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Late last month Open edX held its annual conference in Salt Lake City. I was not able to attend the entire conference due to pre-arranged travel plans, but the two days I was there provided fascinating insight into the vibrant Open edX community and plenty of food for thought about the role of the LMS and open source in EdTech.

This was my first Open edX conference, and I hope not my last. The community's excitement was palpable, different even from what I have experienced at other open source LMS conferences. The sense of possibility, of being at the start of something important and growing, was both hard to escape and infectious.

The discussions touched on a number of themes but kept coming back to one central question: what role does the LMS play as a foundational piece of the learning infrastructure? It is that question I want to focus on.

Typically LMS conferences are about new features being rolled out. Some of this happened at Open edX, though I missed the state platform update. But the first part of the conference was far less about new features than about whether we should be thinking about Open edX as an LMS in the traditional sense at all.

We got an early glimpse of this during the business meeting, where VP of Partnerships & Ecosystem Growth Annie Cellini introduced the concept of Open edX not as a course platform, but as a platform in the broader infrastructure sense of the term.

I lost track of the number of times speakers referenced Phil’s comments about the way that the LMS is changing

Something that surfaced repeatedly throughout the conference was the distinction between learning features and operational integration.

Several speakers argued that organizations are becoming less concerned with feature checklists and more concerned with how learning connects to the rest of their operations. The challenge is no longer simply delivering content. It is connecting learning to workforce systems, credentialing systems, reporting structures, employer partnerships, government initiatives, and organizational workflows.

That is a fundamentally different way of thinking about an LMS. In a traditional value proposition, the LMS provides courses, content management, a gradebook, and assessment tools. In this emerging vision, its primary role is managing identity, permissions, learning records, integrations, and data flows. Conference speakers alternated between describing Open edX as a delivery layer and an orchestration layer. I will use the term delivery layer because it better captures the role they were describing.

This framing helps position Open edX not only as a better way to support operations but better able to deal with change and uncertainty about what future applications might be. It gives institutions a stable platform that allows them to experiment with different models, assessment tools, and learning applications without rebuilding their entire environment each time.

Put differently, the conversation was less about what AI Open edX would provide and more about whether Open edX should become the place where many different AI systems meet.

Whether speakers called it an orchestration layer, a delivery layer, or an operating system, the underlying argument was remarkably consistent. While AI is bringing these questions to the forefront, the discussion was not really about AI. Rather, AI is accelerating a shift that was already underway.

The delivery-layer model plays directly to Open edX's strengths. Throughout the conference, speakers emphasized flexibility, modularity, and scalability. As Open edX increasingly supports workforce initiatives, competency-based education, national programs, and other large-scale implementations that span physical and digital boundaries, the ability to connect systems and integrate new tools becomes more important than any individual feature.

These are all compelling arguments but they are also fairly generic. But at the conference I also heard a lot about sovereignty as a driver behind the vision.

If flexibility was the practical argument for Open edX, sovereignty was the strategic one. It surfaced repeatedly in presentations, hallway conversations, and discussions about the future direction of the platform. Another quote that was shared several times captured the idea well.

When I think about sovereignty, I tend to think about what might be called micro-sovereignty: the ability to control the gatekeepers to institutional data. The discussion at Open edX, however, focused much more on macro-sovereignty. The concern was not simply who could access data, but where data resides, who controls the infrastructure, and which AI providers an organization chooses to work with. It was striking to me how much the language around open source has changed.

Ten years ago, discussions of open source in higher education were often ideological. Conversations revolved around openness, community governance, transparency, and freedom from vendors. At Open edX, the conversation felt different. Open source was increasingly discussed as a practical response to concerns about sovereignty.

The concern was not simply avoiding vendor lock-in. It was maintaining control over where data resides, which AI models are used, who can access learner information, and how quickly an organization can respond to changing regulatory, political, or geopolitical requirements.

Several speakers pointed to ministries, governments, and NGOs as growing areas of adoption. For those organizations, sovereignty is not an abstract principle. It is often a policy requirement. In that context, the appeal of an open, self-controlled platform becomes much easier to understand.

But what is driving this conversation?

At a high level, the shift toward the LMS as a delivery layer makes sense. AI creates a world in which institutions may need to continuously swap in new models, tutoring systems, assessment engines, and analytics tools. In that environment, flexibility becomes more valuable than any individual feature.

As I listened to the presentations and hallway conversations, I became convinced that the delivery-layer framing is also a reflection of where Open edX sees its future growth. The organizations that Open edX increasingly talks about serving are not necessarily looking for a traditional LMS serving up courses. They are looking for infrastructure that can connect workforce development, competency-based education, microcredentials, national learning initiatives, and large-scale skills programs.

What struck me during the conference was how frequently both Open edX leadership and community members emphasized these use cases, and how rarely the conversation centered on traditional campus LMS deployments.

The profile of the Open edX ecosystem reinforces that impression. In the business review, Annie Cellini shared that the twenty-five largest sites account for 73 percent of total course volume. Open edX's strategic focus has increasingly shifted toward skills development, and most of the higher education examples discussed at the conference—including Clemson, WGU, and Calbright College (the online California Community College)—were not traditional campus LMS deployments. They were skills-focused, workforce-oriented, or competency-based initiatives whose requirements differ significantly from those of conventional credit-bearing academic programs.

The same pattern appears at the national level. Especially outside the United States and Europe, there is growing interest in workforce and skills initiatives led by ministries, governments, and NGOs. If you are running a national workforce program, you are not primarily buying a discussion board or a gradebook. You are buying infrastructure: identity management, credential pathways, reporting, integrations, governance, and the ability to coordinate activity across multiple organizations and stakeholders.

Taken together, these examples suggest that Open edX may increasingly occupy a different category than many LMS vendors. One interpretation is that Open edX is simply responding to where the opportunities are. A more cynical interpretation is that it reflects Open edX's position in the education market. While higher education remains its largest segment, many of these deployments are not serving as an institution's core LMS. Instead, they tend to be pilots, workforce programs, skills initiatives, or other specialized implementations. These examples suggest that Open edX realizes that its future is outside the traditional LMS market Whether this represents vision or strategic necessity remains an open question.

But this likely means that institutions evaluating Open edX may need to think differently about where it fits. The relevant comparison may increasingly be less about which LMS has the best feature set and more about which platform is best suited to support complex skills ecosystems, workforce initiatives, credential pathways, and large-scale learning infrastructure.

One question kept nagging at me throughout the conference. Is this delivery-layer vision a genuine strategic direction that the community has embraced, or is it a response to a problem Open edX has been wrestling with for years?

Phil raised a version of this question after last year's conference when he described what he called the "100 Million Learners Paradox":

That question felt just as relevant this year. As discussed above, the same evidence can be interpreted in two ways. Open edX may have identified a genuine market opportunity in workforce development, skills, and national initiatives. Or it may be responding to the difficulty of competing head-to-head for traditional LMS deployments.

What struck me, however, was how much more coherent the conversation felt than I expected. Last year Phil noted uncertainty about whether Open edX wanted to be a product, a platform, or something in between. This year I heard remarkably similar language from leadership, partners, and community members. Terms such as delivery layer, operating system, interoperability, sovereignty, and skills infrastructure surfaced repeatedly. The details varied, but the overall direction felt far more aligned than I anticipated.

That does not mean the question has been resolved (as I make clear below). Nor does it mean everyone agrees on what Open edX should become. But unlike many technology conferences where a strategic vision is presented from the stage and largely disappears in hallway conversations, I found versions of the same argument resurfacing throughout the event.

Open edX has developed a vision that addresses sovereignty and flexibility. The vision may be real or at least more solid than last year but that does not necessarily mean that the underlying tensions have been resolved. Many of the challenges identified last year remain. Partners still need clarity about where the platform is headed. Organizations still need compelling reasons to adopt Open edX. The community still needs to balance flexibility and customization with demands for simpler, more turnkey solutions.

So while the vision was compelling and the logic largely coherent, I kept finding myself coming back to a simpler question: What specific problem does this solve for institutions, faculty, and learners?

The discussion of Open edX as a delivery layer largely stayed at the level of philosophy and architecture. Perhaps that is inevitable given how early these conversations still are. But what I never heard clearly articulated was what specific problems this shift from LMS as application to LMS as infrastructure actually solves.

Institutions don’t buy architectures, they buy solutions to problems. It was not always clear to me what becomes easier or better for students, faculty, or administrators in this model. Does it reduce costs? Improve outcomes? Make systems easier to manage? Create more personalized learning experiences? The conference made a persuasive case for why this vision is technologically and strategically attractive, but a less persuasive case for why it is institutionally or pedagogically necessary.

That question feels particularly important because many of the conversations happening alongside this vision were about much more immediate challenges. Partners spoke about balancing the power and flexibility of Open edX with customer demands for solutions that work out of the box.

That tension is particularly important because it sits at the heart of the delivery-layer vision. The vision assumes that flexibility, extensibility, and interoperability are becoming increasingly valuable. Many customers, however, are still looking for products that solve immediate problems with minimal configuration and complexity. Building infrastructure for an ecosystem is not always the same thing as building a product that customers can easily adopt.

Visibility remains a challenge for the project, and the Open edX team is investing significant effort in strengthening the brand and clarifying its position in the market. There is a natural tension between those efforts and simultaneously trying to redefine what an LMS is.

Many partners also discussed the familiar challenges of moving clients to new releases, managing upgrades, and supporting increasingly complex implementations. These are classic challenges for open source ecosystems. They do not disappear if Open edX becomes a delivery layer. If anything, they may become more complicated as organizations add AI services, external tools, and new integrations into the mix. At the same time, the ecosystem depends on partners building sustainable businesses while helping customers navigate both current realities and future possibilities.

Some of this is a familiar bimodal challenge: building the future while operating in the present. But the combination of diverse markets, partner dependencies, AI-driven change, and geopolitical concerns makes this feel like a bimodal challenge on steroids.

These are all big questions. Increasingly as we head into LMS conference season with Blackboard coming up in early July followed by D2L and Instructure. Increasingly I am thinking of the Open edX conference as perhaps an LMS conference version of the New Hampshire Primary¹ This year et least its the first and earliest. The question is will it set the tone for the sorts of discussion raised at the other meetings or will it become an outlier.

Most LMS conferences are organized around features. Open edX spent much of its conference debating the future role of the LMS itself. What feels different this year is that the vision itself appears more developed and more broadly shared than it did a year ago. The question is no longer whether Open edX is trying to become something beyond a traditional LMS. The question is whether the community can translate that vision into a compelling value proposition while navigating the practical tensions that still remain.

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