Europe in July

Two conferences where we'd love to see you there: Open edX in Paris and Online Learning Summit in Leeds

Phil Hill
April 30, 2025

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This summer is going to be full of travel. Since I live in Arizona, this is a good thing, and I hope my wife Emily doesn’t get too hot back home. I wanted to highlight two conferences I’m attending for the first time (the second of which will also include Morgan and Neil Mosley). If you can make it, I’d love to see you there.

Open edX Conference 2025 Paris

The Axim Collaborative is the nonprofit foundation set up by Harvard and MIT based on the proceeds from the edX acquisition, and this group runs the Open edX platform. They are holding the Open edX Conference in Paris July 1 - 4 (I’ll be there the last two days), and it is in coordination with the eMOOCs conference that runs June 30 - July 2. The conference theme is “Leveraging the Power of Open Source to Democratize Education and Fuel Advances in Learning.”

Why am I going, besides the obvious? I recently covered the migration by Western Governors University (WGU) to Open edX.

I suspect that schools considering CBE initiatives not based on the campus primary LMS will now put Open edX in the short list for evaluation. What is unclear is if this initiative will also raise Open edX’s profile as an institution-wide LMS alternative, beyond the CBE focus. This news certainly raises our interest in how Open edX will develop over time, from both a product design and a market usage perspective.

You can register here. And for the record, Emily was invited, but she wanted to help out with our second grandchild.

Online Learning Summit 2025 at Leeds University

Listeners / viewers of the Online Education Across the Atlantic podcast will already know the reputation of the Online Learning Summit (first held two years ago) as an incredibly valuable event. And this year, we are not only attending but directly participating with a live podcast episode at the event, which is being held July 10 - 11.

You can register here. And to give an idea of the key themes and other speakers:

Podcast listeners will also be painfully aware that I consider Leeds to be hallowed ground, the location for one of the great live rock albums of all time: The Who Live at Leeds. A great conference, live podcast, and a rock pilgrimage all in one place? Check.

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