How to Scale Open edX to Tens of Thousands of Students

Summary

Everything is big in Texas: there are over 1,200 independent school districts, with hundreds of thousands of teachers. That’s quite a continuing education training challenge.

In this webinar Trinity Education Group’s co-founder and CIO Clyde Boyer describes how they ditched a traditional LMS in favor of Open edX, and worked with Appsembler to provide a scalable infrastructure to serve those many teachers on the Texas Education Agency’s Texas Gateway site texascourses.org.

The traditional LMS had a lower adoption rate among the teachers, due in large part to its clunky UI and student experience. It also couldn’t scale. Open edX changed all that, and in just eight months close to 40,000 teachers have taken at least one course, compared to the old LMS system which had less than 3,000 learners after 4 years in operation. They are working to ultimately reach all 320,000 teachers in the state. And when they do, Open edX on Appsembler’s Enterprise Cloud will support them.

Trinity was also looking for an open system with interoperability. And with Open edX they got that, too.

The platform has been so reliable that not only is it reaching far more teachers, but costs are significantly lower than they were with the proprietary system.

Gateway Courses offer statewide online professional development opportunities for Texas teachers. Through Gateway Courses, teachers have anytime, anywhere access to trainings that offer strategies on providing effective instructional support for English language learners, Gifted and Talented students, and struggling students; and CPE credits and certifications. Teachers simply register and they get instant access to courses where they can watch instructional videos, engage in interactive activities, participate in discussions, and earn CPE credits.