Hi all, it's been wonderful to follow the discussions here on the edX forums for a while, and I recently published an article about EOCS which is a new Open Courseware Standard that we have been developing as part of the EXLskills.com (https://github.com/exlskills) platform. It was heavily inspired/motivated by many of the awesome developments with OLX that edX courses use, and so I wanted to share our standard with the edX community. The full post/discussion is hosted here https://medium.com/@svarlamov/the-hunt-for-an-open-courseware-standard-a3808438d3dc and I'm adding a brief summary below. You can also join our discord server via the links at https://github.com/exlskills/exlskills for more in-depth chat.
Today, there exist numerous standards/formats for building courseware, however, none of them are really meant for human readability/editing, large-scale collaboration, or cross-format conversion -- there is also a huge lack of automation/development tooling and APIs around today's formats. For these reasons (among many others as well), we started working on the EXL Open Courseware Standard (EOCS) that is being developed at https://github.com/exlskills/exl-open-courseware-standard. EOCS is a courseware development format that is geared towards human readability/editing -- like a modern programming language -- with a transpiler utility (https://github.com/exlskills/eocsutil) that contains all of the tooling and APIs for building, testing, maintaining, and updating courses built with EOCS or EOCS-compatible formats, such as OLX! The goal with this format is to drive the next generation of open-source (and source-available) courseware that can be built and maintained by the community (or large-scale global teams) and then seamlessly deployed to multiple platforms instantly. In the near term, we're also building in AI and localization primitives, so that courses written in a single language can be automatically translated/localized, proof-read, and then deployed to an international audience -- all powered by the eocsutil CLI. These features are already in production at https://EXLskills.com where we also have a tutor chatbot and multi-language data stores so that online learning can be more accessible to a global audience. With the release of this new format -- although it is still really in its early stages -- we hope that edX course authors will consider open-sourcing their courseware and adopting the EOCS format/tooling to build better, more accessible, and more open courses that the community can contribute to. For an example of a finished course using the EOCS format, you can also check out https://github.com/exlskills/course-java-basics Thanks for checking out EOCS and I look forward to the edX community's thoughts and feedback on this new project! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General Open edX discussion" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/edx-code/fc9df38f-7bd5-4998-afdf-6ee63b691ac5%40googlegroups.com.
