Key Features:
- A learning management system (LMS) with a seamless learning experience allows learners to take courses using the LMS and also provides an instructor dashboard that users who have the Admin or Staff role can access by selecting Instructor.
- The LMS uses a number of data stores. Courses are stored in MongoDB, with videos served from YouTube or Amazon S3. Per-learner data is stored in MySQL. As learners move through courses and interact with them, events are published to the analytics pipeline for collection, analysis, and reporting.
- Course browsing is done through a simple front page with a separate home page and course discovery site.
- Studio is the course authoring environment. Course teams use it to create and update courses. Studio writes its courses to the same Mongo database that the LMS uses.
- Discussions: Course discussions are managed by an IDA called comments (also called forums).
- Comments are one of the few non-Python components written in Ruby using the Sinatra framework. The LMS uses an API provided by the comments service to integrate discussions into the learners' course experience. The comments service includes a notification process that sends learners notifications about updates on topics of interest.
- Mobile Apps: The Open edX project includes a mobile application, available for iOS and Android, that allows learners to watch course videos and more.
- Analytics: Events describing learner behavior are captured by the Open edX analytics pipeline. The events are stored as JSON in S3, processed using Hadoop, and then digested, aggregated.
- Results are published in MySQL. Results are made available via a REST API to Insights, an IDA that instructors and administrators use to explore.
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