Education From handling hosting to customizations to many other key services, open edX service providers help users build tailored online learning environments without needing extensive technical expertise. With providers managing the platform, you can focus your energy on creating engaging courses and scaling your programs.
Key Takeaways
- Open edX is an open-source online learning platform that gives organizations immense flexibility to build fully customized learning environments.
- Partnering with an experienced Open edX service provider offers benefits like saving time, boosting security, ensuring quality, and providing economies of scale.
- When evaluating providers, look for expertise in installation, hosting, customizations, course development, and support.
- Carefully evaluate features to find which best suits your specific needs.
- Top providers will have transparent and cost-effective pricing, excellent reviews on third-party platforms, and an overall partnership mindset.
Table of contents
What is Open edX?
Open edX is an open-source online learning platform created in 2013 by Harvard and MIT to power edX, their non-profit MOOC provider. As an open-source platform, Open edX provides organizations immense flexibility to build fully customized online learning environments that meet their specific needs and goals.
Key features of Open edX include:
- Robust course authoring tools that create engaging interactive courses with multimedia, assessments, and exercises.
- Collaboration features like forums to build learner communities.
- Powerful analytics that provide insights into student progress and engagement.
- Integration with third-party tools, building a seamless ecosystem.
- Continual innovation by developers worldwide.
Open edX vs edX: What’s the Difference?
Open edX gives users full control over tailoring courses, branding, pacing, accessibility features, and more. In contrast, edX offers pre-designed courses that follow a standardized format, with limited customization options. While edX does provide high-quality courses, Open edX allows you to author and host your own customized learning experiences at scale.
Benefits of Using an Open edX Service Provider
Open edX service providers are companies that provide hosting, support, customizations, and ongoing management for learning platforms powered by Open edX. By partnering with a service provider, organizations reap the full potential of the platform in a streamlined, cost-effective manner while offering high-quality learning.
Open edX service providers support organizations in several ways:
- Save Time: Providers can save you substantial time since they handle time-consuming installation, upgrades, hosting, backups, security, and other technical aspects. Organizations are freed from platform management to focus on course creation.
- Increased Technical Support: Providers offer teams of experts continuously managing and troubleshooting to minimize downtime. Their specialized knowledge helps identify and address issues both thoroughly and efficiently.
- Enhanced Implementation: By offering extensive custom branding, tailored workflows, analytics integration, single sign-on, and more, providers ensure the platform aligns seamlessly with an organization’s needs.
- Scalability: Providers facilitate easy scalability to handle increasing courses and users, providing optimized hosting infrastructure and streamlined expansion capabilities.
- Cost Efficiency: Providers offer economies of scale in hosting and technical management, leading to significant cost savings versus handling Open edX independently. Their technical expertise in implementation and optimizing performance creates even further savings.
- Quality Assurance: Providers ensure quality assurance through extensive testing, monitoring, access controls, and learning from deployments across clients. Their teams have extensive experience with best practices and protocols.
- Increased Security and Compliance: Partnering with a provider boosts security and compliance by leveraging their protocols, software, and expertise in areas like data privacy.
Considerations for Choosing the Best Open edX Service Provider
Selecting the right Open edX service provider can make all the difference. Like any meaningful partnership, you need to evaluate fit, vision alignment, and specialized expertise. Take a discerning eye to the following key considerations so you can find the right partner for impactful, long-term success.
Installation/Hosting
Hosting and installing Open edX is far more complex than typical web hosting due to the platform’s intricate architecture. It takes a lot to get Open edX up and running optimally, as well as ensure continual uptime monitoring and maintenance for responsiveness, apply frequent updates, maintain security, and more. This can be demanding for teams who aren’t partnered with a service provider to manage on their own.
Given these multifaceted technical demands, the benefits of partnering with an experienced Open edX service provider include minimized downtime, quick issue resolution, optimized performance, and reduced headaches all around. The right provider will help you migrate onto a robust, optimized Open edX infrastructure smoothly.
Customizations
Seek out providers that enable deep customization to match your brand, workflows, and objectives. The ability to customize portals, style elements, integrations, reports, and more can help tightly align the platform with your needs, as compared to an off-the-shelf system. Customization in e-learning also boosts learner engagement and unifies experiences across touchpoints.
Course Development
Compelling course content is the lifeblood of impactful learning. Partners adept at instructional design and the best ed-tech practices will elevate your content above the rest.
Opt for providers that offer resources, templates, production assistance, and other course development support. This is immensely beneficial if you lack robust internal course design capabilities. Team Expertise
Look for diverse teams encompassing instructional design, project management, Quality Assurance, developers, and customer support – service providers with deep Open edX and e-learning experience are the most likely to provide holistic solutions. These cross-functional teams should cover expertise from across the entire learning lifecycle. Service providers with deep Open edX and e-learning experience are the most likely to provide holistic solutions.
Customer reviews regarding the help and support functions will validate the Open edX service providers being considered.
Partnership
A partner mindset results in a provider tailoring solutions to your specific pain points versus a one-size-fits-all approach. They should be highly responsive, collaborative, and committed to smoothing your onboarding and continued evolution. Additionally, your ideal partner will provide all the resources you need.
Top Open edX Service Providers
Finding the ideal partner can be overwhelming in a sea of Open edX service providers. These top Open edX service providers offer a range of capabilities to suit your needs and make you a leading e-learning platform.
Appsembler Tahoe
Rating: 4.9/5 (G2)
Appsembler Tahoe offers a secure, fully managed Open edX LMS platform designed to make online learning accessible for organizations of all sizes and technical expertise.
Appsembler handles hosting, installation, backups, and updates to minimize headaches so you can stay focused on course creation. Their team manages infrastructure and scaling, as well as maintains <99% uptime through extensive monitoring and redundancy.
Tahoe enables deep custom branding, tailored portals, seamless CMS and SSO integration, dashboards, and customized analytics suited to your needs. Their white glove migration service eases transitions by exporting/importing content, migrating user data, and aligning configurations and customizations.
For an optimal learner experience, Tahoe provides engaging options like progress badges, certificates, and Virtual Labs for hands-on practice. The integrated Appsembler Academy offers a wealth of resources on course development best practices.
With Appsembler, you’re treated as a true partner, with dedicated support and experts committed to your unique needs.
Appsembler Tahoe’s Pricing
Appsembler’s pricing plans are fully transparent – no hidden fees, extra set-up costs or surprises.
- Free 30-day trial
- Starter plan, $520/month: all the core features to get started.
- Pro plan, $1,256/month: advanced tools and support for growth.
- Premium, $2,625/month: maximum customization and scale.
Edly
Rating: 5/5 (G2)
Edly is an LMS that provides an Open edX-powered learning suite. It specializes in custom learning environments, ease of use, and mobile accessibility. More than 5000 courses have been taught on the elearning platforms they have built.
Edly usually takes 10-30 days to complete setting up your online learning platform and get it running after completing a requirements-gathering session and needs analysis. They understand that each business comes with a unique set of needs, so they provide ample customization options from easy platform integrations to theming.
Their range of resources includes the Edly Panel for accessing all your tools from one place, a centralized course authoring suite, and comprehensive course authoring services including a built-in authoring engine and SCORM and LTI-compatible tools.
Edly’s Pricing
- Free Trial (1 month): Get started and understand the platform.
- Essentials, $275/month: Get started creating and delivering courses.
- Elite, $300/month: Designed for growth and monetization needs.
- Enterprise, $2250/month: Advanced features, API access, and support to scale to any size.
RacoonGang
Rating: No reviews on G2
Raccoon Gang is an experienced LMS and Open edX development solutions provider, with strong technical capabilities and proven expertise in the e-learning business.
Having hosted over 100 Open edX platform-based e-learning platforms, they have plenty of experience to take care of your installation and configuration. As you move forward, they can also help develop your e-learning platform’s courses. Their process involves understanding the client’s needs, analyzing target audiences, and then designing the course and content with an in-house team of instructional designers.
Raccoon Gang’s team of designers and developers provides a basic theme option with several useful visual features for your e-learning platform. Alongside, they provide a custom theming option that focuses on advanced UX and friendly design to build a unique platform. Their custom features include student dashboards, custom design, courseware content type, progress bars, tracking, interactive components, and gamification systems.
Raccoon Gang’s Pricing
Raccoon Gang does not have any standard packages. Instead, it offers a custom quote based on your needs.
OpenCraft
Rating: No listing on G2
OpenCraft has been working with the Open edX platform ever since it started being open source, over a decade ago. Their decentralized team operates around the globe and believes in openness, sharing, and regularly contributing to open-source projects.
Their easily manageable installation is adapted from playbooks that the Open edX community has worked on as well as their own, facilitating deployment, monitoring, protecting, and management of clients’ instances (virtual machines that run your workloads in the cloud). Users and administrators can customize their instances while OpenCraft will handle upgrades and updates.
Their customization extends further to custom software, extensions, interactive problems, and entire themes. Although OpenCraft provides plenty of tools and resources for designing a course yourself, they do not provide specialists for designing course content.
OpenCraft Pricing
OpenCraft offers a range of services and features at separate, differing prices. While installation on their institutional plan is $3,171, maintenance is $1,477 per month.
Other features with set-up fees include mobile app development ($6330), certificates ($979), and single sign-on ($2110).
Blend-ed
Rating: No listing on G2
Blend-ed provides data-driven education, science-backed design, and an AI-powered LMS. Built with Open edX, they focus on delivering an intuitive interface, cross-platform consistency, streamlined processes, and higher student engagement.
They deploy the right Open edX release for you, installing using Tutor or Devstack. With a dedicated team providing managed hosting, Blend-ed promises enhanced security features, cost efficiency, and scalability.
Post-installation, their customization options cover the spectrum from branding to content management. They can customize their courses with gamification, adaptive learning, and innovative content presentation.
When it comes to the content of the courses, their heavily experienced instructional designers can help out! They specialize in creating bite-sized, compact microlessons. Better yet, Blend-ed goes beyond standard content to develop options that match your brand voice.
Blend-ed Pricing
Their yearly price plans include:
- Free: Trial account to understand the platform.
- Standard, $291/month: White-labeled web, android, and iOS apps.
- Pro, $612/month: Specifically for big enterprises.
- Enterprise, custom quote: For large enterprises that require further custom solutions.
Choosing the Right Open edX Service Provider for You
The right service provider will excel at core functionalities like course and user management, enhanced customization and branding, scalability, strong technical specs, and dedicated support teams.
With all these Open edX service providers in mind, plus countless others outside of this list, which should you pick?
There’s only one answer. The service provider with the best of all these features, perfect for online training, is Appsembler. On top of these, it also provides one-of-a-kind Virtual Labs to provide hands-on experience.
With transparent pricing, great reviews, and comprehensive hosting, installation, customization, support resources, and course development, Appsembler is perfect for making the best of Open edX.
Get Started!
Open edX service providers are critical to running a successful online learning platform––without them, you miss out on the biggest advantage of an open-source platform.
With the benefits of collaboration and key considerations for choosing the right partner in mind, you have the insights needed to make an informed decision. But be sure to understand your own needs and resources when evaluating platforms.
Among the top providers discussed, Appsembler clearly stands out from the crowd. To experience its unparalleled capabilities and have a seamless Open edX journey, request a demo today!
