OPEN edX and blended learning

Our work to introduce gamification to OPEN edX in ours SPOCs.

@bessipo Thank you for posting this!

Because it’s a bit hard to tell from the slides alone, without commentary - would you be able to describe, in 1-2 paragraphs, what you have been able to achieve in blended learning, the tools that you used, and how other instructors would be able to reuse it for their own courses?

Hi

Here you can see a description about this project. I hope that with this information you can have more clear the project. Any comment will be welcome

@bessipo Thank you, that helps a lot to understand the context of what you developed. Nice and extensive work.

A couple of questions that came up while reading:

• Are the additional apps that you developed (Flip-App and GEL) open source?
• Why did you chose to develop these additional apps, rather than adding the features you were missing to Open edX directly? (in CCX, Insights, the edX mobile app, etc.). Is that something you are still considering doing?

Hi.

Well sorry for delay, I have been very busy in these days. I will try to explain ours decisions.

First, flip-app and GEL are not at this moment open source. GEL is a tool that is very nearest with our campus technologies and I think that would be very difficult to use in another scenario :-(. We are using corporative data and our API to get student personal data and group of class of these students.

We are using the mobile open edx app also. but when we started to desing our gamification requirements we saw that will be easier to development a new app than using open edx app. We are famliar with app development

At the moment when we started to development all this we did not have installed insights and under my point of view we would want information that insights did not have at this moment. For this reason we think than the better option will be attack open edx tracking log directly and to have access to raw information. May we are wrong

@bessipo You are right - it is faster to develop the features independently in a separate app, at least at first. The issue usually comes with time, especially with maintenance and upgrades.

The fact that it doesn’t get integrated with the upstream distribution means that you then have to maintain yourself the features you have developed. Depending on the features, on whether you use supported stable APIs or plug directly in the platform core, and on the size of the changes made upstream on individual releases, upgrades could at times prove painful - plus, you have to do it forever, and never benefit from other improvements other community members could make.

Also, as you mentioned, it makes it much more unlikely that anyone else would be able to reuse your work. It can thus make sense for short-term throw-away projects - but if you target the long term, it might make sense to try to integrate your work with the rest of the platform, and contribute it upstream.

Hi

@antoviaque Thanks for your anwser It is hard for us to do this, for several reason, en many cases our knowledge of software is weak, and we don´t like the idea of “touch” a lot the OPEN edX core (for update reason). Anyway we are working on standardize a little for instance we are working now to support xAPI format and export all our analitycs in this format or we are include all graphs inside a new OPEN edx tab