When our students — all 186,000 of them — log into their personal program dashboard, they expect a smooth, responsive and robust experience no matter when, where or how they engage in coursework.

So, it’s imperative for us, the nation’s largest online university, to ensure that the platform is stable, secure and offers powerful features. That’s why we are taking an expanded role in Open edX, a leading open-source platform, which we’ve contributed to and used to deliver our content since 2022.

Open edX has announced that Western Governors University is the first “Mission Aligned Organization” to be named from its global contributors to the platform, which was initiated by Harvard and MIT in 2012. We share a deep commitment to providing excellent experiences for online students.

In our expanded relationship, Courtney Hills McBeth, chief academic officer and provost, and I will provide strategy guidance to Axim Collaborative, which oversees Open edX. I also will join the collaborative’s Technical Oversight Committee to provide strategy support on such issues as platform architecture design, tech stack and design templates. WGU also is putting together a team of 10 engineers who will be dedicated to working on the platform, and we’ll provide product management services.

Our goal is to accelerate advances in Open edX’s online learning ecosystem, whose contributors include developers, researchers and users around the world. For those not familiar with Open edX, it pioneered online learning through MOOCs — massively open online courses — and today is a global leader in learning science, instructional design, and high quality, high-scale online learning solutions for higher education, business and government organizations.

The WGU engineering team’s first projects include creating better facilities for extracting data, setting up libraries of atomic learning units, and improving the upgrade experience for all developers.

In plain language, we will be making it easier to build, adapt and use the Open edX platform to deliver online course content on users’ own websites, whether that is a single course, a certificate or a degree. We want to drive student-first approaches and solutions for how to document skills and credentials. We also want to facilitate wider adoption of competency-based education, which measures what students master rather than time spent in classrooms.

As we work together to keep improving the platform, we will ensure better access to and an enhanced experience for online students at WGU and throughout the world. And we will fulfill the mission not only of WGU but all institutions and organizations using Open edX to shape the future of learning and deliver on education’s promise of economic opportunity.