WGU Commits to the Open edX LMS

WGU takes a seat at the table and will drive much of Open edX's future development while expanding that system's usage

Author

Phil Hill
March 03, 2025

Was this forwarded to you by a friend? Sign up, and get your own copy of the news that matters sent to your inbox every week. Sign up for the On EdTech newsletter. Interested in additional analysis? Try with our 30-day free trial and Upgrade to the On EdTech+ newsletter.

I get questions each year when we release our LMS market analysis report along the lines of why isn’t LMS X listed more prominently? This year I got more questions around Open edX than for Google Classroom, which is a first.

Open edX is the LMS created as part of edX the MOOC platform and subsequently released as open source in 2013. When 2U acquired edX for $800 million in 2021, MIT and Harvard created what is now named the Axim Collaborative, which maintains Open edX separately from 2U / edX.

The questions this year noted the usage of Open edX at hundreds of organizations, but the reason it doesn’t show up more prominently in our graphics is that seldom is Open edX used as the primary LMS for a college or university that is the core metric we track. Much more common is the usage at edX itself or the usage for specific programs, for example MIT xPro, and at numerous workforce development programs. In fact, if you look at that list of known Open edX sites, the majority are vocational or workforce training.

But now there is a university making Open edX its primary LMS, and it is a big one. Western Governors University (WGU), with almost a quarter of a million students, has committed to use Open edX for the vast majority of its courses.

I interviewed Ed Zarecor, VP of Engineering at Open edX, and David Morales, SVP of Technology and CIO at WGU, separately last week as part of my research for this analysis.

WGU Initial LMS Migration

The actual decision to start implementing Open edX at WGU took place in late 2021, but it helps to go back even further. WGU has long used multiple LMSs, depending on specific academic program needs, with the previous primary LMS being a homegrown variety developed years ago. This decision to develop a homegrown LMS can best be understood by the nomenclature of the LMS market in the early 2000s. At that time, the systems were known as Course Management Systems (CMSs), which described the nature of managing not individual learners but managing a traditional term-based, cohort-based course. Blackboard, WebCT, D2L, Moodle, Sakai, and even Canvas were created primarily based on usage in traditional coursework.

But WGU’s model is competency-based education (CBE), which is not based on terms or cohorts, and not based on a group of student participating in a common activity at the same time. The traditional LMSs have added CBE features, and they can support the majority (not all) of CBE use cases by now, but not originally. This led WGU to develop a homegrown system.

By 2021, however, WGU saw a path to increase its usage of someone else’s LMS, particularly if there was an open source license that allowed WGU to develop its own customized version. Open edX was viewed as the most viable system, particularly with the XBlocks part of the architecture to allow custom extensions.

Open edX Financial Picture

I do not think that the timing was coincidental, however. Prior to 2021, Open edX had a dubious funding model (Harvard and MIT sold edX for a reason - they were not willing to keep investing in the initiative). As I noted at the time of the 2U acquisition, there were financial problems.

Those twin $15 million lines of credit are a significant part of the story. As many have noted, edX was losing money every year. It is clear now that Harvard and MIT agreed to keep edX alive with new cash infusions, but they were not willing to keep contributing donations, thus the lines of credit. I strongly suspect the search for a future home for edX was driven by the need for the lines of credit and the doubts that edX [would] end the operating losses, and when the pandemic hit, it was clear that the timing was right to make a change.

The 2U injection of $800 million and creation of what is now known as the Axim Collaborative provided financial sustainability to the project, and it separated Open edX from edX itself. But it is also important to note that the Axim Collaborative is not spending down that $800 million; rather, it is using it as an endowment and planning to operate on $25 - $30 million per year, mostly funded by investment returns.

According to the 2023 Form 990, the expenses associated with Open edX were approximately $3.5 million at the time.

WGU Current News in Context

In the past three and a half years, WGU has already migrated approximately 35 - 40% of its courses onto Open edX, according to Morales. The current decision can be read as WGU being fully committed to Open edX to be its primary LMS, even if there will remain additional LMSs for specific programs. The best estimate is that Open edX will deliver 75 - 80% of WGU courses in the next few years.

In addition:

  • WGU has 10 engineers working on Open edX code and additional engineers working on XBlocks. All of this work is being contributed back to the community as open source. By my calculations, the financial value of these development resources are in the range of $2 million per year, augmenting the core Open edX operations.

  • WGU will be Open edX’s first Mission Aligned Organization, and Morales and WGU’s provost will provide strategic advice to Axim, and Morales will join Open edX’s Technical Oversight Committee.

  • WGU is working on an orchestration layer in its university architecture to streamline the student journey, and Open edX’s API access and provision of near-realtime data are key to WGU’s plans.

This initiative is somewhat similar to the Open University UK in 2005 selecting Moodle as the core Virtual Learning Environment (VLE, what they call the LMS in the UK) and committed £5 million of development in this new ecosystem, contributing back most of the code as open source.

What Does This Mean for Open edX?

Open edX should see significant design improvements, particularly around usability for students, based on this initiative. This has been one of the complaints about Open edX, that it had some really solid design components but a frustrating end-user experience - a trait shared with most EdTech open source initiatives.

Furthermore, this initiative will push Open edX’s CBE functionality over the next two years. WGU has already leveraged Open edX’s ability to support CBE, but there appears to be some specific targets to further enhance CBE capabilities.

Morales summarized some of these goals in his announcement blog post.

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.

One way to read “to drive student-first approaches” is the CBE move beyond the traditional course assumptions underlying the LMS market.

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.

The main On EdTech newsletter is free to share in part or in whole. All we ask is attribution.

Thanks for being a subscriber.