🇫🇷 🎤 🎥 Watch our talk (slides with audio):
Seemingly Seamless: How We Improved the Open edX Learner Experience and Made Our Lives Easier
This case study is for anyone struggling to integrate Open edX with their branding, marketing websites, or content management systems. It’s a practical, real-world example of how to extend Open edX in creative ways. The talk is for those looking for technical insights into customization, user experience improvements, and strategies for dealing with the inherent challenges of Open edX’s architecture.
In this talk, we’ll share our journey of transforming a modern Open edX instance into a highly customized platform that delivers a consistent, branded learner experience across both the marketing site and the courseware.
Along the way, we faced numerous technical and design challenges: integrating MFEs (micro front-ends) with inconsistent styles, managing complex front-end assets, and building a system where content and visual styling are maintained in one place. This talk will walk through our approach, starting with the design requirements that shaped our decision-making, followed by the technical choices that allowed us to leverage Open edX in a way that suited our needs. We’ll discuss the tools we used and the decision that led us to develop with Eleventy for static site generation and content management. We’ll also explore how we created a unified course catalog and login awareness across the entire site experience.
Additionally, we’ll dive into the pitfalls we encountered — MFEs that didn’t live up to expectations, poor documentation, and integration headaches — and how we “broke” Open edX to make it work for us.
Finally, we’ll demonstrate our YAML config and JSON data integration and show how we customized our theme.
- Andrew Miller
- Jeremy Osborn
- Keir Janey
- YAML
- JSON
- Markdown Guide
- Reveal.js Documentation (used for the presentation itself)