorCloud9 IDE
Benefits 21
“Devstack without the headache”Get started in 10 secondsNo software to download to your computer
Disclaimer: Experimental project right now
Come find me at the hackathon to get access to the environment and help test it!