Lots of great ideas here. However I’m a fan of advanced educative talks, so I’d love to hear someone talking about:
Open edX 101: Modulestore architecture overview
Open edX 101: How XBlock rendering works
Open edX 101: Another Open edX source code review (and how the platform has changed since the previous one)
Open edX 101: Open edX From Scratch (how to install it without Tutor or devstack)
Also I noticed that there is some demand on running Open edX on AWS ECS and Fargate. We don’t have experience with this, so this might require some exploration, but I’d check if it’s possible (and how, if it is) to add support for other container orchestrators to Tutor and talk about it:
@yusuf To reach @dave you can try to ping him here, he has an account :) Otherwise, his forum profile has his email (you might just need to replace tcril.org by axim.org, though both likely still work), or Slack.
@tecoholic You could still try to suggest a talk about it - at least it will be fresh experience from the trenches? If you don’t post that talk, then which one(s) will you submit?
I think it would be a good idea to have a dedicated folder (Accepted and Submitted) for the created proposals just like we have for the sprint videos. It would be helpful for the members to take help from the existing proposals in the upcoming events.
P.s. My bad, just saw that we already have a folder for 2024 Talk Topics.
Hi folks. Thank you for the reminder that I needed to update my email address here.
I’d be happy to review the presentation or be someone to bounce ideas off of, but I have a number of talks that I want to pitch as well, and I don’t think I’ll have time to do a good job of co-presenting a “how to break the monolith up” talk.
If you don’t mind taking suggestions from the peanut gallery, one of my all time favorite Open edX talks was the one Regis gave in 2016, particularly from this part where he dives all the way down from a user making a request to a courseware page and the matching urls.py entry, all the way through to the view, ModuleStore, XBlock runtime, Field Data Service, etc.–while explaining some of the crazier things along the way, like the Mixologist wackiness.
A lot has changed since those days (MFEs, all the runtime changes of BD-13, how we generate course outlines, etc.), and I think an updated version would be extremely valuable for orienting developers who want to work on courseware.
I see comments from the community about edx-enterprise occasionally on both slack and the discussion forum. There is little to absolutely no documentation on these services. So, I think a talk on
Demystifying edX Enterprise - the parts that make up the stack
It’s basically explaining everything in this diagram and probably demoing an edx.org competitor.
@maxim@braden@tecoholic Feel free to include course cloning in your proposals if you think it would be a good fit.
I had briefly thought about this topic too, but more from the perspective of presenting it as a finished product. Which made me discard the idea because I don’t expect we’ll be able to address all the remaining challenges in time for the 2024 conference
The angle that you’re suggesting is interesting though, and definitely makes the topic a better fit for a talk that would be presented 6 months from now.
And to making it a shared talk with Michelle. While our experiences are similar in a lot of ways, her perspective on the process is unique in that she’s handling OSPRs for edx-platform, where there is no 1:1 mapping between repos and maintainers/code owners. (So the process for finding reviewers is different and often more challenging than for repos that are fully owned by a single team.)
I’ll reach out to Michelle to see what she thinks, and if she’d be on board with doing a shared talk.
Lastly, depending on when I’ll be coming to South Africa I might not be able to co-present the talk, so I’ll need to talk to Michelle about that too.
Big +1 for this topic. Having dealt recently with edX Enterprise, I felt there was a lack of documentation. I would be glad to help with that.
Another topic about which I’d like to see a presentation is the authorization and access model in the different aspects of Open edX and how it is implemented. There is also current work on evolving and improving the platform’s authorization and the talk can be a stepping stone to that.
Taming the Authorization beast in Open edX: Looking inside the internals of the platform’s access model and its future.
@antoviaque Thanks for the tips. Out of 4 ideas initially, I decided to cut it down to two and restructure them. Please let me know what you think about these ? Based on which one looks better, I can just submit a single idea or submit both for now to see which one gets selected.
@dave Thanks for the awesome suggestion and pointing me to Regis’ talk. I did have something similar in mind as to how I would structure the talk, but wasn’t aware that it’s been done before. A follow-up to Regis’ talk to explore what has changed since, is a great idea.
Peeling the layers of Open edX - Exploring the maze that is XBlock Runtime and how its being simplified
The talk follows the code from the shiny new MFEs all the way down to the guts of the XBlock runtime.
Explores the major classes and inter-dependencies along the way.
And finally takes a look at some of the recent efforts to simplify the XBlock runtime and what has changed in the last 8 years since the Source Code Review by Regis in 2016.
Why can’t I just delete a user ? Demystifying User Retirement in Open edX
What is user retirement and why do we need it ?
How exactly does the retirement service work - Exploring the user retirement flow
User retirement sounds great, but how do I set it up in my Open edX instance ?
Bonus: How to make user retirement less permanent ?
I was not sure whether to directly submit the talk or add the proposal draft as mentioned in the ticket. So adding the draft (created with help of chatgpt to add some content) here first.
Session title: Multi-tenancy vs Separate Instances - Choosing the Best Approach for Open edX
Description:
Open edX, the powerful open-source online learning platform, offers educators and institutions the flexibility to deliver courses at scale. However, the choice between multi-tenancy and separate instances is a critical decision that can significantly impact the efficiency and scalability of your Open edX deployment. In this talk, we will delve into the nuances of these approaches, exploring the pros and cons, guiding principles for decision-making, and practical insights into implementing and managing multi-tenancy.
Key Points:
Pros and Cons of Multi-tenancy in Open edX:
Explore the benefits of resource optimization and cost-effectiveness through shared infrastructure.
Discuss the potential drawbacks, such as security considerations and customization limitations.
When to Choose Multi-tenancy Setup:
Identify scenarios where multi-tenancy is the optimal choice for your organization or educational institution.
Understand the criteria for evaluating the suitability of multi-tenancy based on scale and resource requirements.
How to Run Multiple Sites in Open edX:
Provide a step-by-step guide on setting up and configuring multi-tenancy in Open edX.
Discuss technical considerations and best practices to ensure a smooth and scalable implementation.
Customize Each Tenant with Their Own Themes and Courses:
Showcase the flexibility of multi-tenancy by demonstrating how to customize the look and feel of each tenant.
Discuss strategies for tailoring course offerings and content for diverse user groups.
Manage All Tenants from One Place:
Highlight the advantages of centralized management, including simplified administration and monitoring using grove.
Demonstrate tools and techniques for efficiently managing multiple tenants within a single Open edX instance.
Session Type: Talk(45 mins)
Track: Developing and Operating
Proposal:
Choosing between multi-tenancy and separate instances is a pivotal decision for Open edX users. This talk aims to empower the audience with the knowledge and tools necessary to make informed choices, ultimately contributing to more effective and scalable online learning environments.
Key takeaways:
A comprehensive understanding of the advantages and challenges of multi-tenancy in Open edX.
Clear guidelines for deciding whether to opt for a multi-tenancy setup or separate instances.
Practical insights into implementing and managing multi-tenancy, including customization and centralized administration.
Who is your target audience: Educators, e-learning administrators, and Open edX enthusiasts interested in maximizing the efficiency and scalability of their online learning platforms.
Co-speakers: @kaustav or @maxim or anyone else if interested.
Bit late - I was exploring many how-to style talks, but want to propose this one - the current state of using Tutor as devstack replacement.
I’d like to introduce with the current openedx development experience using devstack, its proposed deprecation, a guide on how to use tutor to develop for openedx instead of devstack (a lot of helpful information in this thread), and then compare and demonstrate working on multiple projects at once on devstack/tutor.
Flexible credentials in Open edX
This talk will introduce an alternative to the default certificates mechanism by using a dynamic plugin, empowering instructors with the ability to create personalized certificate types and establish multiple tiers based on learner performance. We will delve into the pluggable architecture, enabling instructors to define unique certification criteria to tailor certificates to their specific needs, including alternative completion-based certificates and customizable grading criteria (like independent score checks for final exams). The project, currently in an early phase, will gain traction in the upcoming months, offering a practical solution for customizable certification.
@rpenido Note that this is a lightning talk proposal, which might be a bit light in volume for a proper full length talk. Note that we are submitting the latter
@sid There is likely material for a proper full length talk in here, but currently it has a large part of its description being very much a howto / workshop. So I think it can work, but it would be good to rework a bit the content & description.
I’m finding it difficult, at the level of familiarity with Open edX I have now, to propose something concrete in that direction about XBlocks. I could think of proposing an exploration of common or commonly desired features in learning platforms where XBlocks serve the use case well but I’m not confident enough that I could make it into an interesting talk.
@antoviaque I would be interested in participating in either of the open source related ones.
I also really liked @tecoholic’s proposal about edX Enterprise and would be interested in helping with it as well.
@paulo Sounds good to me! I would put the accent on talking about the experience of doing it (giving examples, numbers, stats, etc.) to avoid making it look like a simple HOWTO, and more about sharing the experience.
@artur Noted for your proposal to participate in the talks - I have only submitted the talks about the Open Source Masterclass and the TOC, would you like to submit the 3rd one, about learning from other open source projects? Happy to review the proposal.
You can also participate to someone else’s talk, but you’ll still need to submit one yourself. If you really can’t come up with a new one, try to pick some of the other approved ones, checking with their author that they haven’t already submitted it.
Hi folks. Thank you for the reminder that I needed to update my email address here. 
