Talk:Open edX

Corporate vandalism

I'm the original author of Open edX. This page seems like it was heavily edited by edX/Axim/CRL employees to reflect a corporate narrative.

For the record, the history of the platform, to the best of my recollection, is:

• I first developed the basic concept of the platform while I was a graduate student working for Professor Jesus del Alamo (funded by the Total Foundation) which involved online laboratories and travel to Nigeria. At the time, I began to conceptualize how we might do education at scale. I continued to refine the concept ever since, and built various early prototypes.
• I first proposed what became the edX initiative to Rafael Reif first in 2007, and again in 2011. The second time, he decided to move forward with it.
• I was hired as a Research Scientist (a non-PI position) since this was the fastest way to make a hire administratively, but this was otherwise very much not structured like a normal Research Scientist hire or a typical MIT project. We had, if I recall, $5M in essentially discretionary funding from MIT.
• Rafael Reif brought Anant Agarwal in to be PI, but his role was mostly due to a PI being required by MIT administrative structures; his involvement in the project was only nominal in 2011. At the time, Anant was the head of CSAIL (the largest lab at MIT), as well as the largest research group within CSAIL, so had very little time for this project.
• There is a version control record in git (migrated from hg). There were no major contributions to the original platform from anyone other than myself up to the point when there was a fully functioning system. Notably, all of the core concepts, such as OLX, XModules (which morphed into XBlocks), etc. were developed by me in 2011, before there were any other developers. A few people (notably, Richard Stallman and Jerry Sussman included) made token contributions, typing at my keyboard, in part to distribute copyright ownership when there started to be ambiguity about whether the platform would be released as open source (a hard commitment from MIT that both the platform and courses would be open was why I decided to pursue the project there). The RELATE group (David Pritchard, Daniel Seaton, etc) advised on learning science, to whom I give a lot of credit for the original platform being pedagogically-effective.
• We launched to MIT students in time for the spring term in 2012 (I think Feb 6th or so?) and to MOOC students in March. We had several additional major contributions prior to this launch.

1. Kyle Fiedler from thoughtbot made the platform beautiful. This was mostly just changes to colors, fonts, styling and similar, which sounds trivial, but it made a world of difference.
2. Evgeny Fadeev and Dave Ormsbee worked to adopt Askbot to be performant enough to work at scale. This worked wonderfully
3. Chris Terman wrote a circuit schematic editor and simulator (largely outside the core system), which was central to the success of the original course
4. Jean-Michel Claus created many interactives as well (outside the core system)
5. The wiki functionality was significantly expanded by MIT UROPs.

• The lion's share of the work on our first course was done by Jerry Sussman (way more than full-time), followed by Chris Terman (about 20 hours per week). They did brilliant, complex, analysis and design problems, which is where students spent most of their time. Jerry and I created the tutorials. Anant's involvement was <8 hours per week, and limited to facilitating meetings and to recording videos (which were made watchable through the hard work of video editors, and especially, Greg Martin). It's worth noting through the original course, Anant did not know how to author in the system (which is, again, reflected in the version control record; his videos needed to be integrated by a student on his behalf), but current corporate marketing copy gives him credit for developing it (!!!).
• When this project began to look successful, MIT was able to convince Harvard to join.
• For ego / brand-management purposes, it was necessary to call MIT and Harvard co-equal founders and co-developers of the system, but in fact, all of the early work on anything related to the project was done at MIT. That's in the version control record. Even when Harvard joined and edX became a 501(c)3, MIT was in the lead (e.g. all the edX employees were employed through MIT).
• MITx was renamed edX, and the MITx platform, Open edX, for similar reasons; this needed to appear as an MIT-Harvard partnership, rather than Harvard joining an MIT project.
• At this time, Anant also left his position as head of CSAIL, and joined full-time.
• Although I didn't know this at the time, Anant took a salary which was most of a million dollars (about as much as everyone else combined). The initiative was structured as an investment of the MIT/Harvard endowments (in all practical respects, it was a for-profit by structure, just with the shareholders being nonprofit endowments). Most of us learned this much later.
• The platform was open-sourced mostly due to pressure from Stanford. Unfortunately, most of the courses never were made open, although notably, the original circuits and electronics course was.
• I stayed on for a bit over a half-decade as Chief Scientist. That's a longer story.
• I haven't followed the project since leaving; I have never been willing to sign a CLA or similar paperwork (and I'm not quite sure about the purpose of a CLA, given we have bits of code all over the platform from people who never signed; I was very glad to make commits on behalf of people who didn't want to sign, since the retro-CLA thing was weird to me).

I don't want this to become super-high-profile, and I have no interest in sparring with MIT and Harvard about history or credit, but I do mind corporate propaganda and public vandalism on places like Wikipedia. As a footnote, this is representative of broader academic integrity issues at MIT and Harvard. One of the interesting bits in this process was having visibility into just how common academic fraud is at elite institutions (I saw a lot of research at those institutes).

However, I don't feel great when that leaks out. Wikipedia does strive for integrity, and is generally factually-accurate and increasingly acts as a sort of an archival record. I thought I'd leave a note here, in case others wanted to patrol for further corporate changes. I don't really need credit, so another option might be to just kill the article.

Pmitros (talk) 03:43, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

Lists of open courses

I couldn't find the list of openly-licensed courses within the OedX community, though I recall there is one. Here's a different list which may include the subset of OedX instances that are primarily or fully free content. – SJ + 23:25, 14 May 2022 (UTC)