2026 Open edX Conference Talk Topics Brainstorm

Discussions - Public
21

+1. Coincidentally, we have just been discussing this issue here: Review and consolidate components · Issue #2697 · openedx/frontend-app-authoring · GitHub

As you can read in that thread, Schema is working on a proper Figma file for Paragon.

But for now, Paragon is developed very slowly and I do wish that we had just used one of the standard React component libraries that are out there. Paragon was created to be more accessible compared to Bootstrap, but most of the modern React component libraries have handled accessibility very well, and they have larger teams that proactively maintain their a11y features, whereas Paragon struggles to get improvements planned and implemented. And since Paragon is incomplete, people often implement their own additional components that don’t follow a11y best practices. So in my opinion we now have a less accessible, less useful framework than other frontend applications.

What’s more, Paragon is currently based on an old version of bootstrap and SCSS, which are eventually going to stop working at need to be replaced with something else. Most other frameworks are built around Tailwind or similar which is much nicer to work with and has much faster builds. Brian Smith has chatted with me about replacing bootstrap with something else within Paragon as the library evolves, but that’s going to be a huge project and I’m not sure how we’ll find the developer time to make it happen - plus it means a lot of the extra components that we have created within MFEs may need to be refactored too.

3 Likes
22

I won’t be able to present in 2026 because of scheduling issues, but here’s a fresh idea, along with two topics I submitted last year that I believe are still relevant.

Don’t Tread on Me! Evaluating the Reality of AI Assistants and Chatbots in Learning

Many of us remember Clippy—the original virtual assistant that often got in the way. Today, chatbots have friendly names like Pounce and Sunny, meant to assist with enrollment, advising, coursework navigation, and reminders. But do they really improve the online education experience? More and more users online are asking for less AI clutter. Or is this different? This talk aims to find out if online learners see true value in AI assistants and chatbots and what the short-term impacts are on their learning and assessments. Are these tools a nuisance, are they genuinely helpful, or is the truth somewhere in between?

Open edX should capture the professional training market. Why hasn’t it, and how can we change that? <— somewhat in line with @jordan’s second talk proposal

The professional training market is vast, requiring continuous skill development across various industries. However, many organizations still rely on outdated training methods or rigid proprietary platforms. Open edX, with its open-source framework, is ideally suited to address these needs but has struggled to gain traction. The issue can be solved in three steps: finding the gaps, identifying barriers to entry, and implementing a penetration stragegy.

Unlocking Potential: How Open edX Can Outpace Canvas and Moodle

The traditional LMS market is dominated by established players like Canvas, which is practically closed-source, and Moodle, infamously known for its clunky interface. The Open edX platform, with its customizable and adaptable framework, is well-positioned to evolve and meet the diverse needs of educators and learners. Let’s work on a strategy that will allow Open edX to not only catch up, but potentially outpace its competitors in the “residential” LMS market.

2 Likes
23

There is a Backend + Frontend plugin sample AXIM has put out here GitHub - openedx/sample-plugin. This could help jumpstart.

24
  1. Migrating Open edX across multiple releases - As @jordan and @Agrendalath have already mentioned, we have helped (will help) migrate outdated versions of Open edX installations from Ansible based deployment to a K8S cluster. 2 good case studies - PSU going from Juniper to Sumac (8 releases between them), HMS going from Redwood to Ulmo (2 releases). In HMS’s case, we are also moving the enterprise related services over. It will be nice talk to showcase our team’s capabilities.
  2. So you want to be a Open edX contributor? - Lessons learned from e-SHE Mentorship project. This will require some co-ordination with the ASU-MOE team. I think there are some good stories here - the goals, challenges and learnings.
  3. openedx-events and openedx-filters - Leveraging the Hooks framework for extending funcitonality and integrating with external systems. We have helped with Canvas ↔ Open edX integration multiple times, and used these libraries for customizing workflows.
1 Like
25

@tecoholic That just seems to be a repo with plugin samples, not one cohesive thing. i.e. my plan is to have a single repo that has a frontend, backend and tutor plugin, and installing the tutor plugin installs the frontend and backend from the same repo. This should not be very hard, but I haven’t seen any examples yet.

26
  • Open edX platform: Are we doing a11y right?

This talk focuses on the current anti-pattern that the platform has as well as outline the general anti-pattern which creates challenges for specially abled learners. The tools that can be used to do accessibility audits for making our products edx-platform and XBlocks complaint. Further this talk will help the attendees to correct those anti-patterns.

  • Make Open edX platform your own

This talk highlights the extention ability of the platform. How can one extend the platform with custom features without making change to the current codebase. Later we highlight the ways these can be contributed back to the community so that everyone can make use of it.

We already have different ways to extend the platform:

  • Django App Plugin
  • Plugin Slot

And how these can be deployed using Tutor plugins.

  • Modern XBlock Frontend

Writing accessible and beautiful XBlocks Frontend using React/Vue, how can we using modern frontend librarires and frameworks to write accessible and visually pleasing XBlocks like Accordion XBlocks and Flashcard.

Lightning Talks:

  • Autoadvance units: Listen to the courses like podcast
  • Melisearch gotchas
1 Like
27

1. Harmony and the state of Open edX deployments

The focus of this talk will be on how the community is tackling production deployments for Open edX now that it has been a few years since Ansible-based deployments have been deprecated.

The talk would introduce a few different tools developed by different vendors, talk about harmony - what it is, how the community collaborated to make it a reality, and how it has been integrated with some of our existing tools.

Finally the talk will highlight how community members can contribute to harmony, how we can move towards a more collaborative approach to tacking deployments and what the future of deployment tools could look like.

2. Auth strategies to integrate third party tools and custom UI with Open edX

In this talk we explore how Open edX can be integrated with third party tools and custom UI, when it comes to authentication. We will cover how we can use third-party auth providers for logging into Open edX, but more importantly we will explore how we can use Open edX as an SSO provider for things like custom dashboard.

3. Supercharge your PR reviews with automated PR sandboxes

This lightning talk is a rehash of last year’s submission. We talk about how the automation works, how it can be configured and how many PRs it has benefitted already.

1 Like
28

1. The new forum backend: what changed, what’s coming, and how to migrate

The focus of this talk would be the migration to the new forum app in Open edX, the issues we found with both the MongoDB and MySQL backends, and a description of the migration process for eSHE.

2. eLearning without internet

Getting Open edX into the hands of users can be quite a challenge for some regions of the world, especially where internet access is costly or intermittent.

That’s how we got on board with ASU and Ethiopia’s Ministry of Education to get the eSHE platform to fast-track and test offline features for the Open edX application for Android.

Here we’ll discuss the changes to get the feature, how it was received, and the impact (hopefully, as the feature is currently in QA).

3. AI grading: can we trust it when the answer isn’t always the same?

Automating the grading of open-ended assignments in platforms like Open edX using AI promises efficiency, scalability, and consistency. Especially for large-scale courses where manual grading is time-consuming.

However, can we trust it, as AI models can produce varying outputs for the same input? Besides, AI might struggle due to a lack of proper context or rubric, or with nuanced or creative responses, overlooking the intent behind the students’ answers.

What can we do to fix those issues? Are there contexts where these risks are acceptable if not fixable at the moment?

4. Managing Open edX instances at scale (Grove, PHD, Harmony)

I’ve proposed a talk on Grove for the past two years without success, so I’d rather not go there. But I’d like to be involved if anyone decides to go for it.

2 Likes
29
  1. Creating Open edX Themes for MFEs
    An overview of the process and tooling involved in styling and branding MFEs. The talk explains how to customize look-and-feel consistently across multiple MFEs without breaking anything.
  2. How to Use XBlocks to Add Custom Features
    An introduction to extending Open edX functionality by building custom XBlocks. A walk through of typical use cases, development basics, and integration steps for adding new interactive components.
  3. How to Create Assessments That Students Actually Complete
    A more pedagogy focused look at designing assessments that are engaging, clear, and manageable.
1 Like
30

My three ideas are:

  1. Case study: integrating with a storefront

Out of the box, Open edX provides two important services that are built around course content - CMS (for designing courses) and LMS (for consuming them). However, most organizations also want to advertise and sell the courses, and for that they often have to integrate with other services, like Salesforce or HubSpot. This talk would focus on the mechanisms that are used to build an integration between the two: SSO, APIs (used for learner management, enrolling, progress tracking, syncing courses), custom integrations, etc. Also an opportunity to talk about a pain point - there is no easy way to group the courses (existing programs partially rely on edx-enterprise, which doesn’t work well, or on proprietary code, so it doesn’t work + rely on the discovery service which is poorly documented and is in the process of being deprecated).

  1. Works on my machine: how to debug Open edX on k8s cluster during runtime (from the previous year)

We faced a ton of issues recently with different clusters, especially when upgrading one of the clusters to Redwood. One of the challenges since switching to tutor and Grove has been debugging things. It’s hard to replicate the production set up locally, and we weren’t able to do any runtime debugging on k8s cluster pods. So if an incident happened that didn’t generate verbose logs (happens all the time), you’re are out of luck. However, me and @demid started investigating if it’s possible to attach a debugger to a pod in productions (for example), or clone a pod, and mark it editable to live patch something. Although, we don’t have an answer yet, it would be cool to spend time digging into it (which can be done under budget of fixing the actual bugs, and not the budget dedicated for talk prep) and preparing a talk on this topic.

  1. (didn’t come up with anything yet, many of my ideas overlap or repeat what has already been proposed)
1 Like
31

Hello @team ! We’re going to try a bit of a different voting method this time-- one that’s a bit easier to administrate for large numbers of candidates. This is going to be a kind of approval voting. Each team member is to select 10 talks they would like to see. There is no ranking of order-- just select ten you think would make the conference more awesome. I’d suggest picking topics that you’d enjoy attending and then after you’ve picked those, picking those you think would draw a crowd.

Note: I have removed some talks that seemed to be identical or nearly so. I have also shortened some very long talk names/removed some subtitles, and picked a topic descriptor when a title had not been chosen. Check the posts above for full information/details.

MORE NOTE: Open this page in another tab/window so you can scroll through the talk descriptions while working on the voting. Otherwise Discourse may unload this post while you’re scrolling around.

Preferred Talks
  • How can I use AI on my Open edX Instance today?
  • Community Retrospective: The Post-Acquisition Transition
  • Working with Product: How the Product Proposal Process Makes Engineering Better
  • TypeSense Benchmarking Learnings
  • Modern XBlock Development
  • Tutor Devstack Tips and Tricks
  • Content Libraries Demo
  • Content Synchronization in Libraries
  • Modulestore Migrator
  • Optimistic Update using React Query
  • Staying Ahead of Digital Dishonesty (Proctoring)
  • Open edX in Action: 20 Stories of Flexibility and Global Impact
  • Empowering Admins: Edit, Translate, and Share Open edX Notifications
  • Learning Beyond Courses (Learning Paths)
  • Choosing the Right LMS for the Future
  • Learning Paths: What Authors and Learners Can Look Forward To
  • Importance of non-linear learning
  • Microlearning tools to boost engagement
  • Learning through conversation
  • The Upgrade Dilemma: Lessons from Real-World Open edX Migrations
  • Open edX Unlocked: Designing Learning Platforms for Any Organization
  • Getting Buy-In: Strategies to Fund and Launch Open edX Initiatives Across Organizations
  • Managing Open edX deployments at scale
  • Automating Open edX sandboxes
  • MongoDB forever
  • Mastering Asynchronous Collaboration in Distributed Open edX Teams
  • The Open edX Project at 12+: Community Evolution and Lessons from the Trenches
  • Building Sustainable Open edX Businesses: OpenCraft’s 10-Year Playbook
  • Design Tokens: Plugin Slots but for Your CSS
  • Themed XBlocks with Paragon 23
  • A Single Plugin for Frontend, Backend and Tutor
  • Demonstration of the new course outline and sidebar experience
  • Tanstack DB: Overcome limitations of react query
  • What’s next for MOOCs?
  • The Open edX Project at 12+: Technical Evolution and Architecture Lessons
  • What’s next for XBlocks?
  • Facilitating contributions: The evolution of OSPR and product review processes
  • Evaluating offline readiness of the Open edX Android app
  • Migrating from Ansible-based deployment to Kubernetes
  • Next Steps from the Content Libraries
  • Beyond Paragon - A discussion about the Design System for openEdx
  • Don’t Tread on Me! Evaluating the Reality of AI Assistants and Chatbots in Learning
  • Open edX should capture the professional training market. Why hasn’t it, and how can we change that?
  • Unlocking Potential: How Open edX Can Outpace Canvas and Moodle
  • Migrating Open edX across multiple releases
  • So you want to be a Open edX contributor?
  • openedx-events and openedx-filters
  • Open edX platform: Are we doing a11y right?
  • Make Open edX platform your own
  • Auth strategies to integrate third party tools and custom UI with Open edX
  • The new forum backend: what changed, what’s coming, and how to migrate
  • eLearning without internet
  • AI grading: can we trust it when the answer isn’t always the same?
  • Creating Open edX Themes for MFEs
  • How to Create Assessments That Students Actually Complete
  • Case study: integrating with a storefront
  • Works on my machine: how to debug Open edX on k8s cluster during runtime
0 voters
6 Likes
32

Hmm, @Fox there is a slight problem: if you scroll up in this thread to read the descriptions, at some point Discourse will clear all your in-progress voting selections. So people may wish to have this open in two separate windows while voting - one to read descriptions and one for the checklist.

1 Like
33

Thanks, @braden . I’ve added that to the instructions :slight_smile:

34

Ah, sorry to ping once more, @team , but please remember that the voting must be done THIS WEEK, the first week of the sprint, so we can perform assignment in the second week.

4 Likes
35

@mtyaka @gabor @maxim @pooja @navin @rpenido @antoviaque @gabriel

Friendly reminder to make your selections before the end of the day Friday!

2 Likes
36

Thank you—I did it a few days ago but had forgotten to hit “vote now” :melting_face:

37

Hello @team !

Thank you all for voting in the poll. I’ve gone through, picked the top rated ones, and made some tentative assignments. Not everyone has been assigned and not every talk has been picked. This is also not a ‘hard’ assignment-- feel free to trade around if your assignment doesn’t suit you.

I tried to pick reasonable assignee depending on what I know of the team member’s experience with the subject matter, but a couple of them may not be good fits since some folks had a lot of experience ranging several topics and I could only pick one for them, and others I was unfamiliar with their current knowledge breadth surrounding the topics. Please forgive me if I gave you an initial assignment you don’t care for! :slight_smile:

Modern XBlock Development - @ChrisChV
The Upgrade Dilemma: Lessons from Real-World Open edX Migrations - @tecoholic
Beyond Paragon - A discussion about the Design System for Open edX - @rpenido
eLearning without Internet - @paulo
Learning Beyond Courses (Learning Paths) - @Agrendalath
Building Sustainable Open edX Businesses: OpenCraft’s 10-Year Playbook - @antoviaque
Managing Open edX Deployments at Scale - @gabor
Community Retrospective: The Post-Acquisition Transition - @Fox
Design Tokens: Plugin Slots but for Your CSS - @kaustav
Open edX in Action: 20 Stories of Flexibility and Global Impact - @cassie
Open edX should capture the professional training market. Why hasn’t it, and how can we change that? - @gabriel
The Open edX Project at 12+: Community Evolution and Lessons from the Trenches - @pooja
How can I use AI on my Open edX Instance today? - @farhaan
Mastering Asynchronous Collaboration in Distributed Open edX Teams - @tikr
Open edX platform: Are we doing a11y right? - @Ali
The Open edX Project at 12+: Technical Evolution and Architecture Lessons - @samuel
Themed XBlocks with Paragon 23 - @kshitij
What’s next for XBlocks? - @braden

There are a few folks who are unassigned alongside a set of talks which tied. The folks who are unassigned are: @navin @jordan @mtyaka @maxim

The talks which tied were:

Content Libraries Demo
Importance of non-linear learning
Learning Paths: What Authors and Learners Can Look Forward To
Tanstack DB: Overcome limitations of react query
Working with Product: How the Product Proposal Process Makes Engineering Better
Works on my machine: how to debug Open edX on k8s cluster during runtime

Since these were tied, for those of you unassigned, please select one of the above of your choosing, or else if you would much rather take one of the preassigned talks, take this time to see if you can trade with the current assignee :slight_smile:

Please remember:

  1. Every team member must submit a talk
  2. Only those talks which are accepted will get a sponsored flight to the conference
  3. If someone cannot go to the conference, another team member will present in their place
  4. The assignee and submitter will be the presumptive speaker, unless someone cannot go or they convince someone else to do the talk. If you don’t know much about your topic, still do your best to submit the proposal. Someone who knows the topic will be able to help after acceptance.
  5. If it’s a particularly complex talk that is best co-presented, a talk can be a shared presentation. However, the initial talk proposal is individual.

By the end of this sprint, everyone should know what their assignment is. Getting your assignment is part of the scope of the ticket in your current sprint, and the ticket will not be complete until that is done. So please pick and trade amongst yourselves now! :slight_smile:

4 Likes
38

Thanks for wrangling this @Fox! The unassigned posts are necessarily in my wheelhouse, so if anyone is thinking of swapping, feel free to share and I could grab it, ideally if it’s not too technical :crossed_fingers:

39

@jordan I think you might be able to take a crack at ‘The importance of non-linear learning’-- while the original concept by @pooja mentions an XBlock:

…the argument of the talk is more general-- about the power of using learning that changes based on the learner’s choices/actions. I think you could write up a decent proposal based on that, and perhaps work with Pooja to try out the block she mentions.

Would you be up for that?

40

I’m happy to swap “The Open edX Project at 12+: Community Evolution and Lessons from the Trenches” with you @jordan or anyone else. I don’t feel well positioned to take on that one. I can submit a talk for “Importance of non-linear learning” instead.