The third Open edX developers' conference, called Open edX Con, will take place at Stanford University on June 14th and 15th. Registration is now open, as well as the call for proposals. The conference will be followed by a hackathon, June 16th and 17th. edX made this announcement today. "Stanford has been a supporter of the Open edX initiative since day zero. The Stanford team was instrumental in the open-source release of the edX platform, and continues to contribute their code, effort, and enthusiasm to the project," said edX. Tickets will cost $200 to $450. – Open edX: Open edX Con 2016 Call for Proposals
School Yourself, a leading provider of online math lessons and author of two courses on edX.org (Introduction to Algebra and Introduction to Geometry) and an XBlock, has been acquired this month by Amplify for an undisclosed amount. School Yourself CEO Zach Wissner-Gross and his team at the company will join Amplify and continue building learning solutions in hard sciences, game design and adaptive learning. The current School Yourself content, which includes more than 250 interactive math lessons, will remain freely available at schoolyourself.org and via edX.org. Founded in 2012, School Yourself got five grants since it was created, according to Crunchbase: $5K on April 2012, $10K on June 2012, $25K on November 2012, an undisclosed amount on September 2014 and $250K on February 2015. “Our mission has always been to improve education through innovation,” said School Yourself CEO Zach Wissner-Gross. “By joining with Amplify, we’ll be able to continue that mission, while continuing to support active users of schoolyourself.org.”
The third New York Open edX Meetup will take place this January 7th at McKinsey Academy's WeWork in downtown Manhattan. More than 90 people have confirmed their attendance for the meetup since it was announced four days ago. Meanwhile, the number of people who belong to this group has surpassed 450. This is the largest community of Open edX-ers. Columbia University, edX, McKinsey Academy, IBL Studios and Open Online Academy's representatives will talk about the state of Open edX and explain how this open-source technology is helping universities and businesses to implement MOOC-style courses, intended for blended, continuous education, professional development, alumni engagement, lead generation and for-credit programs. "What makes the Open edX platform unique" is the theme of this meetup. • Maurice Matiz, Executive Director Columbia Center for Media Teaching and Learning, Columbia University • Joel Barciauskas, Engineering Manager at edX • Jennifer Gormley, Senior Director, Product and Marketing at McKinsey Academy • Michael Amigot, Founder at IBL Studios (Open edX) • Ivan Shumkov, Founder at Open Online Academy (ooac.org) This event will take place after the success of the Open edX Universities Symposium in DC, organized by the same team. This short, welcoming event –free of sales pitches– will include brief talks, along with a round-table discussion and networking. This event will be live broadcasted and open to outside participation. All of the talks will be filmed and distributed  throughout the Open edX community. Our third Open edX meetup will be sponsored by McKinsey Academy, WeWork and IBL. Access is free, although seats are limited. Beer and pizza will be served. Post: Open edX's Platform Global Success
edX released this week the first pre-release of Dogwood, the next Open edX version after Cypress. Dogwood RC2 is available for download and for fresh installations, but not for upgrading from Cypress. The RC1 wasn't released, and the next RC3 is scheduled for January 6th, when upgrade scripts will become available. Installation instructions have been posted at this wiki page from edX. Meanwhile, the edX Release Notes page gives a sense of what is new. IBL provided the first Dogwood installation to the community as a testing platform.
The next Open edX release called Dogwood will be available for the code developers' community on January 26, 2016. Dogwood will be the fourth named release of the Open edX software, after Aspen (September 2014), Birch (March 2015) and Cypress (July 2015). December 21: RC1 tag in repos based on the edx.org release of December 16th. December 22: RC1 Vagrant boxes are available for download. No upgrade scripts will be available yet. December 29: draft release notes available January 6: RC2, with upgrade scripts, available January 26: Final Dogwood release available Dogwood will include a Django upgrade from 1.4 to 1.8, Student Notes, Badging, Otto ecommerce as well as other services that are being discussed now.
