edX is a non-profit online initiative created by founding partners Harvard and MIT that now includes dozens of leading global institutions, the xConsortium. edX offers free, interactive online classes and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) from the world’s best universities to students around the world.
Open edX is an open source initiative where developers and educational institutions around the globe work together to create an extensible online learning platform to bring quality education to "anyone, anywhere, anytime."
Open edX is not the only open source educational platform available. Moodle, for example, is a popular platform that has been widely deployed. However, Open edX provides a more engaging learning experience for students, as well as a robust analytics feature that can be used for educational research, decision support, and operational monitoring.
“Install and configure Open edX on SoftLayer quickly and easily so you can provide a scalable online learning platform for your course instructors and students.”
Open edX was originally developed to be deployed within Amazon Web Services (AWS), but you can easily install and configure it on a SoftLayer server. SoftLayer is a different approach to IaaS, and provides additional services to help meet your online course platform needs. In this article, we show you how to install and configure Open edX quickly and easily on SoftLayer so you can provide a scalable online learning platform for your course instructors and students.
