AWS and Bitnami Deliver Education as a Service with Open edX
You might be familiar with the massive open source course (MOOC) website edX. The project brings university level learning to the world for free. Backed by schools like MIT, Harvard, Berkley and others, edX has become noted as one of the top MOOC platforms in the world. In fact, the edX platform is a premier example of what you can build with the public cloud.
Since edX is open source, Amazon Web Services has now announced that they have elected to include it within their Bitnami installer packages. That means that anyone in the world can begin building out their own learning platform using the agile AWS public cloud platform. The new package will be featured as a education and research project. The edX actual software itself contains a plethora of tools that will help online educators present their courses using the cloud.
In a press release, Vice President of Product at edX Beth Porter said, “We are so pleased that Open edX powered by Bitnami is listed in the AWS Marketplace; now greater numbers of individuals and institutions will be able to discover and access Open edX, which will help grow our open source community and ultimately accelerate improvements in the platform.”
Open edX notes that it worked alongside Bitnami in order to build a version that would be suitable for both the installer and scalability of the Amazon cloud. There are currently over 100 instances of Open edX installations being used around the world. Currently, the Open edX platform powers over 1,200 courses worldwide. Edx.org, the site that started it all, currently has over 4 million registered users.
With the new Open edX platform now being readily available for implementation within the AWS Marketplace, educators all around the world will now be able to build a scalable educational platform.
