This past month the Crystal Delta team have spent a lot time on the road at conferences, talking to university leaders, running webinars with RMIT, and like all edtech-ers, drinking near-lethal amounts of coffee. Here is a summary of the interesting stuff…

Webinars

We had the pleasure of hosting the first in a series of webinars that introduced some RMIT Online friends to dozens of attendees from universities across ANZ. The aim of the series is to let attendees hear first-hand about RMIT’s massive LMS migration and look under the hood of the Crane Migration utility that powered much of the successful uplift & shift activities. The other topic we covered was the highly-publicised short course offering and why it is powered by Xenops: The customised Open edX platform that we built.

We are finalising details on the second in the series: A deep dive into Xenops and all things Open edX.  Keep any eye on our website for details.

Conferences

EduTECH 2018: The Crystal Delta team caught up with old mates and made a lot of new friends.  As always, the conference was a massive event and threw up some really interesting stands for those walking the trade floor. In what appeared to be a parallel universe, Tesla and Bic had large, centrally-located booths – I was struck by this dichotomy and the vast chasm between ultra-digital Tesla and the uber-analogue Bic.

Open edX 2018: Having built RMIT Online’s customised Xenops platforms, our urbanely cultured CTO, David Mackenzie recently attended the Montreal conference and came back excited by what he learned, who he met and high levels of caffeine in the bloodstream.

Apart for RMIT,  another uni killing it with Open edX is UQ.  An old mate of mine from Apple days, John Zornig is the Director of UQx and he was particularly generous early on in helping RMIT Online understand the potential of the platform.  As the Xenops platform architect, David will be the main speaker in our next webinar and will we keen to take your questions on how and why RMIT Online chose Open edX.

Summary

Following our work with RMIT, webinar campaigns and briefings with US and local Instructure teams, we have been inundated with questions from universities considering LMS migrations. So, in my next post, I’ll dig into how RMIT halved the usual migration time through automating uplift and QA activities, and how our team has created a brilliant course creation and editing tool for Canvas simply called Page Builder.

Please enjoy this EduTECh 2018 Video Postcard